You might think you live in your
country, or your
state or
city or
house. On an even smaller scale, you might think you live in your
body. But the
truth is more tightly packed and solidly confined still. Really, you live in your
brain. All of your
thoughts and
experiences, all of your
memories and
personality quirks, are contained within the few pounds of
organ-
meat between your
ears.
But, in one of the great
ironies of existence, your brain is itself a largely
unfeeling thing. Though your body passes tactile sensations to it from every nervously connected surface, the brain can't feel
itself. Indeed, this holds for most of your bodily experience. Your body is made of
cells which, internally are warm and wet and sort of oozy. Yet your experience of
existence is not one of always feeling all the wetness within all your cells (indeed, this you only feel externally when you
bleed on yourself or otherwise leak cellular material). If you pause for a moment to feel how your
tongue feels sitting inside your
mouth (feels, mind you, not tastes), you might have some inkling of how most every part of your internal body would feel to almost every other part. Our brains are simply incapable of feeling their own internal squishiness, despite being made of it. Even the most intense
headache is not an instance of the brain feeling itself; it is the nerves in areas surrounding the brain passing information into it, sometimes in a roundabout way.
And, on perhaps a happier note, even though your brain is the center of processing your sense of
taste, it cannot taste itself, either.
Now, there may be a very, very small number of people who've actually physically touched their own brain with their own
hands. Perhaps some people who'd just lost a piece in some tragic event had a fraction of a moment to hold that and marvel at the feel of the very thing they did their marveling with. Even more rarely, since it is possible to do
brain surgery on a conscious person (and sometimes necessary, so the surgical subject can explain the effects the procedure is having on him as it goes), a very few may have been allowed, with immaculately sanitized fingers, to gingerly touch the squiggly surface of the system containing both their volition and sensation. With a well-placed
mirror, one might even have, in that position, the equally rare experience of
seeing one's own brain, and living to tell of it.