This Is Why Your Brain Thinks Your Hand Is Fat

“The phrase ‘I know the town like the back of my hand’ suggests that we have near-perfect knowledge of the size and position of our own body parts, but these results show that this is far from being the case. Our results show dramatic distortions of hand shape, which were highly consistent across participants.”
-University College London researcher Matthew Longo discusses his new study on position sense which “shows the brain maintains a model of the hand in which our fingers are perceived to be shorter and our hands fatter than they actually are.” Basically, when you’re trying to find something in a dark room your brain thinks of your elegantly tapered digits as thick little sausages. Obviously there’s an easy dick joke to be made here, but I’d prefer to keep things classy and correct. I mean, it is Science. What? You insist? Sigh. Okay. Longo went on to suggest that the brain also seems to distort perceptions of penis size, particularly among scientists, who are endowed with much larger genitalia than commonly understood. You happy now? Me neither.