Problems of the Self (to quote Bernard Williams)

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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)