Also, if you don't want your ability to feel your wings to be scientifically theorized, keep scrolling ❤️
"Hi! Someone who has experienced “phantom wings” for as long as I can remember and is a med student here! This is actually pretty common and doesn’t necessarily point to any medical issues or that anything is wrong with us. Here’s a longer explanation: Neurologically, the brain has a surprisingly flexible “body map” called the somatosensory homunculus. It’s capable of generating sensations for configurations that don’t exist physically. This doesn’t require trauma or amputation, it can happen naturally due to how your brain organizes sensation and imagination. This happens to many people with the feeling of limbs that may or may mot have ever been there like legs, hands, wings, tails, ears, and horns too! If your mind has had a strong mental model of wings since childhood, your brain can genuinely create a felt sensory map for them. This is not delusion. You’re not claiming they literally exist. You’re describing the SUBJECTIVE SENSATION, which is a real, studied thing. Knowing what it feels like to dive, hurt them, the ache of a long flight. That level of detail usually comes from kinesthetic imagination, a real measurable trait. Some people’s brains simulate physical sensation so well that it feels like lived memory. Your brain has a blueprint for where limbs should connect to a torso. Wing placement lines up near: the scapula, the latissimus dorsi, and the trapezius. This area is extremely expressive in humans, it’s why emotions tense your shoulder blades, and why you may feel “pressure” or “awareness” there when imagining wings. When your brain imagines wings, the body map activates those muscles as if they are the wing base. You are literally feeling a real brain-body signal. The cause is internal, but the sensation itself is genuine.
