Follow the pattern

So, as I was getting my bikini wax today, my Esthetician and I had a discussion about our critical voices and how to outwit or overcome the negative stuff we can throw down at or about ourselves at every turn. Now this gal is a lovely young and vital woman who I of course would have thought had not a problem in the world. Of course she does, she as much as anyone lives with a lot of pain; which brings me to my real topic which is phantom limb syndrome. Yes, I typically in my East Coast transplanted one generation removed way read the New Yorker every week, though most of the time I'm three of four weeks behind. There is an article about Vilayanur S. Ramachandran who came up with an amazingly simple solution and reason for an enormously common problem that plagues people who have lost limbs. In addition he has ingenious theories on other issues regarding the mind and body connection, including, schizophrenia and other previously thought of as fetishistic disorders. I have truncated and vivisected his work by describing it as such, but what is most valuable when reading his books, which I have done with two of them, or reading more about his research, is to realize that though his approach is scientific, he also plays with information and looks outside of the parameters of the intellectual community with a more pedestrian mind set which certainly cannot be discounted by the say, fifty or sixty thousand people who have benefited from his understanding that sometimes what we think exists, really does even if it's not real.