Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, you wasn't a stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: what are you doing? You're closing your eyes and you're
Speaker 1: you're touching your nose. I'm touching my nose. I am
Speaker 1: being a pro pre exception champ right now, oh, pro
Speaker 1: pre exception. Yeah. The subject of today's episode, and this
Speaker 1: really gets down to what may seem at first like
Speaker 1: a very basic concept, right, where is our body? Where
Speaker 1: are we? Where are we in terms of time and space?
Speaker 1: Where our arms? Just sort of basic stuff that we
Speaker 1: take for granted on a near constant basis. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: at first glance seems kind of like a stoner question.
Speaker 1: Where is my body? It's right here? Um, but you're
Speaker 1: right if you look at a little bit closer. It's
Speaker 1: amazing that we can locate ourselves in our body. That
Speaker 1: we have this meta sense that combines our brains knowledge
Speaker 1: of what our muscles are doing with a feel for
Speaker 1: the size and the shape of your body. Because as
Speaker 1: we know, um, the way that we take in data
Speaker 1: and we parse it in our brains is not always. Um,
Speaker 1: so straightforward, it's not always actually correct. So of course
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about some weird things happening with
Speaker 1: appropriate exception. Just to go back to the what you
Speaker 1: were doing earlier with your nose though, I'm going to
Speaker 1: try it myself, and I encourage listeners who are not
Speaker 1: trying Okay, let's see or otherwise engaged to do this
Speaker 1: as well. Closing my eyes and then my hand is
Speaker 1: out to the side, and then I'm going to reach
Speaker 1: in with my finger and I'm going to attempt to
Speaker 1: touch the bridge of my nose. And I got it here.
Speaker 1: Oh I can't there's a headphone over it. But but
Speaker 1: I would have had the headphone not I was kidding.
Speaker 1: You actually did get the bridge of your nose. Yeah, okay, good, good, good.
Speaker 1: So what was that of that all about? How did
Speaker 1: I find my nose? Right? Because I couldn't see where
Speaker 1: my nose was. I couldn't here where my You could
Speaker 1: use echolocation like a bat to determine where my my
Speaker 1: hand was and then guided in towards my nose. Um,
Speaker 1: I couldn't smell where my finger was and then negotiate
Speaker 1: it into place. Yeah, I was about to say this
Speaker 1: is not one of those here's one of your five senses.
Speaker 1: Because we've talked about that, there were pretty limiting to
Speaker 1: say we have five senses. There's obviously stuff going on
Speaker 1: beyond that. And if you've ever hovered your hand over
Speaker 1: a hot iron, you know that automatically, right. You didn't
Speaker 1: get that sense of heat from licking that hot iron,
Speaker 1: from smelling it, from tasting it, from touching it, um
Speaker 1: from seeing it. There was another thing going on with
Speaker 1: the nerves and your fingers that were saying, hey, here's
Speaker 1: some data about that object. So that's what this meta
Speaker 1: sense appropriate reception is. But you can't get into the
Speaker 1: meat of it until you kind of talk more about
Speaker 1: the nuts and bolts of what's happening inside of your
Speaker 1: body and how that connects your mind and body. Yes,
Speaker 1: we're talking about American philosopher and psychologist William James two
Speaker 1: through nineteen ten. Very important thinker, a lot of ideas
Speaker 1: that were especially in this case controversial at the time
Speaker 1: and really ahead of of of his time in terms
Speaker 1: of the way he was thinking about our experience of
Speaker 1: reality and how our our brain engages and all of that,
Speaker 1: and he came up with a thought experiment involving a bear. Yes,
Speaker 1: now this was covered in a Radio Lab episode, but
Speaker 1: we wanted to bring it up because it is so
Speaker 1: central to our conversation today. This thought experiment was imagine
Speaker 1: you're walking through the woods and a bear attacks, Okay,
Speaker 1: or just shows up. Really, that's that's enough for me.
Speaker 1: That shows up. And he's wondering that feeling, that emotion,
Speaker 1: that fear, what is that feeling made up of? Where
Speaker 1: is it really coming from? And so what he gets
Speaker 1: into is this idea that it's your body kicking off
Speaker 1: the sense of fear. In other words, it's not your
Speaker 1: emotions that you feel at first, it's your body having
Speaker 1: the response. It reacts to the stimuli first, and then
Speaker 1: the chain reaction informs your body of how to feel
Speaker 1: emotionally or your brain how to feel. So this was
Speaker 1: tested out by the idea that people who are paralyzed
Speaker 1: from the neck down wouldn't exhibit fear. This is what
Speaker 1: he thought, right, because he's again arguing that your body
Speaker 1: is essentially feeling what's happening and feeling the fear and
Speaker 1: then informing your brain on how to think. And so
Speaker 1: if therefore, if the if the body were cut off
Speaker 1: from sensation, then it wouldn't the brain would not have
Speaker 1: a body to tell it to be afraid of the bear,
Speaker 1: right exactly. And so he thought thought, okay, well, if
Speaker 1: you're paralyzed in the neck down, then this should bear
Speaker 1: out right. But he finds out that this is not
Speaker 1: just as cut and dried as he had hoped. This
Speaker 1: is not, in fact happened. People who are paralyzed the
Speaker 1: neck down still experience fear and and could still be
Speaker 1: eaten by a bear from just a very physical, literal sense. Yes,
Speaker 1: not exactly. Yeah, However, some such three years so later,
Speaker 1: neurologist Antonio Dimazzio, the director of the Brain and Creativity
Speaker 1: Institute at the University of Southern California, who is a
Speaker 1: paraplegic psychologist, I thought there might be something to this
Speaker 1: because he said that his emotions weren't as strong since
Speaker 1: um becoming paralyzed. And so he conducted studies of able
Speaker 1: bodied people who became paralyzed and found that they reported
Speaker 1: this same sense of lessening and feelings feeling less sad
Speaker 1: or less happy. As we bring this up because once
Speaker 1: again we see, as Dimazio says, our being is rooted
Speaker 1: in a body state. Yeah, it comes back again and
Speaker 1: again our podcast to that that idea we rolled out
Speaker 1: of the man on a horse versus the centaur. Right,
Speaker 1: there's the the old notion that our brain is this
Speaker 1: rider on a horse and the body just obeys the mind,
Speaker 1: and that's all there is to it. But the more
Speaker 1: we understand about how our brain works and how our
Speaker 1: body works, we see that it's more of a center
Speaker 1: model where the rider and horse are one. You can't
Speaker 1: you can't take the brain apart from the body without
Speaker 1: losing a part of the overall self. Yeah. I was
Speaker 1: thinking about this morning when I was driving in I thought,
Speaker 1: when was the last time I felt like I was
Speaker 1: just punched in the gut from information I was taking in?
Speaker 1: And actually wasn't that long though, And uh, I thought,
Speaker 1: you know what that was exactly it? I felt that
Speaker 1: physical in my stomach and then I had a cascade
Speaker 1: of emotions that followed it. Yeah. I think they brought
Speaker 1: this up in the Radio Lab episode. Well, they were
Speaker 1: talking about our own memories of feeling fear. But it
Speaker 1: made me think about reading stories in which someone encounters
Speaker 1: something fearful, which which I frequently find that because I
Speaker 1: read a lot of horror and suspense. But but when
Speaker 1: you when you read these stories, it's never something like
Speaker 1: and then Randolph encountered a ghost and had the idea
Speaker 1: in his head that he should feel afraid. No, it's
Speaker 1: always the author always describes a visceral reaction to something horrifying.
Speaker 1: You know, hearts are leaping, skin is crawling, um bowels
Speaker 1: or maybe avoiding. But but but that stuff comes immediately before,
Speaker 1: sometimes separated by seconds, minutes, days, hours, whatever, before they
Speaker 1: actually are able to assemble what's happening in their mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why that that cliche of being punched in the
Speaker 1: gut is so true, because we have an innate sense
Speaker 1: of this pre pre reception working on our emotions. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: so again, let's talk about approprioception. What is it? It
Speaker 1: is actually stimuli relating to position, posture, equilibrium, or our
Speaker 1: internal conditions. Um. It is the sense or rather senses
Speaker 1: of position and movement of our limbs and trunk, the
Speaker 1: sense of effort and the sense of force and the
Speaker 1: sense of heaviness, and all of this information coming together
Speaker 1: in the brain to form a picture of who we are, well,
Speaker 1: not well, not as much who we are in this scenario,
Speaker 1: but what we are, what are parts are composed of,
Speaker 1: what those parts are doing, and where we physically are.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting because if you, if you just take
Speaker 1: any given moment, we tend to fall back on a
Speaker 1: visual understanding. If you, if you ask yourself the question, well,
Speaker 1: what's my body doing and where am I? We think, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this is me because I see me and I see
Speaker 1: my surroundings, so I know where I am. We tend
Speaker 1: to think just visually about it. But it's far more
Speaker 1: complicated than that. Yeah, and that comes down to body schema,
Speaker 1: in this sense of body ownership. So you in body schema,
Speaker 1: you have this model of where your mind thinks your
Speaker 1: body is in time and space. And in the paper
Speaker 1: and an implicit body representation underlying human position sense, authors
Speaker 1: long Goo and Haggard say that human position sense must
Speaker 1: refer to a stored body model, and this model has
Speaker 1: the body's metric properties like body parts, size and shape.
Speaker 1: And in their study they found that without cues from
Speaker 1: a person's environment or their own muscle movements, and we'll
Speaker 1: talk more about that, that a person's implicit mental map
Speaker 1: to say, their hand when they tried to recreate it
Speaker 1: for the researchers was greatly distorted, and it bears out
Speaker 1: this idea that you can't have just the mental map
Speaker 1: alone of the body schema to to really know where
Speaker 1: you are in time and space, you have to have
Speaker 1: other clues. Yeah, it made me instantly think of Game
Speaker 1: of Thrones for some reason. Um, have you watched any
Speaker 1: of the show? Well, you know there are a lot
Speaker 1: of scenes, inevitably, especially when things get a little more warlike,
Speaker 1: where you'll have general staring down at a map and
Speaker 1: then they'll be pieces on the map representing where the
Speaker 1: army is. Now, for a general to command an army,
Speaker 1: you're having to depend on that general sending out messages
Speaker 1: to the to the army to command where they're going
Speaker 1: to go. And then those individual units in the in
Speaker 1: the army, you're sending back messages to the general to
Speaker 1: let uh he or she know where the army is.
Speaker 1: And then all of that is put on a map,
Speaker 1: and then the general has a has an idea in
Speaker 1: his or her head regarding the shape of the army,
Speaker 1: the formation of the army, where the army is and
Speaker 1: where it is going, and not to encourage a horse
Speaker 1: and rider view of the mind body connection. But that's
Speaker 1: kind of what's happening here. There's all this data coming
Speaker 1: together and it's an assembling too, and it's really kind
Speaker 1: of a complicated, um, cognitive process. I mean, the human
Speaker 1: experience is more like a tapestry the more we look
Speaker 1: at it. But but that's kind of what's going on
Speaker 1: in this in this body schemma. Well, yeah, because if
Speaker 1: you're looking at this map that these men on the field, right,
Speaker 1: you could kind of look at the vestibular and kinesthetic
Speaker 1: systems as being some of those men. However, they are
Speaker 1: not appropri reception, right um, you know alone. They have
Speaker 1: to be working in tandem to create that picture. So
Speaker 1: when we talk about the vestibular system, we're talking about
Speaker 1: the master controller of our balance and spatial orientation. And
Speaker 1: when we talk about kinesthetic system, we're talking more about
Speaker 1: motion and behavior, or rather even the habits of movements,
Speaker 1: like your eyes between the computer screen and your keyboard.
Speaker 1: So that's some of the data that comes in. But
Speaker 1: according to Joseph Bennington Castro and he's writing for Ion
Speaker 1: nine quote comparatively pro pri reception has more to do
Speaker 1: with body position and focuses on the cognitive awareness of
Speaker 1: the body of space, so it's not just those two
Speaker 1: elements of the stibular and kinesthetic. And this kind of
Speaker 1: gets us into this weird area too, because people will
Speaker 1: sometimes say, well, sure, pro preeception is kind of a medicine,
Speaker 1: but it couldn't be like alongside one of the five senses, right,
Speaker 1: because when we talk about the five senses, we're talking
Speaker 1: about experiencing the outside world, whereas pro preeception allows us
Speaker 1: to understand the physical place within that world. So that's
Speaker 1: I just want to bring that there's a bit of
Speaker 1: quibbling when we talk about this as it's well, one
Speaker 1: thing about it, though, I feel like with with site,
Speaker 1: with smell, with hearing, these are all process processes that
Speaker 1: that seem a lot simpler based on that sort of
Speaker 1: take it for granted every day um experience. But as
Speaker 1: as we've explored on the show, when you start looking
Speaker 1: at site in the way site works, or how smell works,
Speaker 1: or or how hearing works, all these are are far
Speaker 1: more complicated than we give them credit on a daily basis.
Speaker 1: I mean, just on hearing alone, you get into the
Speaker 1: two different ways that you hear the world hearing with
Speaker 1: the with your inner ear hearing with your skull. You
Speaker 1: can you can take just about any of these these
Speaker 1: senses and you can divide them up into into more
Speaker 1: complicated systems, especially touch, as we mentioned earlier, you can
Speaker 1: get into all the various ways that are our sense
Speaker 1: of touch interacts with the world. I agree. I think
Speaker 1: that pro preception is just right there alongside with the
Speaker 1: other senses in the way that you can view it
Speaker 1: as pointill is um right um. Each one of those
Speaker 1: dots creates that picture of whatever that sense is. So
Speaker 1: it gets us to this idea of how does our
Speaker 1: brain keep track of our body? Anyway? Yes, how does
Speaker 1: it do that thing that it does? We're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick breaking when we come back. We're gonna jump
Speaker 1: into that question. All right, we're back, and we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about how our brain keeps track of our body.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna go sort of into the nitty gritty
Speaker 1: in a second. But let's get this obvious part out
Speaker 1: of the way when we talk about equilibrium and orientation,
Speaker 1: because in humans, gravity, position, orientation, those are all registered
Speaker 1: by tiny greens called odo life moving within two fluid
Speaker 1: filled sacks in the inner ear in response to any
Speaker 1: change or position and orientation and their motion is detected
Speaker 1: by sense hairs. So rotation is detected by the inertial
Speaker 1: lag of fluid and the semi circular canals acting on
Speaker 1: the sense hairs. Okay, let's getting the weeds with all
Speaker 1: that stuff. So you have central nervous system integrating signals
Speaker 1: from the canal to perceive rotation in three dimensions. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, if you're saying getting off an elevator, let's
Speaker 1: slow mo this and figure out how your brain is
Speaker 1: then figuring out how it's transitioning from one place to
Speaker 1: another and where it is, right, because we've mentioned before
Speaker 1: the elevator's magic. The door opens and we're in a
Speaker 1: different setting, and I suddenly have to figure out where
Speaker 1: I am, which way is right, which way is left,
Speaker 1: which way leads to the castle, which way leads to
Speaker 1: certain death, at least that's how it is in our building, right.
Speaker 1: So that's when you get into this idea that pro
Speaker 1: prereception uses receptors located in the skin, muscles and joints.
Speaker 1: And if we slow mo this, we can see when
Speaker 1: we've got a microscope here, Uh, we're inside actually the muscle, now,
Speaker 1: muscle spindles, signaling the angle of related joints and telling
Speaker 1: the brain, hey, this is going on. And then you
Speaker 1: get stretch receptors getting in on the game. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: these are detecting small movements of the limbs. So again
Speaker 1: it's just general ideas of what are the limbs doing,
Speaker 1: what kind of what kind of movements are taking place,
Speaker 1: what kind of force is taking place? Yeah, just another
Speaker 1: dot in the point as um picture. And then within
Speaker 1: the tendons that attached to muscles two bones, there are
Speaker 1: PreO pre aceptors called Goldie tendon organs, which would be
Speaker 1: clocking the muscle tension and reporting about that. Yeah. This
Speaker 1: gets into how much force am I exerting? Right, So,
Speaker 1: which is something that can get a little out of
Speaker 1: whack if you are, say, really worn out or maybe inebriated,
Speaker 1: but you need to know how much if you're putting
Speaker 1: into your efforts. Yeah, you get that sense of effort
Speaker 1: because all of those different processes are informing like, okay,
Speaker 1: this is how much force I'm exerting, as you say,
Speaker 1: and then that's getting reported to the cerebellum, which would
Speaker 1: then take that information and try to determine the location
Speaker 1: and the movement of body. Parts, and finally it would
Speaker 1: match that up to the body schema or that stored
Speaker 1: body mob well that we talked about. But and here's
Speaker 1: the rub body schema. Appropri Receptive cues aren't always reliable, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because especially body schema. We've we've discussed before how the
Speaker 1: fact that body schema is notable is key to our
Speaker 1: success as they cool using organism because if you remember
Speaker 1: from our our episode on tool using tool use, when
Speaker 1: we use a tool, be it an ink pin, a hammer,
Speaker 1: or a battle axe, the brain adapts to that tool
Speaker 1: and incorporates it into the body schema, which works to
Speaker 1: our advantage this particular life hack, if you will, when
Speaker 1: we need to write something hamm or something, or chop
Speaker 1: someone's head off. So you can see how when someone
Speaker 1: looks at a rubber hand, for instance, they might think
Speaker 1: that it's their own. Not initially, of course, but as
Speaker 1: you say. This idea that something becomes part of you
Speaker 1: um is steeped in a study by Marcello Constantini who
Speaker 1: had subjects view stimulation of a rubber hand and at
Speaker 1: the same time their own hand was touched in the
Speaker 1: same manner. Okay, so there succeeded at the table. Have
Speaker 1: your own hand. Here there's another rubber hand next to it.
Speaker 1: That hand is being stroked. Your hand is being stroked.
Speaker 1: So you have the visual information of these two arms
Speaker 1: being stroked, and then you have the sense data reaching
Speaker 1: your brain as well of a hand being stroked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they come to feel like that rubber hand
Speaker 1: is part of their own body. And this is called
Speaker 1: appropri receptive drift, and it's an example of how easy
Speaker 1: it is to have a spatial mismatching and um in
Speaker 1: the abstract of the paper that Constantini has says, current
Speaker 1: sensory evidence about what is me is interpreted with respect
Speaker 1: to a prior mental body representation, meaning that this idea
Speaker 1: of where we are who we are is kind of
Speaker 1: easily messed with. In act, you can take the same
Speaker 1: idea and you can you can extrapolate it a little
Speaker 1: more and actually make the test subject feel as if
Speaker 1: they have three arms. And for this we look to
Speaker 1: a two thousand eleven study from Sweden's Carolinska Institute UH
Speaker 1: and this this is pretty pretty amazing against similar in
Speaker 1: a sense to the rubber hand illusion. They created an
Speaker 1: experiment where subjects had a prosthetic but realistic rubber arm
Speaker 1: placed right next to their right arm. And then the
Speaker 1: experimenters started touching both right arms with a brush in
Speaker 1: the same location, trying to make identical brushstrokes in time
Speaker 1: and location, so similar again to what we saw we
Speaker 1: saw in the rubber arm. And I remember this is
Speaker 1: a first person view of this. They're they're seeing this
Speaker 1: as their arms. Imagine across the room, right, I manage
Speaker 1: yourself at that table, looking down at your one left arm,
Speaker 1: your right arm, and then this plastic right arm there
Speaker 1: as well, and some stranger is stroking it um And
Speaker 1: what happens is is pretty crazy. According to head researcher
Speaker 1: Arvid Gurtustan, what happens is a conflict arises in the
Speaker 1: brain concerning which of the right hands belongs to the
Speaker 1: participant's body, which one could expect. What one could expect
Speaker 1: is that only one of the hands is experienced as
Speaker 1: one's own, presumably the real arm. But what we found,
Speaker 1: surprisingly is that the brain solved this conflict by accepting
Speaker 1: both right hands as part of the body image and
Speaker 1: the subject experience having an extra third arm. So again
Speaker 1: it gets into that same idea of the body scheme
Speaker 1: is saying, all right, my the end of my left
Speaker 1: hand is a battle axe. Now, okay, we can roll
Speaker 1: with it. And here the body schema is updating and saying,
Speaker 1: all right, is a third arm. It's psychologically before to like,
Speaker 1: how do people accept some some piece of information that
Speaker 1: is starkly different from what they thought was happening. Well,
Speaker 1: they just accept it, right, Um, So it's kind of
Speaker 1: not to you know, surprising that this would happen. But
Speaker 1: how do the researchers know for sure that the participant
Speaker 1: is really accepting this body part as their own. Well,
Speaker 1: you've got to you've got inflict little pain, you gotta
Speaker 1: at least bring out a knife. And that's what they did. Uh,
Speaker 1: They threatened the arm with a knife, and they saw
Speaker 1: the participants a lynch and then you know, maybe it
Speaker 1: was just because they saw a knife. So how else
Speaker 1: would they measure that response? Well with a goalvonic skin response,
Speaker 1: which would measure the amount of sweat um, which of
Speaker 1: course is one of those things that's a telltale sign
Speaker 1: of fear. Now you watch the video. I didn't. Now
Speaker 1: I'm imagining the researchers are there gathered around this individual
Speaker 1: with the third plastic arm there, and they've done some
Speaker 1: gentle stroking of the real arm and the plastic arm
Speaker 1: to to inspire this sense of of of having three limbs.
Speaker 1: And then imagine one of the researchers reaching under the table,
Speaker 1: pulling out a dagger and just stabbing, just nailing that
Speaker 1: that third plastic arm to the table so that the dagger,
Speaker 1: you know, vibrates and quivers, and then the test of
Speaker 1: you just shrieks and uh and away. Is that what happened?
Speaker 1: Exactly what happened? No? No, but yeah, kind of except
Speaker 1: for like they didn't like, you just did this big
Speaker 1: arm movement that was big, overarching. I mean they brought
Speaker 1: out the knife and then they brought it up to
Speaker 1: the hand. Um, so it wasn't any sudden movement. But
Speaker 1: you know, obviously there was an implied threat there. Well,
Speaker 1: they're probably standards in practice for the sort of experiment.
Speaker 1: There's a certain way you have to threaten your test
Speaker 1: subjects with a knife. Well, and they explored that. They
Speaker 1: explored this idea more by having someone have a mannequin
Speaker 1: right across from them and then having these little goggles
Speaker 1: on that gave them the vision of being the mannequin.
Speaker 1: Does that make sense? Yes, they're they're wearing basically virtual
Speaker 1: reality goggles. They put them in the point of view
Speaker 1: of the mannequin. Yes, they see the mannequin, and you can.
Speaker 1: The video is great because it shows how they're this
Speaker 1: view of looking down at their mannequin body, and so
Speaker 1: the same sorts of things happened. They have a paint
Speaker 1: brush that's stroking them gently, and then of course all
Speaker 1: of their responses are being measured. Uh, and then the
Speaker 1: knife comes out and it goes right straight across the stomach.
Speaker 1: And so again, what you're doing here is you're removing
Speaker 1: that distance. Um, you're changing it from a third person narrative,
Speaker 1: as we discussed before, a first person narrative. This is fascinating.
Speaker 1: I recently wrote a blog post about a recent study
Speaker 1: where they took a similar situation. They had a lecture
Speaker 1: giving a lecture about some some topic, and they had
Speaker 1: individuals that were, uh that we're in a everyone is
Speaker 1: in a virtual reality environment to view this lecture. But
Speaker 1: some people have that third person sort of like that
Speaker 1: over the shoulder video game persona like like looking at
Speaker 1: a mannequin setting in front of you, and the other
Speaker 1: said that first person view. And they found afterwards that
Speaker 1: the people with the first person view had better comprehension
Speaker 1: of the material and the lecture versus the third person, which,
Speaker 1: again you take the human experience out of the body
Speaker 1: experience and lose something in this case, um, memory comprehension
Speaker 1: of what is experienced in that body, right, so that
Speaker 1: that distance, that objectifying doesn't mean it's part of you,
Speaker 1: so it's not as important. So the same thing with mannequin,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, if you are looking at
Speaker 1: yourself as a mannequin, you're the first person. You're you're
Speaker 1: the one who's having the knife dragged across your chest,
Speaker 1: and you're going to show that in a fear of response. Um.
Speaker 1: So we're actually gonna be touching on this a little
Speaker 1: bit in the sense of unconscious commonality in the next
Speaker 1: episode in which we talk about nominative determinism essentially names
Speaker 1: forming our personalities. But but even then, when you see
Speaker 1: someone having the same name as you, you feel connected
Speaker 1: to them. You get a little bit closer to that
Speaker 1: first person experience, right. And we see this in our
Speaker 1: body schema, and then we see it play out in
Speaker 1: our unconscious which brings us to the subject of out
Speaker 1: of the experiences because ultimately an out of body experience,
Speaker 1: which which does exist as an experience, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's not a situation where your soul is drifting
Speaker 1: away from your your body or your your you know,
Speaker 1: your your mind is about to travel the astral plane.
Speaker 1: But the experience of existing outside of your body for
Speaker 1: brief periods is is a reality and it's kind of
Speaker 1: the the ultimate uh in in leaving the body scheme,
Speaker 1: leaving prop prio sception behind, right because um, we we've
Speaker 1: talked about us in different senses before, Like, um, if
Speaker 1: you have ever experienced sleep paralysis, what is that? But
Speaker 1: in misfiring of your brain and your muscles, you're waking up,
Speaker 1: but your brain is not quite there yet and so
Speaker 1: you can't move your body yet. Um. In the same way,
Speaker 1: proprioception can go awry in out of body experiences. Essentially,
Speaker 1: that is the basis for them. And this has been
Speaker 1: looked at in pilots because pilots they can experienced the
Speaker 1: sensation of being outside of their bodies in something called
Speaker 1: g lock. That's called gravity induced loss of consciousness, and
Speaker 1: this occurs frequently with fighter pilots. Right, Yeah, if you've
Speaker 1: ever played a fighter simulator, which is my main uh
Speaker 1: tie into this sort of stuff since I've never powered
Speaker 1: it a plane. Uh. You you know, if you you
Speaker 1: pull too many g's, you can experience, say a red
Speaker 1: out where all the blood surges to your head. You
Speaker 1: can get a gray out or even a blackout. Is
Speaker 1: the brain is the blood leaves your brain and heads
Speaker 1: towards your abdomen. Uh. And of course our brain needs
Speaker 1: to have blood to function, and so if enough blood
Speaker 1: leaves the brain, if you pull too many gs, you
Speaker 1: black out, you lose consciousness. But some other interesting stuff
Speaker 1: can occur there as well, as explored by Dr James Winery. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is the the the individual who was interviewed
Speaker 1: on that episode of Radio Lab. We were mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: specifically in a section of that episode titled Out of
Speaker 1: the Body. Roger. Yeah, he looked at these pilots experiencing visions. Okay,
Speaker 1: because as you say, they get through these different red, gray,
Speaker 1: and then blackouts of consciousness, and along with them, they
Speaker 1: get different ideas of what's going on or their brains
Speaker 1: are presenting maybe a a tunnel sort of vision going
Speaker 1: on in a gray blackout. But with those people, those
Speaker 1: pilots who experience blackouts. Some of them said, hey, I
Speaker 1: had some weird vision. Yeah, like it's it's one thing
Speaker 1: to like some of the examples where I found myself
Speaker 1: on the wing of the plane looking at myself, and
Speaker 1: that's that's weird and interesting, but it's more based in, alright,
Speaker 1: the reality of where you were. You just saw yourself
Speaker 1: outside of yourself. You were kind of viewing that model
Speaker 1: of the self that we talked about earlier, instead of
Speaker 1: experiencing it from within or or simply blacking out. Right.
Speaker 1: That's fine too, But but some of the stories, for instance,
Speaker 1: we're you're blacking out and suddenly you're fishing on a
Speaker 1: river somewhere, which sounds so cinematic made up that it.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I wouldn't need to have they even bought
Speaker 1: that idea. Had I seen it in a movie, like
Speaker 1: our hero blacks out wall fighting the Germans in the air,
Speaker 1: and suddenly he's back home fishing, I would have said,
Speaker 1: that's complete hueie. But that's exactly the type of experience
Speaker 1: that Winery came across in his studies. Yeah, they're fishing.
Speaker 1: There's another one which the guy was shopping for ice cream.
Speaker 1: So what I thought was interesting about both of these
Speaker 1: examples is that in this dream or what they call
Speaker 1: vision um, they were struggling with motor control. They were
Speaker 1: struggling with the real they were struggling to try to
Speaker 1: reach into that ice cream freezer to extract the ice cream.
Speaker 1: And so what you see here, I think, is this
Speaker 1: idea that the brain has trying to square where it
Speaker 1: is in the motor control necessary to help it try
Speaker 1: to get its pro pre reception back right the body.
Speaker 1: The person, the pilot is in a situation where they're
Speaker 1: trying to pull back on the controls and gain control
Speaker 1: of the aircraft again, but they're they're losing consciousness, they're
Speaker 1: blacking out. The brain is essentially losing not only a
Speaker 1: visual understanding of where that the individual is, but also
Speaker 1: a PreO perceptive understanding of of of what's going on,
Speaker 1: and therefore it has to fill in the blanks. Uh.
Speaker 1: We've we've run across examples of this in the podcast before,
Speaker 1: where the brain has to and actually on a regular basis,
Speaker 1: fill in the missing pieces in its perception of the
Speaker 1: of reality. Now, forty of the subjects who reported out
Speaker 1: of body experiences, a subset of them had that kind
Speaker 1: of white lights at the end of a tunnel vision
Speaker 1: and we've heard about this before, right. Um turns out
Speaker 1: they were out the longest, and again that gives us
Speaker 1: a clue about the sort of um distance that they
Speaker 1: were from their bodies. The longer they're out, perhaps the
Speaker 1: less sort of data that they're getting in, the less
Speaker 1: that their minds can create a picture of where they are.
Speaker 1: And the idea is that they're just so disassilitated, disassociated
Speaker 1: from their bodies that they're minds can't really pin them
Speaker 1: to space and time, and in that absence, that's the
Speaker 1: story that's created. UM. It's interesting. In a two thousand
Speaker 1: five study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the researchers
Speaker 1: actually used transcranial magnetic stimulation of the temporo parietal junction
Speaker 1: and they were able to impair the mental transformation of
Speaker 1: the body and healthy volunteers, essentially inducing an out of
Speaker 1: body experience. And did a recent episode This was with
Speaker 1: the guys from Stuff They Don't Want You To Know
Speaker 1: mind On we did one about shadow people, similar situation.
Speaker 1: There uh electrical stimulation of the t PJ, which concerns
Speaker 1: self processing, self other distinction, multi central body integration. There's
Speaker 1: no one part of the brain that's involved appropriate reception.
Speaker 1: But but certainly the TPJ is in the mix. And
Speaker 1: in this case, in this one particular style you mentioned
Speaker 1: in that episode, by electronically stimulating this part of the brain,
Speaker 1: they're able to induce the perception that, uh, that there
Speaker 1: is another you, a sort of stranger you, just like
Speaker 1: a few inches or less away from your body. So
Speaker 1: just able to take the the idea of who we
Speaker 1: are and where we are and skew it just a
Speaker 1: little bit. Yeah, if anybody is interested in reading a
Speaker 1: bit more about this, John Horgan has a great book
Speaker 1: called Rational Mysticism, and he interviews Michael Persinger, who was
Speaker 1: one of the people who uses those transcranial magnets and
Speaker 1: who was looked into this idea of ghosts. All right,
Speaker 1: this is god helmet, the god helmet, right, And and um,
Speaker 1: I think you can get a good sense of how
Speaker 1: easy HIT is to kind of mess with someone's reality
Speaker 1: by by warping in a little bit in the magnetic
Speaker 1: field there. Um. But anyway, yeah, I mean it's it's
Speaker 1: it's fascinating to me just because we take it for granted,
Speaker 1: this idea that we're rooted in our body and we
Speaker 1: are who we are, and we're just moving through time
Speaker 1: and space. But um, you know, to go back to
Speaker 1: Walter James and that there thought experiment, I think it
Speaker 1: says so much about how we perceive in color our
Speaker 1: emotions and experiences of life through our body. Yeah. One
Speaker 1: of the things I love about appropriate reception is that
Speaker 1: essentially this is key to this embodied, consistent self, uh,
Speaker 1: that we perceive at the center of a changing universe,
Speaker 1: which is part impartial to everything from the illusion of
Speaker 1: the soul to personal importance. I mean, so much of
Speaker 1: the human experience hinges on this sense. Indeed, it does.
Speaker 1: I'm hinging on it right now, are you okay? Hinge
Speaker 1: on hingeon? So there you have it. I hope that
Speaker 1: forces everyone to just take a few seconds during the
Speaker 1: course of your day to just stop and think about
Speaker 1: how complicated this, uh, this scenario is in which we
Speaker 1: we know exactly where we are and what our body
Speaker 1: is doing. So again, it sounds a bit like stoner talk,
Speaker 1: but it's it's truly amazing that we know where we
Speaker 1: are and know where our body is. Yeah, er minds here.
Speaker 1: When I was little, I used to do, I guess
Speaker 1: you would call a thought experiment. I used to imagine
Speaker 1: myself on a grid, and I imagine myself can tiny, tiny,
Speaker 1: twenty and then getting huge, and the sense of that
Speaker 1: scale in my own mind and body. I used to
Speaker 1: think that I could physically feel those effects because I
Speaker 1: was insane, um and I was six years old. But
Speaker 1: but it is kind of one of those things that
Speaker 1: it's just amazing when you look at it a little
Speaker 1: bit closer. And if you guys have any personal experiences
Speaker 1: with us, whether it's out of body experiences or just
Speaker 1: ever feeling sort of um, disassociated with your body, we
Speaker 1: would love to hear about it. Yes indeed, so be
Speaker 1: sure to get in touch with us and share those
Speaker 1: stories with your district. General thoughts on this topic. As always,
Speaker 1: the best place to go for the stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind experience is stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That's where you will find all the latest podcast episodes
Speaker 1: and all the old podcast episodes going all the way
Speaker 1: back to the beginning. You'll find um over a thousand
Speaker 1: blog posts. You'll find a whole bunch of videos, as
Speaker 1: well as links out to our various social media accounts
Speaker 1: such as Facebook, Twitter, Tunneler mind Stuff Show, that's their
Speaker 1: name on YouTube and tortually. Is there another way they
Speaker 1: can reach out to us, perhaps with their minds or
Speaker 1: am I forgetting something well their minds and their bodies specifically,
Speaker 1: like just tapping out an email and you can do
Speaker 1: that at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com for
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, Does it
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