Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to the Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas.
Speaker 1: You know, Julie. I U. I take marta headline is
Speaker 1: public transportations to work every day. I don't know you've
Speaker 1: taken it sometimes yourself. Yes, I have frequented at Martyn myself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so you're completely surrounded by strangers, and if you're
Speaker 1: like me, you kind of keep your head down and
Speaker 1: eyes on your book and heading some music and trying
Speaker 1: not to make eye contact. No eye contact, that's the
Speaker 1: first rule. Yeah, but you still can't help it. Get
Speaker 1: a glimpse of people out of it in your peripheral
Speaker 1: vision and uh yeah, sneak looks and occasionally, if you
Speaker 1: can get away with it, like genuine people watching, but
Speaker 1: that's more of a sunglasses thing. But but anyway, that
Speaker 1: when I first started taking it, I had this situation
Speaker 1: where out of the corner of my eye, I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: my goodness, that's my my friend Becky, who take makes
Speaker 1: this uh this train as well, And I'd look over
Speaker 1: and upon closer examination and and stringent questioning, I found
Speaker 1: out that it is not her the questioning h yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the question you know. I drilled her for about an
Speaker 1: hour and she finally you know, fest up. No, I'm
Speaker 1: not really packing but yeah, but anyway I can. I
Speaker 1: still see her occasionally, and I think of her as
Speaker 1: foe Becky, as this this doppel gang er, this this
Speaker 1: double that Becky has in the world and apparently has
Speaker 1: never met and doesn't know about, and probably to Becky
Speaker 1: doesn't look a lot like Becky. But I even encountered
Speaker 1: her in yoga class one time, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: come up and be like, your foe, Becky, what are
Speaker 1: you doing outside of Martha? But um it But this
Speaker 1: this experience though, of seeing somebody else's double or seeing
Speaker 1: your own double, uh, you just you find it throughout
Speaker 1: human culture and in different way shaped and form it
Speaker 1: might spirit um especially the classic German dopel ganga topel ganga.
Speaker 1: Really yeah, I like write it and you give it
Speaker 1: a good sprockets go there. Um you know the idea
Speaker 1: that there are or you know, invasion of the body
Speaker 1: snatchers pod people, that there there are doubles out there
Speaker 1: trying to replace you or replace people you love. Um,
Speaker 1: it's just a common item in folk tale and fiction
Speaker 1: throughout history. Yeah, I mean it means double walker right
Speaker 1: in German. I believe so. And it actually that the
Speaker 1: idea that the pure idea I suppose and folklore is
Speaker 1: that it's your evil twin and if you were to
Speaker 1: be visited by such, it would pretend death. And and
Speaker 1: not every culture has it laid out like Star Trek
Speaker 1: where you can tell your evil twin is evil because
Speaker 1: of their goatee, right right, exactly. Yeah, And actually, I
Speaker 1: mean there are a lot of people who have said
Speaker 1: that they saw their their doppelganger, and Percy Shelley is
Speaker 1: one of them. Uh, Abraham Lincoln that that falls into
Speaker 1: the hole that Lincoln really get shot or was it
Speaker 1: his twin? Right right? I mean it gets since some
Speaker 1: creepy territory. Yeah, and uh, you know, as we're we
Speaker 1: can explore in this podcast, there are there are various
Speaker 1: types of what world is referred to as doppelgang er situations,
Speaker 1: encounters with a mysterious double of some kind that that
Speaker 1: have a definite scientific explanation. Um. And then that's what's
Speaker 1: fascinating about it, because something has clearly been happening to
Speaker 1: the mind, So kind of like the like we discussed
Speaker 1: in our episode on an alien abduction, something is clearly happening.
Speaker 1: It causes people to have extraordinary situation encounters with what
Speaker 1: seems to be the supernatural, and it becomes a part
Speaker 1: of the stories we tell. Um. But you can when
Speaker 1: you really examine it and boil it down with modern science,
Speaker 1: you find some some some genuine reasons for what's happening. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting that you bring that up, because in the
Speaker 1: alien abduction there's there're always these memes, right, these these
Speaker 1: ideas that have a certain thread running through them. So
Speaker 1: a lot of alien abductions sound like the same sort
Speaker 1: of thing, right, little green men, weird lights, so on
Speaker 1: and so forth, and that shares some similar days with
Speaker 1: double gangers. I think, yeah, because it's like you you
Speaker 1: end up, say, you see yourself or you see somebody
Speaker 1: who who you think has been replaced. Um, your mind
Speaker 1: ends up coming up with these reasons for it. There's
Speaker 1: a story they're that they're replacing somebody, there's some sort
Speaker 1: of nefarious scheme at work. The thing is, our understanding
Speaker 1: of it now is so much more nuanced, and so
Speaker 1: in the past in degree, we were like, oh, that
Speaker 1: person is just certifiability nuts, right, But now through neuroscience
Speaker 1: we have a better understanding of it as an actual
Speaker 1: secondary condition. So if you had brain lesions, UM, if
Speaker 1: you had an epileptic fit or um some other uh
Speaker 1: neurological damage to your brain, it's very possible that you
Speaker 1: could have this type of delusion in which you had
Speaker 1: a doppelganger of yourself or I might even imagine that
Speaker 1: you right now have been replaced, that you are an impostor.
Speaker 1: Who Yeah, it's possible for new listeners. You don't even
Speaker 1: know if you you have no frame of reference. That's right.
Speaker 1: I mean I've never seen anywhere of that shirt before.
Speaker 1: That's that's the way you're shuffling your papers. Well, let's uh,
Speaker 1: let's get into it then. UM let's look at the
Speaker 1: first of these doppelganger syndromes. And this is uh cop
Speaker 1: grass syndrome. And this was discovered by French scientists Joseph
Speaker 1: capgra In. Right. Yes, this syndrome basically breaks down to
Speaker 1: you have to end up with this strong suspicion that
Speaker 1: impostors are replacing friends and or loved ones, right and
Speaker 1: everywhere else, you're you're completely functional, right, Like your logic
Speaker 1: is completely intact um, nothing wrong with you except that, right,
Speaker 1: It's it's the pod people thing, the invasion of the
Speaker 1: body snatchers, right. Something you you run into, say, your
Speaker 1: mother are a close friend and you're talking to them.
Speaker 1: They they look like your mother. Uh, but there's something off.
Speaker 1: There's something that's not right, that's not clicking, and and
Speaker 1: and you realize and you your brain totally rationalizes that
Speaker 1: something has replaced them, right, And you've actually covered this
Speaker 1: in a blog post before U there was this one
Speaker 1: specific instance where there was a guy I think he's
Speaker 1: maybe in his twenties at the time, but he was
Speaker 1: being treated by Dr vs. Ramachandran and he had an accident.
Speaker 1: He had some brain damage, and honestly he was perfectly
Speaker 1: fine cognitively, you know, functioning, except that he was he
Speaker 1: was convinced that his parents had been replaced by impostors.
Speaker 1: And we're you know, complaining to them day and night
Speaker 1: and basically saying, like, you know what, that lady that
Speaker 1: was here this morning that made me the breakfast, I
Speaker 1: like her better. Those eggs were really good, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of implying that the person that was standing right there.
Speaker 1: His mother was the impostor. So the way this breaks
Speaker 1: down is that each of us has a visual system
Speaker 1: and a limbic system which helps to generate and process emotions.
Speaker 1: All right, So there's a there's a screw up in
Speaker 1: the visual system here, uh and and then it's left
Speaker 1: to the to uh, to the to other parts of
Speaker 1: the brain to interpret that data. Um, particularly the amiga amigdala, Right,
Speaker 1: amigdala is the emotion processing center, right, and uh so
Speaker 1: it has to it has to make sense of this, right,
Speaker 1: He's like, it engages the again, the emotional significance of
Speaker 1: what you're looking at, trying to figure out, you know,
Speaker 1: what's going on there? Is this? Is this a threat?
Speaker 1: Is this a dangerous it's something to ignore? And uh
Speaker 1: and so it ends up getting excited and it ends
Speaker 1: up and it ends up applying an interpretation or a
Speaker 1: meaning to it. So it's um one way I was
Speaker 1: thinking of it. It's kind of like, so you have
Speaker 1: an editor and a journalist at a newspaper and say,
Speaker 1: that's just like a star journalist, right, and the editors
Speaker 1: will always go go to bat for that journal to
Speaker 1: that for that journalists to defend what they've written. You know,
Speaker 1: someone says, hey, I don't, I don't. I don't think
Speaker 1: they're they've got the story straight in this article. They say, no, totally.
Speaker 1: This person is always done right by us, this one. No,
Speaker 1: this this guy knows his story. And then imagine that
Speaker 1: that journalists I don't know, screws up one day, maybe
Speaker 1: has a um, you know, a head injury or something,
Speaker 1: and and or or it's just totally misinformed on something.
Speaker 1: The journalist is still going to go to bat form
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean the editor is still going to
Speaker 1: go to bat for that journalists and be like like,
Speaker 1: look this this person is totally totally knows their beat.
Speaker 1: They've they've got all the facts, um, you know, totally
Speaker 1: trust the stellar creds. So it's kind of a similar
Speaker 1: situation with these two systems in the brain. This one
Speaker 1: system is getting something wrong, but the other side is
Speaker 1: totally going to go to bat for it and say, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's something wrong with this person. It's uh, it's it
Speaker 1: must be um, it's a double it's a It ends
Speaker 1: up creating a story in which this uh neural problem
Speaker 1: makes sense. Well, that's what I think is so fascinating
Speaker 1: about this is that you've got the fusiform gyris right,
Speaker 1: which is the part of your brain that recognized is
Speaker 1: the face, and so it's recognizing the mom and dad's
Speaker 1: face right in the case of David, I believe it's
Speaker 1: the subject here, Um, David's mom, Dad knows it, but
Speaker 1: that the thread to the magdala is all sorts of
Speaker 1: crazy shredded or you know what. It's not working, and
Speaker 1: so that emotional processing isn't there. So David can say, yes,
Speaker 1: that is my mother, that is my father, and yet
Speaker 1: I don't feel those feelings of love for them, and
Speaker 1: then the brain can then take that, as you say,
Speaker 1: anxiety sets in and start to weave a story around that.
Speaker 1: That is fascinating that your brain is capable of doing that,
Speaker 1: that instead of sustaining brain damage and having your entire
Speaker 1: brain dim like a light bulb. You know, everything else
Speaker 1: is functioning except for this one little part. And the
Speaker 1: brain is like, you know what, We'll just run with this,
Speaker 1: trying to make sense of this with the data that
Speaker 1: we do have. We're not going to shut down production
Speaker 1: just because something that the little fishy. We're gonna we're
Speaker 1: gonna work with and therefore, you know, David's parents, they
Speaker 1: must be imposters. That's what makes it's right, because if
Speaker 1: you don't have that feeling of love, that connection, then
Speaker 1: then that would be what your brain might perceive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this can be The interesting thing about this too,
Speaker 1: is it's not necessarily like a situation where it has
Speaker 1: to be extreme brain brain trauma like alcoholism can play
Speaker 1: a role in this. Pituitary tumors, migraines, UM, you know,
Speaker 1: against severe injuries, Alzheimer's UM, schizo, effective disorders, UM, a
Speaker 1: whole host of There can be a whole host of
Speaker 1: causes for this, and and in many cases you can
Speaker 1: effectively treat the primary cause and uh, this doppelganger or
Speaker 1: or you know, mysterious double or body snatcher a scenario
Speaker 1: will just fade away. That's right. You could, I mean,
Speaker 1: if it's a brain tumor, you could treat the brain
Speaker 1: tumor and hopefully it would would completely go away. Or
Speaker 1: you could use antidepressants if it's not a brain tumor,
Speaker 1: or in conjunction with it UM. If it's dementa, though,
Speaker 1: that's a problem because you're continually going to have some
Speaker 1: sort of deterioration going on in the brain. So in
Speaker 1: some cases with to mention actually worsens. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: and when it worsens, you can also end up with
Speaker 1: situations where an individual attacks or becomes violent towards, uh,
Speaker 1: the other individual. Yeah. And you know, I have this
Speaker 1: idea in my head and I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: some sort of um myth, but I feel like someone
Speaker 1: perceived their family member to be a robot and actually
Speaker 1: ended up decapitating the person to see to verify whether
Speaker 1: or not they had some robotics of puitry going on. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if it's one way to tell, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that's that's the extreme. So if you have a loved
Speaker 1: one asking about where you're lithium ion battery pack is
Speaker 1: seek shelter. This presentation is brought to you by Intel
Speaker 1: sponsors of tomorrow. Yeah, and indeed, if you have any
Speaker 1: suspicion that somebody has been replaced in your life by
Speaker 1: by an impostor go to the doctor first before you
Speaker 1: call the police or taking matters into your own hand,
Speaker 1: because it's uh, it is almost guarantee it's something and
Speaker 1: your logical going on and not uh uh some sort
Speaker 1: of twisted scheme to disrupt your life. Yeah, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: and we know this too because Ramachandra, the doctor treating David,
Speaker 1: he could actually test the emotional response and verify this
Speaker 1: lack of emotional response. He uses the galvanic skin response.
Speaker 1: And and of course we knew that you attach electrodes
Speaker 1: to your hand and then when you think about someone
Speaker 1: that you know, the loved one. In theory, you should
Speaker 1: start sweating, right because you're you're having some sort of
Speaker 1: emotional response. And and um, when Ramachandra tested this, there
Speaker 1: was was absolutely no response whatsoever to his parents, was
Speaker 1: absolutely flat. So he knew he had he had some
Speaker 1: verification that this was what was going on. In addition,
Speaker 1: and I thought this was really interesting. Um, David the subject,
Speaker 1: when he would speak to his parents on the phone,
Speaker 1: he didn't have the feeling that they weren't imposters. He
Speaker 1: was like, where have you been? How? So like on
Speaker 1: the phone, everything's fine, yeah, absolutely fine. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1: what Ramachan positive is that the auditory circuitry was left
Speaker 1: intact during the damage that he sustained and that it
Speaker 1: was actually fine. And he ended up verifying that as well.
Speaker 1: So it's really kind of trippy that he could get
Speaker 1: on the phone with his parents and be like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, did you know that you've been taken over
Speaker 1: by someone? Like they're in your house right now getting
Speaker 1: to be I wonder how cold like the mom couldn't
Speaker 1: call and say like, look, there's my double is going
Speaker 1: to come over and cook breakfast this morning. I know
Speaker 1: her breakfast isn't as good as the breakfast that I cook, Like,
Speaker 1: just be polite, be kind, and I'll talk to you
Speaker 1: to night on the phone. Yeah, yeah, who knows. Maybe
Speaker 1: she tried it. You know, maybe that made it worse
Speaker 1: because then he was like, Okay, now I know for
Speaker 1: sure because my mom, my real mom on the phone
Speaker 1: told that's all right. Well that's one doppelganger down. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's turn to another. Um, another interesting syndrome, and that
Speaker 1: would be the syndrome of subjective doubles. Now, this is
Speaker 1: this is not a oh, you know, you're on the
Speaker 1: train and you look over and you see somebody looks
Speaker 1: like a friend of yours. This is where you get
Speaker 1: on the train and um, maybe maybe maybe at the
Speaker 1: far end of the car you climb onto, maybe just
Speaker 1: exiting as you come on, you see yourself yeah, it's
Speaker 1: kind of terrifying, right, Yeah, this is more like the
Speaker 1: classic German doppelganger. There is someone out there that has
Speaker 1: either taken on my appearance or is trying to thick
Speaker 1: on my appearance, and clearly they're up to no good. Well,
Speaker 1: in a study that you actually shared with me, there
Speaker 1: was the case of miss A right. Yeah, she eighteen
Speaker 1: years old. She thought that her neighbor was putting on
Speaker 1: these elaborate prosthetic masks and wigs and masquerading as her,
Speaker 1: and the gang was putting them that's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: There was some sort of puppet master gang out there
Speaker 1: that was putting her up to it, and those people
Speaker 1: were spalling on her or whatnot. So there was some
Speaker 1: sort of paranoia that's woven into this as well. Um
Speaker 1: and these um, these doubles actually replicated themselves when she
Speaker 1: was admitted to a hospital and she got very upset
Speaker 1: and assisted that the doubles of her the unmasked um
Speaker 1: and again here's again instances where violence come into play. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like she was actually like leaping at the double and
Speaker 1: like trying to attack it, attack her, attack that her
Speaker 1: perceived double, and insisting that the doctors tear the mask
Speaker 1: off because she she thought that that she believed that
Speaker 1: they were quote putting on a wig and a mask
Speaker 1: and walking from room to room stealing things in order
Speaker 1: to incriminate her. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of said. And
Speaker 1: what they found is though that she suffered from epilectic seizure.
Speaker 1: So again here's another case where it's secondary. She may
Speaker 1: have had some other conditions, um that had to do
Speaker 1: with mental instability in addition to that. UM. It was
Speaker 1: a little bit unclear from that study, but what was
Speaker 1: clear is that this could definitely be some sort of
Speaker 1: indirect process going on. Yeah, it seems like if you're
Speaker 1: the type of if you've suffered through something or you
Speaker 1: just end up with the mental um uh you know
Speaker 1: architecture that it makes you think people are out to
Speaker 1: get you, or you're very suspicious of people. It seems
Speaker 1: like the stronger that is, the stronger that's going to
Speaker 1: be when you perceive a double all right, right, And
Speaker 1: she was treated with a number of things antidepressants, electric
Speaker 1: shock therapy, so you know, sad um. But what I
Speaker 1: thought was interesting about this is that we have heard
Speaker 1: about these epileptic auras before that there's this sense that
Speaker 1: someone might be there. And Susan Blackmore, we've talked about
Speaker 1: her before. She she shown up in our Abductions podcast before.
Speaker 1: And she's also the medicist's hair. She's blue, yellow, all
Speaker 1: sorts of stuff. She's a skeptic and the psycho uh
Speaker 1: analytic chick so to speak. Uh, she's great. And she
Speaker 1: actually visited a doctor Michael Persinger at one point um
Speaker 1: to undergo some manipulation on her own temporal lobes to
Speaker 1: see if she could have this sort of sense of
Speaker 1: someone else being there, this hallucination or rather this delusion
Speaker 1: replicated in herself. And Persinger used these magnets on her
Speaker 1: temporal lobes machine. Right, yeah, he's He's done a couple
Speaker 1: of different things. But the God machine is was nicknamed
Speaker 1: that because those sort of euphoric feelings of another are present,
Speaker 1: hence the God machine. But she actually had the same
Speaker 1: thing happened to her. So when he used those magnets
Speaker 1: on her temporal lobes, she felt like there was someone
Speaker 1: in the room with her. So it's really amazing that
Speaker 1: we can get it down to this point in science
Speaker 1: where we can actually duplicate the duplications so to speak. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's almost kind of like a like a
Speaker 1: really potent form of deja viku. You know. It's a
Speaker 1: except really really strong yea, and very disorienting. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and yes, it's actually kind of a tragedy,
Speaker 1: right because I mean for people who cannot alleviate it,
Speaker 1: I mean, the suicide ridge is pretty high. Um, so
Speaker 1: it's a little bit depressing. Yeah, it's you know, it's easy.
Speaker 1: It's easy to look in from the outside of pretty
Speaker 1: much any kind of mental illness or or a neurological
Speaker 1: disorder and say, oh, well that, you know, I can
Speaker 1: see the exit from that maze. But when you're actually
Speaker 1: in that mental labyrinth, it's not not so simple. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's another example of how your mind is really
Speaker 1: beautiful but can be really sick at the same time.
Speaker 1: You know. But another example of this clonal pluralization of self. Now,
Speaker 1: this one's great, This one's this is more like you
Speaker 1: you're on the train and it's not that you're seeing
Speaker 1: your double, but you are seeing yourself. That person isn't
Speaker 1: an imposter, but it's another you. It's kind of kind
Speaker 1: of like any any type of any of these films
Speaker 1: were like suddenly a person clones himself and completely illogically
Speaker 1: it's an actual double of them, or somebody travels in
Speaker 1: time and he's hanging out with themselves. It's it's that
Speaker 1: sort of scenario. It's sort of like if my twin
Speaker 1: all of a sudden showed up. Yeah, yeah, and which
Speaker 1: just happened to this eighty six year old man, right, yes,
Speaker 1: Oh no, I don't. I don't think we have a
Speaker 1: name for yeah, eighty six year old. Um. I believe
Speaker 1: he's Hungarian um mentioned in a two thousand nine study.
Speaker 1: And yeah, suddenly his uh, this doppelganger shows up, his
Speaker 1: his it's not even a twin, but it's perceived as
Speaker 1: as him, like right down of the clothes, he's wearing
Speaker 1: the same clothes as this guy. And it's it's this
Speaker 1: is a real twist on on our last scenario because
Speaker 1: because there's not like, oh my goodness, I need to
Speaker 1: bar the door because my doppelganger is shown up. I'm
Speaker 1: I have company come in and let's let's have tea,
Speaker 1: let's do crossword puzzles. And they did. They literally did
Speaker 1: crossword puzzles together, and um, and that's the interesting thing
Speaker 1: to literally it's difficult in this scenario, right, Literally, in
Speaker 1: his mind they did it together. But so for him
Speaker 1: it was a sense of comfort. Rate yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like this guy's lonely, and then who's who better to
Speaker 1: hang out with but yourself when they fell up on
Speaker 1: your door straight and uh, And he was kind of like, well,
Speaker 1: I seem to have this twin and I think we're
Speaker 1: the same person. Let's do some experiments so that the
Speaker 1: crosswords was one. Like they each supposedly took the crosswords
Speaker 1: into a different room and they filled out the crossword puzzle,
Speaker 1: and then when they came in to compare notes, they
Speaker 1: had the exact same answers. Can you imagine that? It's yeah,
Speaker 1: I can imagine it even more if they were playing
Speaker 1: scrabble against each other. Well, no, no, they wouldn't have
Speaker 1: the same title, or would they. I don't know. This
Speaker 1: is it's really hard to pre take because you're in
Speaker 1: pre ten world now, right. Um. But he did have
Speaker 1: brain lesions, right, uh. And the neurologist Dr Feinberg actually
Speaker 1: said something along the lines of the brain lesions and
Speaker 1: neuropsychological impairments are necessary, right for this condition, for this condition,
Speaker 1: but the full development of these syndromes depends upon the
Speaker 1: individual's responses to his or her defects as much as
Speaker 1: the defects themselves. So I thought was interesting because they
Speaker 1: had gone on in the study to say that clearly
Speaker 1: he was lonely and that this this twin although it's
Speaker 1: it's a figment of his imagination brought on by the legions,
Speaker 1: he still had the subjective ring to it, where it
Speaker 1: was like, you know, as long as I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: this delusion, and might as well, you know, copy myself
Speaker 1: and have a body, you know. Another experiment that he
Speaker 1: performed with the double um, according to this guy, was
Speaker 1: that one of them would stand in the house and
Speaker 1: the other would stand outside, and the one standing outside
Speaker 1: would describe what the one inside was seeing on the wall,
Speaker 1: described like the exact size and details of paintings that
Speaker 1: the guy had framed. UM, because they could see through
Speaker 1: each other's eyes, right, I mean, you know, I laugh,
Speaker 1: but it's just it's just kind of it's sort of funny. UM.
Speaker 1: And there's also another aspect to this, uh, just going
Speaker 1: off on what Feinberg said and talking about how there's
Speaker 1: the subjective quality to it. Dr Carol Berman talked about
Speaker 1: how the negative aspects of a person that are are
Speaker 1: psychologically turned into a disassociation with that person. And this
Speaker 1: is more in cap craw right, where what do you
Speaker 1: think there's an impostor? So in other words, uh, if
Speaker 1: I if I think that you're impostor, Robert, and let's
Speaker 1: say that you're you're tapping your fingers on the desk,
Speaker 1: then I might say, like, that might actually annoy me,
Speaker 1: and that might turn into another reason why I think
Speaker 1: that you're an impostor. And what is so interesting about
Speaker 1: the blog post that you have. You've got um an
Speaker 1: embed in there of the YouTube video with David, and
Speaker 1: you can see David talking to his father and saying,
Speaker 1: you know, you drive too fast, but my real dad
Speaker 1: like he's a much better driver than you. And it's
Speaker 1: like this ultimate passive aggressive act of saying, you know,
Speaker 1: could you slow down a little bit? So I mean,
Speaker 1: And of course David is not sitting there pretending to
Speaker 1: have cap gratches so that he can, you know, say
Speaker 1: this little zinger of passive aggressiveness. But it's an interesting
Speaker 1: side note to see that these negative attributes that they
Speaker 1: see in other people than sort of underscore that their
Speaker 1: feelings for that person being an impostor. Uh yeah. Now
Speaker 1: the there's an interesting end to the story of the
Speaker 1: eight six year old Hungarian man. Oh yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: and that's that they they treated him, they were treating
Speaker 1: the treated him with with various medications and his condition improved.
Speaker 1: But and so this double ends up brawlinsons and purposes vanishing.
Speaker 1: But again, the mind has to make sense of this.
Speaker 1: It has to it has to roll with these changes.
Speaker 1: I can't just vanish. So the version, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess it could if one word, say, engaging in
Speaker 1: some sort of the type of supernatural occurrence that would
Speaker 1: that where it would make sense for this person to vanish.
Speaker 1: It was like an angel or an alien. I they're
Speaker 1: like Doug Henning is my Yeah. But the way this
Speaker 1: guy interpreted was that they had merged into one person.
Speaker 1: They'd like they had come together, and he would talk
Speaker 1: to himself for a while, like like there was still
Speaker 1: like it didn't just completely vanish, it it kind of
Speaker 1: faded and and so he would continue to talk to
Speaker 1: himself a fair amount of the time. But there wasn't
Speaker 1: a necessarily a sense of a physical other, right and uh,
Speaker 1: and eventually it got back to where he could, you know,
Speaker 1: he was a lot more normal daily life. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and and again. Here here's this person who, other than
Speaker 1: this is functioning fine in the world. So good thing
Speaker 1: that he got cohesive with his personalities. Uh. There's one
Speaker 1: other one in this sort of of what you would
Speaker 1: call delusional misidentification syndromes, and that is the mirror self identification.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, this one. This one is pretty interesting too
Speaker 1: because it brings to mind the classic gag that, as
Speaker 1: far as I know, originated in the Marx Brothers film
Speaker 1: Duck Soup, where you know, and you if you haven't
Speaker 1: seen that film or this scene, then you've seen some
Speaker 1: version of it in a cartoon or a sitcom. And
Speaker 1: it's where one person is pretending to be the mirror
Speaker 1: image of the other. Uh. Maybe it's like a you
Speaker 1: have like a picture frame, but there's no actual glass
Speaker 1: or mirror, and so one person thinks, oh, that's my reflection.
Speaker 1: But the person that's dressed like them or looks like
Speaker 1: them on the other side is just shadowing their movements.
Speaker 1: And so the you know, one person, uh, the one
Speaker 1: person on one side will we'll sort of we'll move
Speaker 1: around and suddenly make a you know, some sort of
Speaker 1: um uh strange movement to try and throw off his
Speaker 1: quote reflection and uh and try and uh and and
Speaker 1: eventually in cases um reveal the false reflection for what
Speaker 1: it is. This is also mime exercise too, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they found a case where there were two dementia patients,
Speaker 1: right who who were I mean, they weren't miming or
Speaker 1: were they doing Mark's brother routines, but they could no
Speaker 1: longer recognize their faces in the mirror. Right now, they
Speaker 1: could recognize other people's faces in mirror. So it wasn't
Speaker 1: like just a weird screwy mirror thing. It was when
Speaker 1: they were looking at their own face in the mirror,
Speaker 1: they they were like, who is this guy? Is this
Speaker 1: handsome devil? I don't know? Uh. But they also suffered
Speaker 1: from right side brain lesions. And again, this is the
Speaker 1: portion of the brain, the fusiform gyus, that's associated with
Speaker 1: self recognition. Yeah, like, even if you're using self describing adjectives, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the portion that lights up. Yeah. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: And it's I mean, I guess you would say it's
Speaker 1: similar to face blindness, right, except for that you with
Speaker 1: face blindness, you are blind to everyone all the time, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: even yourself. Right, But this is this is more selective,
Speaker 1: just just like I don't I don't know who that is.
Speaker 1: That's so I guess that's me, but it doesn't look
Speaker 1: like me. Yeah. So the final specter that I thought
Speaker 1: was interesting that popped up in some of our research
Speaker 1: is something called the third Man phenomenon or the third
Speaker 1: Man factor. Oh yeah, this one, this one was really fascinating.
Speaker 1: So you've probably heard some version of this story before, um,
Speaker 1: and and that is you have some sort of extreme situation. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's you know, it's like it's it's explores
Speaker 1: in the Antarctic or the Arctic, It's it's it's climbers
Speaker 1: on Everest, it's you know, people in one of the
Speaker 1: World Trade Center towers. You're in an extreme situation. It
Speaker 1: was life and death. And suddenly there's somebody there to
Speaker 1: help you write like emotionally, your haggard, your body physically
Speaker 1: is at its end of its rope. Right, and then
Speaker 1: it's like a guardian angel, um, you know, an alien,
Speaker 1: a spirit, uh, you know, something something supernatural has appeared
Speaker 1: and and there's a sense of maybe things are gonna
Speaker 1: be all right, and and like and in some cases
Speaker 1: it's actually manifests as a a physical helping hand, like
Speaker 1: something somebody's helping you up and uh, and then they're
Speaker 1: gone after things are cool. It's like a Superheroes jumped
Speaker 1: in and saved the day. Now, you're right, And every
Speaker 1: single story, once they have surmounted their obstacle, that that
Speaker 1: person vanishes, right, and then like who was that mass man? Yeah? Um?
Speaker 1: A good example is Frank Smith three climbing Mount Everest.
Speaker 1: He went with a group of people. He was the
Speaker 1: last one to make it to the to almost make
Speaker 1: it to the summit. At this point, Um, he was
Speaker 1: feeling weak and hopeless. He didn't know if he could
Speaker 1: go on, and so he had and he's in the
Speaker 1: death zone, right, just low oxygen area. We've I think
Speaker 1: we've discussed this in the past, Like this is a
Speaker 1: good model for for some of the things that can
Speaker 1: happen in space when when you have low oxygen levels
Speaker 1: aboard a spaceship. Right, so, really mess with your mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean at this point you're not thinking clearly anyway, right, Um.
Speaker 1: But the whole time he had been discussing something with
Speaker 1: with a person that he felt was behind him the
Speaker 1: whole time. And um, and at this point where he
Speaker 1: was at his his most hopeless, he actually turned to
Speaker 1: get some food and share it with this person and
Speaker 1: was completely shocked that that person wasn't there to receive
Speaker 1: like the other half of his whatever nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 1: Cliff bar Is or whatever. Um, I interpreted like a
Speaker 1: half of a tunafig sandwich on white bread. When I
Speaker 1: read the account, dide listen to. I mean, that's the
Speaker 1: ideal food to split with, uh, you know, an imaginary devil.
Speaker 1: I think, huh, get some protein carbs and tasty manni's um.
Speaker 1: But he actually thought he this is a quote from him.
Speaker 1: He said, it seemed that I was tied to my
Speaker 1: companion by a rope and if I slipped, he would
Speaker 1: hold me. I remember constantly glancing back over my shoulder. Um.
Speaker 1: And again, it's not it's not a surprise, right that
Speaker 1: this is happening. The surprise is that it's happening so
Speaker 1: freak only in so many different instances. Yeah. Again, you
Speaker 1: see it happen, and just various accounts of it. I mean,
Speaker 1: you have other famous stories from say Sir Ernest Shackleton
Speaker 1: during his trance Antarctic expedition. There was a sense that
Speaker 1: they were being accompanied by this third man. Uh. It's
Speaker 1: it's referenced in by T. S. Eliot. Who is that
Speaker 1: third besides you? And is the group too that perceived him?
Speaker 1: It wasn't just him. They all discussed it later and
Speaker 1: thought there was another person that wasn't there. It's uh,
Speaker 1: it's inter right. I was reading an article on Scientific
Speaker 1: American that nails down some of the actual reasons for
Speaker 1: what's happening, and they're they're all pretty interesting. One is
Speaker 1: that one factor is isolation. So if you're in a
Speaker 1: case where it's like one guy out in the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere, or or even if if it's like an
Speaker 1: extreme situation and you have uh, you know, there are
Speaker 1: other people around. There's a certain isolation in death experiences,
Speaker 1: and so this high selection can trigger the mind to
Speaker 1: hallucinate the normal feelings we have when we're working or
Speaker 1: traveling with other people around. Uh, you know, it's like
Speaker 1: we're constantly surrounded their people in our in our peripheral vision,
Speaker 1: and the mind can sort of hallucinate that they're still
Speaker 1: there in some fashion. Um. The other other possibility is
Speaker 1: rational uh, cortical control over emotions shuts down due to
Speaker 1: oxygen deprivation such as you know, death zone, uh, sleep
Speaker 1: deprivation or exhaustion, which are certainly you know, if you're
Speaker 1: struggling for your life, you may not have time for
Speaker 1: a nap, especially if going to sleep and subzero temperatures
Speaker 1: would mean death. And so this opens the door for
Speaker 1: inner voices and imaginary companions uh and and this reminds
Speaker 1: me a lot of of some of the accounts that
Speaker 1: have been studied of alien abduction UM. The the individual
Speaker 1: who was on the bike ride and have been up
Speaker 1: for a long time was just pushing himself to the
Speaker 1: limits and then he falls out and interprets the events
Speaker 1: as aliens coming to abductive. Well, what's interesting about this
Speaker 1: is that in every single one of these accounts UM.
Speaker 1: You know, in some of some of the CAPCRA and
Speaker 1: the UM and the other misidentification syndromes and abductions, epileptic
Speaker 1: seizures UM and the RS and delusions that accompany them,
Speaker 1: the temporo parietal junction is the at issue, right, and
Speaker 1: so the temporal lobe is responsible for processing images in
Speaker 1: long term memory, and then the parietal lobe is what
Speaker 1: helps us map objects um as coordinates. So when you
Speaker 1: talk about seeing someone in your periphery and misunderstanding and
Speaker 1: that that's the that's the those that's the juncture that
Speaker 1: is processing all of this information. And so I mean,
Speaker 1: even if you think that there's some sort of uh
Speaker 1: truth to what maybe the person's personal account is, you
Speaker 1: have to to think about how and every single one
Speaker 1: of these cases, that's the area of the brain that's
Speaker 1: being compromised. Yeah. Another another thing to the temporal lobe
Speaker 1: handles body scamma, which we which we've mentioned on the
Speaker 1: Tool Users podcast that that's how the when you are
Speaker 1: using a tool, it becomes an extension of your own
Speaker 1: body because it's tied up in the body schemma. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: the temporal low body scamma can be tricked in some
Speaker 1: cases into seeing into interpreting a double So instead of
Speaker 1: interpreting just your body doing things, it kind of gets
Speaker 1: double vision. Yeah. And again here's your brain taking the
Speaker 1: data that it has available to it and constructing these stories. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you can imagine like this sort of double vision
Speaker 1: where instead of you opening the door to escape the
Speaker 1: burning building, it's interpreted as some other person opened that
Speaker 1: door so you could escape and and the brain rights
Speaker 1: the rest right, And it's fascinating and that life or
Speaker 1: death situation that it can spring from the font of
Speaker 1: fabulism and create this little story to get you some
Speaker 1: fire up under your bomb and get you going. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: as far as fictional doppelgangers and mysterious doubles go, do
Speaker 1: you have any particular favorites. There are a lot of them,
Speaker 1: But I really like Dr Jackel and Mr Hyde because
Speaker 1: I think that's the perfect evil twin example, that is,
Speaker 1: that's one of this one of the really iconic ones
Speaker 1: for sure. Yeah you uh yeah. The ones that I
Speaker 1: really like her, I mean, I love a story about
Speaker 1: an evil doppelganger. I'm a real sucker for those. But
Speaker 1: I also really like the ones that are kind of
Speaker 1: like the story of the eighties Yu Old Hungarian Man,
Speaker 1: where where the doppelganger is either accepted with or or
Speaker 1: just dealt with in a kind of curiosity. Um Alan
Speaker 1: robe Gerla, the uh now deceased French author, had a
Speaker 1: book called Repetition, which starts out with the narrator discussing
Speaker 1: the his double that he occasionally encounters. UH. While I
Speaker 1: think typically on the train and uh, and so that's
Speaker 1: a really interesting book. And then uh. A horror author
Speaker 1: Brian McNaughton has a story called The Vendron Worm, which
Speaker 1: deals with a guy who will occasionally glimpse this stranger,
Speaker 1: this kind of double that he uh that that he
Speaker 1: can't quite explain, but ends up being tied to something
Speaker 1: really ghastly and horrifying. But but but before he finds
Speaker 1: out the reason, he's just kind of like, oh, there's
Speaker 1: my double, you know, and you just sort of come
Speaker 1: to accept it, which I find is a really interesting
Speaker 1: take on the whole scenario. It's very European of you
Speaker 1: just to be like, you know, I'm just gonna go
Speaker 1: with it. It's kind in many of these cases, it's like,
Speaker 1: let's go with it, let's make sense of it, let's
Speaker 1: do it. Yeah. I mean, like the American mentality is
Speaker 1: a conquer it, right, give it some drugs, attack it,
Speaker 1: give it some drugs, Call the police, call your mother,
Speaker 1: want to you know, whatever it takes. So, if if
Speaker 1: you have any interesting tales of doppelgangers and mysterious doubles
Speaker 1: in your life, if the reflection in the mirror doesn't
Speaker 1: look quite right, and you don't have a good March
Speaker 1: Brothers explanation for it. Let us know. You can drop
Speaker 1: by Facebook or Twitter. We are Blow the Mind on
Speaker 1: both of those and if you or your doppelganger would
Speaker 1: like to drop us a line, please do so at
Speaker 1: Blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. For
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast,
Speaker 1: click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner
Speaker 1: of our home page. The how stuff Works iPhone app
Speaker 1: has a ride. Download it today on iTunes