Do I look fat in this???

Lots of papers have reported a recent piece of research with headlines such as:Why women think they are fat: brain 'thinks body is two thirds bigger than it is'

This is a perfect example of journalists taking the findings of a good study and drawing conclusions about twenty squillion miles ahead of the what the study actually did and found.

The study asked participants to estimate the location of 10 different points on their hands and found that the participants overestimated these locations.

The key thing to notice is that the research only looked at the estimation of hands. The newspapers are reporting as if the study looked at the entire body, but this is not the case at all.

In fact, the logical conclusion of the study actually would be the exact opposite of the interpretation of the newspapers. The authors explain their results with reference to the homunculus. The parts of our brain that feel the sensations from the entire body and control our motor movements are not proportionately related to the parts of the body. You can see this clearly in a picture of the homunculus.

Large parts of our brain are dedicated to the hands, face and mouth. The torso and legs are represented by far smaller parts. This is why the authors claim that the hands are overestimated - because they are over represented in the brain. By this logic, the shoulders, trunk, hips and legs should be underestimated - certainly not overestimated!!! If anything - this research would predict that when a woman thinks about her body she would think that she's smaller than she really is.

Another error in the reporting - they got the name of the lead researcher wrong. This work was conducted by Matthew Longo, not Michael as the papers call him!!!