1026
hours. My grandfather, Clell Tullar Orndorff, would be 120 years old today.
Happy Birthday, Pope! You are forever in my heart as one of the kindest most
generous people I have ever known. I love you. Your grandson, Dickie.
Right off the top of your head, boy. The words must have been sitting there waiting for expression. – Amorella
1033
hours. I am surprised, but I am happy the words are out. I guess they needed to
be expressed.
Carol is at the community center. Time for
exercises. - Amorella
After the forty-five minutes of exercises you
and Carol had a late lunch at Cracker Barrel, then home where you unexpectedly
took a longer nap than usual. – Amorella
1645
hours. Last night I woke up somewhat awake at two so I went down and watched the
last two episodes of “Extant”. I didn’t get back up to sleep until about four-thirty
then I slept to almost nine, which was not enough. They have jacked up the action
and the characters but I am not sure it is enough to save the show. Maybe they are
trying too hard. I’m still watching though. It is interesting to see what they
will have to do to get the show renewed. You can only do so much with science
fiction, over the years it has been overdone or mix and match with a variety of
other science fiction. It is easier to enjoy a good BBC mystery series. What a
rat race TV series and films must be. Not my lifestyle for a minute. To each
their own.
1754 hours. Sitting downstairs checking BBC and found this
really interesting article.
** **
BBC - Future, “The disturbing consequences of seeing
your doppelganger”
By Anil
Ananthaswamy,
31 August 2015
- One morning, a
man discovered his double staring him in the eyes. Anil Ananthaswamy explores a
dangerous hallucination that reveals how the brain constructs our sense of
self. –
More than two decades ago, Peter Brugger, as a PhD student in
neuropsychology at the University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland, was
developing a reputation as someone interested in scientific explanations of
so-called paranormal experiences. A fellow neurologist, who had been treating a
21-year-old man for seizures, sent him to Brugger. The young man, who worked as
a waiter and lived in the canton of Zurich, had very nearly killed himself one
day, when he found himself face-to-face with his doppelganger.
The incident seemed to have been started when the young man had
stopped taking some of his anticonvulsant medication. One morning, instead of
going to work, he drank copious amounts of beer and stayed in bed. But it
turned out to be a harrowing lie-in.
He felt dizzy, stood up, turned around, and saw himself still
lying in bed. He was aware that the person in bed was him, and was not willing
to get up and would thus make himself late for work. Furious at the prone self,
the man shouted at it, shook it, and even jumped on it, all to no avail. To
complicate things further, his awareness of being in a body would shift from
one body to the other. When he inhabited the supine body in bed, he’d see his
duplicate bending over and shaking him.
Soon, fear and
confusion took hold: Who was he? Was he the man standing up or the man lying in
bed? Unable to stand seeing his double any longer, he jumped out of the window.
When I visited
Brugger in the autumn of 2011, he showed me a photograph of the building from
which the man had jumped. The patient had been extremely lucky. He had leapt
from a window on the fourth floor and landed on a large hazel bush, which had
broken his fall. But he had not really wanted to commit suicide, said Brugger.
He had jumped to “find a match between body and self”. After getting treatment
for his fall-related injuries, the young man underwent surgery to remove a
tumour in his left temporal lobe, and both the seizures and the bizarre
experiences stopped.
Such hallucinations are classified as autoscopic phenomena (from
“autoscopy”; in Greek, autos means “self” and skopeo means
“looking at”). The simplest form of an autoscopic phenomenon involves feeling
the presence of someone next to you without actually seeing a “double” –
a sensed presence. The doppelganger effect takes this phenomenon a step
further, so that a person may hallucinate that they are actually seeing and
interacting with another “me” – a visual double. But probably the most
widely experienced and best-known form of autoscopic phenomena is the
out-of-body experience (OBE). During a classic full-blown OBE, people report
leaving their physical body and seeing it from an outside perspective, say from
the ceiling looking down at the body lying in bed.
Despite their vividness, they are all hallucinations caused by
malfunctions in brain mechanisms that root us in the here and now. The strange
experiences are probably our best window on some very basic aspects of our
sense of bodily self – explaining how the brain builds our perception of being
present in the here and now, and the subjective, emotional feelings that
dominate our consciousness.
Electrifying experience
Some clues come from the work of Olaf Blanke, a neurologist a
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. In 2002, Blanke managed to
induce repeated out-of-body experiences in a 43-year-old woman. He had been
treating her for drug-resistant temporal-lobe epilepsy. Brain scans did not
show any lesions, so Blanke resorted to surgery to figure out the focus of her
epilepsy.
His team inserted
electrodes inside the cranium to record electrical activity from the cortical
surface directly, rather than from outside the skull as you would if you were
using standard EEG. During this procedure, the woman volunteered to have her
brain stimulated using the implanted electrodes. This technique allows surgeons
to double-check that they’ve really found the cause of the seizure, while also
ensuring that they don’t excise some key brain region. And not just that. The
procedure, pioneered by Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, is often the
best way to find out the function of different brain regions, and much of what we
have learned about the brain has come from courageous patients who have let
themselves be stimulated while conscious.
It was during such
a procedure that Blanke found that he could cause the woman to report some
rather weird sensations, by stimulating a single electrode, placed on the right
angular gyrus, a small region towards the back of the skull.
When the stimulating current was low, she reported “sinking into
the bed” or “falling from a height”; when Blanke’s team increased the amperage,
she had an out-of-body experience: “I see myself lying in bed, from above,” she
said. The angular gyrus lies near the vestibular cortex (which receives inputs
from the vestibular system that’s responsible for our posture and sense of
balance). Blanke concluded that the electrical stimulation was somehow
disrupting the integration of various sensations such as touch with vestibular
signals, leading to the woman’s OBE.
The next step was to try to produce OBEs in healthy
participants. In 2005, philosopher Thomas Metzinger proposed an experiment and
teamed up with Blanke and Blanke’s then student Bigna Lenggenhager, and
designed an elegant experiment. A camera filmed a subject from behind, and the
images were sent to a 3D head-mounted display that the subject was wearing. The
subject could see only what was being shown in the display, which was the back
of his or her own body, seen in 3D and about seven feet in front.
The experimenter
would then stroke the person’s back with a stick. The subjects would feel the
stroking on their backs, but would also see themselves being stroked in the
head-mounted display. The stroking was either synchronous or asynchronous (to
make it asynchronous, the video feed was delayed a smidgen, so the subject felt
the touch first but saw the virtual body being stroked an instant later). In
the synchronous condition, once the illusion set in, some subjects (but not
all) reported feeling the touch in the location of the virtual body about seven
feet in front of them and that the virtual body felt like their own. They had
experienced ownership of an illusory body – an aspect of the doppelganger
experience.
A few years later,
Blanke’s team upped the ante. They rigged a setup that allowed them to conduct
the same experiment inside a scanner. The subject was lying down, and a robotic
arm stroked the subject’s back. Meanwhile, the subject viewed through a head-mounted
display a video of a person being stroked on the back. The robotic arm’s
stroking was either synchronous or asynchronous with stroking of the virtual
person seen on the display. Again, in some subjects, their sense of location
and sense of body ownership were shaken up. One of the most striking outcomes
was when a subject reported looking at their own body from above, even though
the subject was lying prone, face-up, in the scanner.
“That was for us really exciting, because it gets really close
to the classical out-of-body experience of looking down at your own body,” said
Lenggenhager, who is now working in Peter Brugger’s group at the University
Hospital Zurich.
The subjects were scanned during their experiences, and the
scans revealed that their sense of being out-of-body was correlated with
activity in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), a site that integrates touch,
vision, proprioception, and vestibular signals. Here was some objective
evidence that the TPJ is involved in the sense of self-location – where you
perceive yourself to be.
That’s significant:
it is part of a network of regions (including the angular gyrus) that integrate
various sensations to create a sense of the bodily self. Together, they combine
the different external sensations with sensations that tell the brain about the
orientation of the body and the location of body parts, and signals from inside
the body, such as the viscera (which contain information about the beating
heart, blood pressure, and the state of the gut, for example). In other words,
it provided further evidence that it is the process of combining all these
signals that together give us the feeling of inhabiting our bodies.
Could a similar process explain some particularly strong
versions of the doppelganger effect experienced by some people? These powerful
experiences often feel mystical – but the process may tell us a lot about the
body, emotions and the subjective feeling of a bodily self. Chris may offer the
most startling account. His brother, David, had died of AIDS a few months
previous to this strange episode. It was early in the morning. Chris got off
the bed, stood up, and walked toward the end of the bed, where there was a
dresser. He stretched and turned around and got the fright of his life.
“The shock was electric,” Chris recalled. “Because I was still
lying in the bed sleeping, and it was very clearly me lying there sleeping, my
first thought was that I had died. I’m dead and this is the first step. I was
just gasping. My head was spinning, trying to get a grip on things.”
And then the phone rang. “I don’t know why, but I picked up the
phone and said, ‘Hello.’ It was David. I immediately recognised his voice. I was
overwhelmed, but at the same time I had this incredible sensation of joy.” But
David didn’t stay on the line for long. “He told me that he didn’t have much
time and he just wanted me to know that he was all right, and to tell the rest
of the family, then he hung up,” Chris said. “And then there was this enormous
sucking sensation,” said Chris, making a long, drawn-out slurping sound. “I
felt like I was dragged, almost thrown, back into the bed, smack into myself.”
He woke up screaming. His wife, Sonia, who was asleep next to him, woke up to
find a hysterical Chris.
“I was totally
freaked out, I was shaking all over, I was sweating, my heart was beating like
a racehorse’s,” said Chris. Chris grew up in a scientific household. His
upbringing was at odds with this experience. “My heart tells me that David was
letting me know that he was OK. I really believed at the time that he was
somehow communicating with me from beyond death,” Chris said. “But my
intellectual side says that’s just silly. But it’s so hard to rationalise; the
experience was so real.”
What Chris experienced was a particularly intense doppelganger
effect, also known in neuroscientific jargon as heautoscopy. It is different
from other out-of-body experience in many ways. For instance, during
heautoscopy, you perceive an illusory body, and your centre of awareness can
shift from within the physical body to the illusory body and back
– there’s self-location and self-identification with a volume in space,
whether that volume is centred on the physical body or the illusory body. The
other key components of heautoscopy are the presence of intense emotions and
the involvement of the sensory-motor system.
“Usually, the double is moving and there is interaction, there
is sharing of emotions, of thoughts, and that’s what’s giving the impression of
a doppelganger,” said neurologist Lukas Heydrich, who was at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Lausanne when I met him.
Using data from brain scans, Heydrich and Blanke have found that
patients who have reported heautoscopic hallucinations typically show damage to
the left posterior insula and adjacent cortical areas. Given that heautoscopic
hallucinations involve emotions, it’s revealing that the insular cortex is
implicated. The insula is the hub that integrates visual, auditory, sensory,
motor, proprioceptive, and vestibular signals with signals from the viscera.
It’s the brain region where the body’s states seem to be represented and the
representations are eventually manifested as subjective feelings, giving rise
to the perception of a bodily self.
When abnormalities arise in the integration, it’s as if there
are now two representations of the body instead of one, and somehow the brain
has to choose the representation in which to anchor the self, or rather choose
which representation to imbue with self-location, self-identification, and
first-person perspective.
The “minimal self”
Based on all these findings, Metzinger and Blanke think they are
ready to examine the more philosophical aspects of our beings – such as what is
needed to create a sense of embodiment (the “minimal phenomenal self”). One
surprising conclusion is that the sense of agency is not key to this state,
since you can create a sense of being a body in some other location by merely
passively stroking someone’s back and messing with their visual input. “From a
philosopher’s point of view, it is important to find out what is necessary and
what is sufficient for self-consciousness,” Metzinger told me. “We have shown
that something that most people think is necessary is not necessary, namely
agency.”
Rather, Metzinger argues that this feeling of being embodied
comes before everything else. The next step in the process is when this
primitive selfhood, turns into selfhood as subjectivity. “If you not only feel
that you are in that body, but if you can control your attention, and attend to
the body, that’s a stronger form of selfhood,” said Metzinger. “Then you are
something that has a perspective, something that is directed at the world, and
something that can be directed at itself. That is more than mere embodiment.”
One idea is that
minimal phenomenal self may also act as a thread through our autobiographical
memories, helping us to build a narrative through our own life story; some
experiments have shown that, despite the intense sensations, out-of-body
experience weakens your memories – perhaps because they aren’t so tightly
anchored to the bodily self.
If we are now beginning to understand the neural underpinnings
of the self, many questions remain. Why did it evolve in the first place, for
instance? Most likely as an adaptation that let the organism orient itself and
function better in its environment. If the brain evolved to help the body avoid
surprises and remain in homeostatic equilibrium and to effectively move around
in its environment, then representing the body in the brain was a necessary
step to fine-tune these abilities. Eventually, this representation became
conscious, further enabling the organism to be aware of the body’s strengths
and weaknesses, which must have given it a survival advantage. But in this
case, rather than physical attributes, it was the self that was being honed in
evolutionary time.
Regardless of how complex our self feels to us – with its
conceptual and autobiographical aspects – autoscopic phenomena are showing us
that it all begins with the body. As Metzinger writes in his book The Ego
Tunnel, “‘Owning’ your body, its sensations, and its various parts is
fundamental to the feeling of being someone.” It’s no wonder that
Brugger’s young patient took the drastic step of jumping out of the fourth
floor to reconcile body and self – he was desperate to become himself again, of
one body and mind.
This article is
based on a chapter of Anil Ananthaswamy’s book, The Man Who Wasn’t There.
Selected and edited from -- http://www.bbcDOTcom/future/story/20150821-the-dangerous-consequences-of-seeing-your-doppelganger
** **
Evening.
You had fish crackers (left over from the boys) and a banana with Kroger
crunchy peanut butter spread topside for a late supper. You watched NBC News
and the second half of Death Comes to Pemberley on PBS Mystery- Amorella
The article above brings forth even more
doubts about what you have heard and seen in your head having a common reality
to it. You too have had a few out of body experiences in your life, the first
when you were a teenager painting Uncle Ernie and Aunt Patsy’s deck during part
of a summer for extra money. You were painting the side of the deck and
suddenly watched yourself painting the side of the deck from an angle forward
from about three feet from the deck when you were obviously right next to the
deck. – Amorella
2134
hours. I don’t believe I ever told anyone about it but a couple of them were
like being in a lucid dream only I was awake – I was in two places at once or
so it seemed. As the article states some of this experience appears as mystical
but it is not. Functions in the body are the cause even though it seems a real
enough experience at the time. My doubts are based on the science that we have
observed about how the human brain can function. G---D and even Angels may
exist. I have my doubts on this too, but it is better to keep an open mind to
what we don’t know.
Your point of view has validity, orndorff.
Tomorrow we will work to complete Grandma Ten. Post. – Amorella
2142
hours. I have been going over the rest of this segment. I think it will be
manageable, but the whole of the chapter has to make sense too. Fictional Grandma
pulls these stories from the fictional Dead. Some of the stories I can better
see a purpose to – a lesson in life of sorts. Others I am not so sure. As long
as they are interesting to me at the conclusion of the Grandma segment I’ll
keep them in. I do not claim to know the whys and
wherefores of my unconscious mind at mix with my conscious one. I don't really care all that much where it comes from in my head.
