Mind

Can the mind "feel" things even though nothing has happened? If so how does this work? For example, someone swung a textbook at my head playfully, and even though he did not hit me, I still felt something where he would have hit.

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Funny, if someone took a (missed) swat at me, I don't think I'd feel anything where he might have hit me! There is something known as the "phantom limb" phenomenon: people who have lost one of their legs, for instance, often report feeling pain in a very particular part of their (now missing) limb -- they can even point to where in their "leg" the pain is. As for how that works, I have no idea. But I likewise have no idea how pain in my real leg works.

The brain and nervous system "combine" information from different sensory modalities, so it is quite likely that when you visually perceive that you are about to be hit, other parts of your brain respond, including perhaps sensory systems that normally perceive pain in that part of the head and/or motor systems that prepare you to react to such a blow. There is a lot of interesting research showing that the same parts of the brain are active when you imagine performing an action (but don't perform it) as are active when you perform the action--sometimes you can start to feel your body doing something even though you don't move. Your situation might be sort of the reverse of this. The key is to remember that even though "nothing has happened" on the outside, lots can be happening on the inside--that is, in the brain, which of course, is the basis of our minds' feeling things.

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