The Human Body -or- Multidisciplinary Research of Dream Vision

Body Schema and Body Image

The human body stands at the crossroad of multidisciplinary research. The variety of disciplines include; the medical, neurological, anthropological, sociological, and the psychoanalytical to name a few. Henry Head had defined the "body schema" as the postural model of the body. Head believed that there were two body schemas that organized the somatosensory and sensorimotor systems of the human body.  The one part of the human nervous system encodes posture and movement, while the second localizes stimulation of the body's surface. The point to point body mapping of the body's surface was later discovered by Wilder Penfield in which the "homunculus" serves to provide a psychophysical foundation for our "body image".

Jean Piaget believed that all human knowledge found a cognitive basis in the "sensorimotor"  stage of development, upon which all later more abstract psychological body schema structures would be built upon. Said differently using a computer analogy, the body schema is the biological hardware of the body, while the body image is the psychological software that runs on the neural network operating system platform.

Piaget "Play, Dreams and Imitation" saw dreams as playing a key cognitive role in psychological development. Nowhere can we better research and investigate the nature of the human body, than by researching dreams. Taken one step further, nowhere can the psychophysical measurement of the nature and the developmental changes of the body schema and body image be better undertaken than by researching dreams. Perhaps more importantly, we can see the social psychological influence of culture and the environment on our body image found in dreams.

This dream interpretation begins a series of future planned notes to you the reader, that will make the biological. cultural and sociological formation and function of the human body found in "dream vision" fully transparent. Many dream interpretations already posted at the International Institute for Dream Research website speak about the human body;

Anatomy of Dream Vision -or- Screening the Cultural Production of the Body 

By the end of "Field Notes of a Dream Researcher: 1001 Nights in the Global Village", the IIDR will have provided you the reader with an interdisciplinary medical humanities platform for the ongoing research of dreams, and a unified mythological and cosmological model of mind, body and society.

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