The Neuroscience of Being Human
The Neuroscience of Body Image and Ageing
How the brain processes the ageing body, why the discrepancy between the internal self-image and the external reflection causes genuine distress, and what happens when the person you feel like no longer matches the person you see
938-word article with 8 Harvard references.
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The brain constructs a body image that is not a photograph but a composite, assembled from sensory input, memory, emotion, and expectation, and maintained with a stability that resists rapid updating. When the body ages faster than the internal representation can accommodate, the result is a discrepancy between felt identity and visible appearance that the brain processes as a form of self-incoherence. This fully referenced article explores the neuroscience of body image in midlife, examines how the brain constructs and updates its representation of the body, and argues that the distress of watching the body age is not vanity but the brain's response to a mismatch between two versions of the self that it cannot easily reconcile.
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