Are all creatures wired like that? Are any humans wired with the left side connected to the left side of the body in a similar way that some people have hearts on the wrong side?

I understand that there are no pain receptors in the brain, so people undergoing brain surgery can be alert, with anaesthetic administered only locally to the scalp.

If this is so, how do we experience the pain of headaches and migraines, especially those that seem to come from a specific point inside the head and which throb and radiate from that point?

Sophie Yauner, By email, no address supplied

I remember hearing a while back, on a science podcast by Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki, that it is possible that memory is stored throughout the body aswel as in the brain. I'm not sure how correct this theory is, but if it is in fact true could it have any link to 'Phantom limbs'? I was thinking that maybe the body remembers how, an arm for example, moves or feels even when no longer there. This maybe sends signals to the brain (which knows the arm isn't there) but because the memory is stored elsewhere it causes confusion and leads you to interpret the memory as present truth. Could this be at all possible?

I've heard from a few sorces that we can now input computational images into the eye. The sources didn't go into much detail on how to do this, but I am buessing that they figured out how visual images are processed through our Optical Nerve, and - after some lengthy reasearch - were able to imitate these electrical nerve pulses and hook up a wire directly into the part of the brain which processes images.

Is this right, and if so, then why does it work? Shouldn't the patient feel some sort of electrical current flowing throught their brain? Why does the patient's brain recieve the image as if it were a normal image from out eyes?

In common parlance, one would say the body 'burns' food, and, indeed, we are warm creatures due to some kind of exothermic reaction(s) inside us, yet our muscles and brain work on electrical impulse. Is this the most efficient conversion of heat to useful energy we know of, or is the electrical energy converted from chemical potential energy somewhere?