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As far as I know, the only way neurological facts go into this figure is the relative size of the body parts. You could have made this figure based on a lemur model, walking on all fours, (or really any five-digited tetrapod) and it would be equally correct.
What wemp said about other cultures is a good point, but I think you really overestimate how much of this I find plausible. I think there are some leftovers from pre-bipedal bodies, and I make no claim whether this causes furries.
I find this interesting mostly in how this illustrates a way of thinking about trans-. The part where the theory is not total whack and you can believe it if you really want to contributes to the accurate immitation, just like the ultrapersonal grievances turned into a general theory of politics in the other posts, and the all around excellent mental health of the author.
There are aspects of it that scream bipedal hominid over all else.
Note the enormously disproportionate upper limbs. The absence of a tail. Bipedal hominids had their arms freed from the task of being just another means of propulsion, and hence could repurpose them for tool-use. This incentivized much finer grained control of muscles, as well as denser sensory innervation.
Furries, and the LCA between humans and lemurs, are notably fond of tails.
Fair enough, if you want to look at it that obliquely. You said it was a plausible theory in your top-level post, but if you think it's less likely to be true than not, then my only disagreement is that I think it is very unlikely to be true.
It may have relevance to the Trans Question, but only to the extent that is an attempted explanation for body dysmorphia, which I think is as unlikely to be true as the culturally-driven manifestation for trans body dysphoria as gender dysphoria represents an actual error in some well-defined gender pointer in the human brain.
If there were neurons dedicated to a non-existent tail, could we tell?
I mean, monkeys do already use their hands for holding objects to some extent, but what I had in mind is less about how much neurons you dedicate to body parts and more so the shape of those parts thats expected. Because in what sense could your body be "wrong" for a given neural emphasis? But I would say that hands are propably a part where the model is almost entirely human, because there it really matters to get them exactly right.
I said the part I quoted is somewhat plausible.
Im afraid my english isnt good enough for this grammar.
The cortical homunculus was visualized by electrostimulation of the precentral and postcentral gyri, while asking participants where the perceived sensation was localized.
If there was a chunk that mapped to a "tail", then you'd pick up a disproportionate amount of correspondence to the current sacrum. If it was to go as far as the blog in question conjectures, you might see reports of 'phantom tail'.
So yes, we could tell, and in the absence of such, it's just a tall tale about tails.
The blog claims that there must be an atavasism in human sensory-motor proprioception. The cortical homunculus is the best visualization we have of that, and in a sense is real, with a true 1:1 correspondence with our body (weighted by salience and richness of ennervation).
It does not show any such discrepancy. It can plausibly be similar in both humans and precursor primates, barring the glaring absence of a tail. I would also strongly expect more emphasis on the feet, especially in an arboreal animal like the LCA between humans and lemurs.
The author claims that furries have body dysmorphia that is an atavism of a previous ancestral form. Many trans people happen to be autistic, and claim that they have a sense of "wrongness" or body dysmorphia, which they interpret as gender dysphoria. They think that this sense of wrongness is a sign from their body telling them they're the wrong gender (inside) and seek to 'correct' this discrepancy by transitioning.
I believe both are incorrect. In the latter case, because autistic people have sensory processing issues, and modern culture prompts them to reinterpret that as gender dysphoria. Hence the over-representation of ASD in both furries and trans people.
Though as far as I know, the number of people who think being a furry is evidence of an atavistic proprioceptive system rounds down to 1.
I mean, you are the doctor, but its not clear to me that you would need to feel them anywhere. If you lose an arm and have a phantom limb, do you feel the sensations at the stump? And if there was a phantom tail, Im not sure the participants could easily recognise it as such. Do people get phantom limbs for limbs they never had and not the mirror image either, and if yes how do they report about the experience?
Im not sure its the best representation of what the post is talking about. E.g. expecting hunchbacks to have dysphoria - this homunculus doesnt have a determined back hunchedness. And Im not sure how, say, my hand could be that would contradict it, short of missing a finger.
That seems like a reasonable possibility.
Oh you can definitely feel something where it doesn't exist, or you could feel a body part is different than it should be. I've had some "leg" pain induced by a pinched nerve and the probem was at the spine but the feeling of pain was "general" and felt impossible to locate where exactly on the whole leg the pain was coming from. But the pain was serious enough and actually felt as the whole leg, it made me writhe for a few seconds when it decided to pulsate its ugly head. The only solution was pain killers for a while.
Try wearing a ring for an extended period of time then remove it and touch with another finger of the same hand where the ring used to be. It's a strange feeling.
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