Reply to comment

I found this topic very interesting, and I had actually seen something once about a girl who had convinced herself she was pregnant and showed some symptoms of pregnancy as well. Before I saw this post however, I was thinking about the boxes within boxes model of the nervous system and I came to realize that as impressive as this system of the nervous system is, what really astounded me is trying to wrap my head around the fact that this system is vastly different from person to person, thus making us each our own unique person.  This idea applies to the phenomenon of pseudocyesis because as was pointed out, not every person who wants to have a baby goes through pseudocyesis. As Stacy said, when you see a cute baby, many people think "oh how cute, I want one!" or how many kids when they were little played house or something and stuffed a pillow under their shirts to play the role of a pregnant woman. However, by and large, people who do this do not continue to exhibit symptoms of fase pregnancy.

This emphasizes the fact that each person's "boxes within boxes" nervous system would look different from every other person's if you could map it out or diagram it.  Then I got to thinking about where the differences are. In which level of box do the differences appear? Are they structural differences or is it determined purely by how the little boxes are arranged to make the bigger boxes? I don't even know if these questions make sense or not, but it interested me. The bottom line is that it is amazing how the same input such as seeing a cute baby can produce vastly different outputs depending on the person. Some people might say "thank goodness I don't have one of those" or "I want a baby" or "I want a baby" and then have a false pregnancy.