I think this is a reasonable hypothesis, as someone who has experienced some similar things, though not as distinctly as yours it sounds like. More generally, the whole sensate volume occurs ‘inside your brain’, so there’s no reason other than practical usefulness that the mind can’t render physical sensations as ‘over there’ the same way it renders sounds as ‘over there’, after all, you don’t experience sounds as occurring at your ears.
An interesting related phenomena is that the body map can be weird compared to our visual and kinesthetic map of where things are ‘supposed’ to be occurring. So when doing body scans and back felt quite blank compared to the front, when I investigated it felt as if there were sensations way behind me, like the body was expanding. On reflection, I think this is just that the body wasn’t used to noticing sensations back there and so didn’t quite know how to map it immediately. Other body shrinking or expanding sensations seem similar to me. So if the body is used to experiencing 20 sensations per inch and suddenly feels 40, it might initially map this to the area having doubled in physical size.
I think this is a reasonable hypothesis, as someone who has experienced some similar things, though not as distinctly as yours it sounds like. More generally, the whole sensate volume occurs ‘inside your brain’, so there’s no reason other than practical usefulness that the mind can’t render physical sensations as ‘over there’ the same way it renders sounds as ‘over there’, after all, you don’t experience sounds as occurring at your ears.
An interesting related phenomena is that the body map can be weird compared to our visual and kinesthetic map of where things are ‘supposed’ to be occurring. So when doing body scans and back felt quite blank compared to the front, when I investigated it felt as if there were sensations way behind me, like the body was expanding. On reflection, I think this is just that the body wasn’t used to noticing sensations back there and so didn’t quite know how to map it immediately. Other body shrinking or expanding sensations seem similar to me. So if the body is used to experiencing 20 sensations per inch and suddenly feels 40, it might initially map this to the area having doubled in physical size.