Self and Other
Sunday December 14, 2008
Spotted in the December 19 issue of The Week -- Neuroscientists at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute used video headsets to make volunteer subjects feel they’d swapped bodies with mannequins. When they looked down while wearing the headsets, the volunteers saw the body of a dummy placed in the same room. When they looked up, they saw themselves as if they were looking from the eyes of the dummy. They could even experience the illusion of shaking hands with themselves.
The experience quickly and dramatically changed how the subjects’ brains perceived the world. From the magazine:
“It feels like I’m the mannequin,” one volunteer reported. “Wow, this is cool.” The experiment shows that the boundary of the “self” isn’t as solid as you might think, study leader Henrik Ehrsson tells New Scientist. “By manipulating sensory impressions,” he says, “it’s possible to fool the self not only out of its body but into other bodies, too.”"I" is just a series of thought-moments, after all.
Comments
In an NLP training with John Grinder, I did two exercises that completely changed the way I perceived the world. These were similar but different from that in the cited experiment.
In the first, we were blindfolded and given a long stick which we used to explore the world during a walk that lasted for about half an hour. After ten minutes or so, the stick seemed to become part of my body, and it gave me almost as much information as I could get by touching things with my hands.
In the second, we mirrored another person (as accurately as possible, we copied a partner’s behavior on the premise that behavior and state of mind are intimately linked and that changes in one will result in changes in the other). Again after about ten minutes of a 30-minute exercise, I began sensing the world in the same way as my partner, not the way that I normally perceive it.