OBEs

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3 November

Pass by, if you wish to read about royal honours, not Out-of-Body Experiences...


It is a curious term, if you think about it. As usual, the experimental psychologists think that they have got it licked - in the lecture where I learnt about The Rubber-Hand Illusion (sounds more like something in one of Woody Allen's characters' magic acts), I was also told about a woman who was having some pre-operative measurements made of her brain.

She had epilepsy, and, by stimulating parts of her brain, the surgical team wanted to establish that they were not going to deprive her of any important function when they came to remove material to prevent her fitting further. It so happened that they found that stimulating one part caused her to say that she was above her body, looking down on it. For whatever reason this part of the brain had not been identified before, the psychologists seem delighted that they have the brain to hold responsible for this 'experience'.


Not much of an experience, when people report far more than just being above themselves, looking down, but the lecture did not dwell on that possible criticism of this enthusiastic discovery. Of course, experimenters can see that stimulating this part of the subject's brain, when they know where the subject is (i.e. not above their body), causes him or her to report looking down from above, but do they non-scientifically assume it is not a real effect, by invoking a silent circularity ?

In other words, we can see that the subject is where he or she was, so it is just a function of the brain that reports that he or she is several feet in the air above the bed. If the subject were alone when a non-induced experience occurred, he or she would say that, if someone else came into the room when he or she was above his or her body, that person would see his or her body. So, true scientific investigation would have to carry out this experiment (it is my guess that it has not been carried out) :

1. By a shield at mid-body level, prevent the subject from being able to see the lower part of his or her body.

2. Place an easily identifiable object, e.g. a coloured square, on the bed, unknown to the subject.

3. Then stimulate the relevant part of the brain. If the subject can, when asked, report the presence of the object, one can only conclude, not that the brain generates the impression of that point of view, but that the self is actually put into that point of view.


Has anyone tested that ? Or did science confuse cause and effect, as so often ?


Maybe it has been done, or you want to say that it is a waste of time to do an experiment of that kind (though ones on ESP have been carried out enough), and maybe the person would never be able to see the object, because it is just a function of the brain to cause the illusion (can science say why, what use it would be ?). OK.

Do you recall the pivoting beds on board the USS Enterprise in Star Trek ? What if the person whose brain were to be stimulated got put in one of those first, so that he or she is near vertical before the brain is touched ? Where would that person report his or her self being then - upright facing 'the bed', or still above, looking down ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Problems of the Self (to quote Bernard Williams)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 November

I saw an experiment being carried out to-day (a video of it), during a lecture called Boundaries Between Self and World by Dr Jane Aspell, Lecturer in Psychology, in Cambridge's Festival of Ideas : The Rubber-Hand Illusion.

If I put a rubber hand in front of you, and then suddenly stuck a fork in it, would you - other than the surprising gesture - be shocked, as if the hand were yours ?

Well, and although you would know what was happening (apart from the fork bit), if a physical barrier shielded your arm from sight, but your hand and the rubber hand (in front of you) were stroked with a paint-brush in the same place, your brain would come to identify the rubber one as yours, confusing the apparent stimulus (on the rubber hand) with the felt one (on your own hand), because of the visual message.

Without the fork element, here is a link to a video from New Scientist.


This all seems surprising, out of context, or even in a lecture of this kind, but is it, and does it show what the experimental psychologists claim ? I am told that the eye's lens throws an inverted image on the retina, and the brain's visual cortex adjusts for this - even to the extent that, if one wore glasses all the time that turned the projected image right way up (and so everything would be seen upside down), the brain adjusts in time, righting the perceived image. Or those walk-in optical illusions, where patterns of black and white can make things seem taller, shorter, or unstable in some way.

Consider, also, going to the theatre, opera or cinema : even if you lose yourself in what is being shown (arguably it is bizarre that projected moving images, when we know that we are in a darkened screen so that they can be seen, can engage us, and seem like life, but they do), part of you knows that it is not real, but does that (or Puccini's music) stop you being tearful over Mimi ?

Or take reading a book, where there is no illusion of reality, but we co-create it with the writer, and, like Beckettt's character Krapp, cry buckets at Effi, or come to hate Arthur Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall : as the player has it, what is he to Hecuba, when these are just words on a page ?

Identification of things that are not ourselves, but outside of us, is part of our living and loving - a text-message to say that a friend is delayed, a relative ill, would mean nothing if we did not pity, care, fear, hope, despair, pretend, imagine.


So is the Rubber-Hand Illusion that novel ? No, I think that the appeals that I have made to entering into the world of a film, or a symphony, and feeling something is far, far more remarkable.


More here from this lecture, with what they call OBEs, or Out-of-Body Experiences...


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)