The Lessons of Out-of-Body Experiences
Recently I read an article about doppelganger experiences.
A doppelganger is an experience where your body feels like it is inhabiting an inanimate object and experiencing what your real body is actually experiencing. For example, one doppelganger experience is if someone is tickling a hand, and you feel like it is your real hand. In a lab, a doctor rubbed his subject's hand while simultaneously rubbing a rubber hand. The subject could only see the rubber hand. After a few minutes, the subject felt that he was experiencing the rubbing on the rubber hand, and felt like the rubber hand was part of his body.
So what is happening here? The brain has to make sense of conflicting information: sensations of strokes on the real hand and the sight of a rubber hand being stroked. So the brain, in effect, decides that the eyes don’t lie: The rubber hand must be the source of the sensations, and so the brain proceeds to embody the inanimate hand. The eyes account for the majority of your brain's sensory section, so logically it decides that the eyes are more reliable than the hands.
This sounds like a very weird feeling and I would like to experience it sometime, the feeling of having a rubber hand in place of your physical one!
A doppelganger is an experience where your body feels like it is inhabiting an inanimate object and experiencing what your real body is actually experiencing. For example, one doppelganger experience is if someone is tickling a hand, and you feel like it is your real hand. In a lab, a doctor rubbed his subject's hand while simultaneously rubbing a rubber hand. The subject could only see the rubber hand. After a few minutes, the subject felt that he was experiencing the rubbing on the rubber hand, and felt like the rubber hand was part of his body.
So what is happening here? The brain has to make sense of conflicting information: sensations of strokes on the real hand and the sight of a rubber hand being stroked. So the brain, in effect, decides that the eyes don’t lie: The rubber hand must be the source of the sensations, and so the brain proceeds to embody the inanimate hand. The eyes account for the majority of your brain's sensory section, so logically it decides that the eyes are more reliable than the hands.
This sounds like a very weird feeling and I would like to experience it sometime, the feeling of having a rubber hand in place of your physical one!
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