We are used to thinking of our body as the receptacle of the mind and feelings. We believe that our body is always with us. Ilya Kolmanovsky was convinced from his own experience that a person can easily move into someone else's body, confuse his own hand with a rubber dummy and even lose his temper in the literal sense of the word.
The dummy had the shape of a human hand, but the fingers were not at all like mine and without a ring on the ring. A rubber brush was sticking out from under a piece of oilcloth that covered the upper half of my torso - so that my real brush, which rested on the table to the right, about thirty centimeters, was not visible.
This is my hand
I didn't notice how it happened. It's just that at some point, a piece of rubber lying on the table in front of me turned into my right hand. I am assisted by a graduate student at the Brain, Body and Self-Awareness laboratory at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm (in the same place where Nobel Prizes are awarded) named Bjorn. He is the keeper of a not weak collection of rubber brushes (one - with numb blood stains; for which - no one admits), legs and whole mannequins, laid out in a strict order in transparent Ikeev plastic containers. At first, for about a minute, he ran two brushes over my invisible fingers and over the visible fingers of the dummy, simultaneously hitting the same areas.
Then he put down his brushes and began to move with his own fingers, warm and lively; I defocused my eyes for a second, and at that moment something switched in me, as happens with a strong yawn after lunch, after which it suddenly turns out that the second half of the day has begun - suddenly the rubber hand became mine. There were no longer two objects on the table, the two right hands were aligned in my head. At some point, Bjorn pressed a little harder, and it clearly seemed to me that the “skin” on the dummy pressed in - although this was impossible, the dummy is completely hard. Finally, he pulled out a kitchen knife and aimed the point between the two bones of the rubber metacarpus.
I screamed. Then a tall, plump, very young-looking blond, with a rosy-cheeked baby face framed by long straight hair - Professor Henrik Ershon entered the hall with an imperious gait. The whole neurobiological world knows him; and the popular press does not miss the opportunity to tell about incredible illusions from his laboratory - however, more and more as a curiosity. I understand that these experiments actually reveal one after another the secrets of our brain. I want to shake his hand, which he has been holding out for a long time and with some irritation, but I cannot: it seems to me that my right hand is paralyzed, because I look at the rubber hand, and it does not move. Shaking off the darkness, I jump out of my chair and follow the professor into his office - to ask him how he started to engage in illusions.
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When psychologists first came up with the rubber brush trick in 1998, no one knew why it actually worked. Ershon put the volunteers in a tomograph and found out: there is a specific area of the brain that is responsible for the feeling of belonging to a part of the body. Until the illusion occurs, the zones that receive tactile and visual information work. At this moment they are not connected in any way: somewhere under the oilcloth they touch a hand, and on the table in front of us we see a rubber brush and a brush stroking it. Suddenly - although the sensory stimulation remained the same - the volunteers report the onset of the illusion, and the tomograph records that a special zone in the parietal cortex has begun to work. She, as it turned out, is responsible for integrating information from different senses in order to create a body image. The brain made a decision: this is my hand.
Ershon recalls: “I was amazed at how easy it is to fool the brain; at the same time, I was mesmerized by illusions, I wanted to experience these surreal sensations again and again. Gradually, it became clear to me: bodily self-awareness is not a given, not some material phenomenon, but the result of sensation (more precisely, experience, experience) that the brain creates by projecting an image onto the physical body; it is this sensation (or this experience) that makes a piece of meat alive - and then you can understand that this part of space is you."
The most emotional part of the experiment with the rubber hand, its participants admit, is the moment when the laboratory assistant takes out a large knife and aims it between the fingers of the rubber hand, which the subjects have already managed to take for their
Ershon continued his experiments on deceiving the brain - and soon learned to make the volunteers feel that their body shape was changing. This is done like this: the hands are on the waist, and special vibrators are attached to the areas of the skin on the wrists where the tendons pass. Their action creates the illusion that a particular muscle is contracting: sensors hidden in our tendons are triggered, which constantly inform us about the degree of contraction of a particular muscle - and thereby about the posture. By manipulating vibrators, scientists created in people the feeling that their hands, which were continuously resting on the waist (they were informed of this by touch), were getting closer, which means that the waist was getting smaller. Psychiatrists are interested in this work: victims of anorexia, who think they are fat, have a clearly disturbed body image - and it can be corrected by creating a feeling of a shrinking waist.
So, the body is just such an area of space where several senses are simultaneously triggered. By influencing the senses, we can program the brain so that it attributed the same properties to another area of space (for example, a rubber hand), and then this area for our brain “becomes” a part of the body. Realizing this, Ershon began to invent illusions one after another. Some of them quickly developed into medical applications.
In collaboration with surgeons, Ershon reprograms the brains of amputees, creating the illusion of complete belonging of the prosthesis. To make it clearer for me what this is about, a postdoc of the laboratory, a lean yogini named Laura, moves me into a mannequin that does not have one brush. It's simple: I'm standing in front of a mannequin with virtual reality glasses on my head; they feed pictures from two cameras that hang on the head of the dummy and look down. They also ask me to tilt my head - and instead of myself I see the body of a mannequin.
Laura with several strokes (visible - on the mannequin's chest, abdomen and healthy arm; invisible, but synchronized - on the same places in my body) creates in me the illusion of being transformed into an amputee. I turn to stone, my body does not obey - and when Laura's touches reach the mannequin's crippled forearm, I realize that I have no hand. Then Laura demonstrates the "invisible hand" illusion: she begins to stroke my hand and the empty space near the mannequin's stump; then I understand that in fact I have a brush, it just is not visible. To move on, Laura asks me to close my eyes: "I need to recalibrate your brain, minute."
When I open my eyes, it turns out that the illusion has disappeared (this is "recalibration") and I need to be reinstalled in the mannequin. When the resettlement took place, Laura creates a new illusion: she starts stroking the mannequin's stump and the tips of my real fingers at the same time. The feeling is eerie, as if my stump, devoid of a brush, has a strange sensitivity - it is divided into five zones corresponding to the fingers: a little to the left of the big one, next to the index, and so on.
The illusion that the fingers are "pulled" into the stump, so that their pads are the surface of the stump, is constantly present in eighty-five percent of amputees. Surgeons, on the advice of Ershon, do this: they simultaneously stroke the zones of the real stump (hidden from the eye) and the visible fingers of the prosthesis, thereby causing a feeling of its belonging. “This is important, because usually a prosthesis is just an instrument, which means that its actions are not as accurate as that of one's own hand. By creating the illusion, we allow the brain to use the natural motor programs to move the real hand - not the learned skills to control the prosthesis,”explains Ershon.
The illusions associated with individual parts of the body are impressive - but those that affect the whole body are much stronger. In Ershon's laboratory, they managed to completely remove me from my body in half an hour and force me to look at myself from the outside, to be in an invisible body, as well as in the body of a doll eighty centimeters tall, which made all the objects in the room around me seemed gigantic. The Alice in Wonderland illusion isn't just a circus trick: it resolves an age-old debate about how we view the world. It turns out, not only with the eyes.
Through the eyes of a doll
I took off my sneakers and lay down on the gray fabric sofa; I looked with satisfaction at my designer striped socks - and immediately stopped seeing them: graduate student Bjorn put glasses for virtual reality on my head. Nearby on the same gray sofa lay a doll eighty centimeters long; there were two video cameras at the level of her head, looking at her legs. The glasses turned on, and instead of my body, I began to see what a doll would see if I raised my head slightly and pressed my chin into my chest: slender legs in jeans (which Bjorn bought in a baby clothes store) and white socks. The body was very small. A little further off, I saw the furnishings of the experiment room: a chair, a table, a blue theatrical drapery hanging around the perimeter of the wall.
Bjorn picked up two long slats with striped colored balls at the ends, stood out of sight and began to synchronously drive them along my, invisible to me, lower leg - and along the visible lower leg of the doll; a minute later he switched to feet and toes. A bright ball attracted my attention, I looked at it. Nothing happened. Bored, I began to inspect the room - the ball was looming at the periphery of the field of view; and at that moment the little body in white socks became mine; more precisely, not "mine", but simply me. “When the ball is at the periphery of the visual field, it is easier for your brain to“forgive”some of the out of sync with my movements; I have been working in this laboratory not so long ago and have not gotten very good at it yet,”Bjorn explained to me.
But the most amazing transformation did not take place with me, but with the chairs, which were clearly visible in my miracle glasses in the background: they became sharply larger, like the table in "Alice in Wonderland". Bjorn placed a red cube on a string in my (more precisely, a puppet's) field of vision and asked me to show with my hands what size it was: it turned out that I enlarged it by one and a half times - the cube was forty centimeters wide, and I spread my arms sixty.
Feeling himself in the body of a doll, the participant of the experiment begins to perceive the world through her eyes, or rather, from the height of her growth. And the world grows noticeably in size
This moment turns Bjorn and me playing with puppets from a circus trick into solving an important scientific riddle: from the point of view of classical science, if my body has become smaller, but nothing happened to my eyes, the perception of the size of objects around me should not change, because the eye is just such an optical camera with a lens, and the physics of the rays that the eye registers has not changed in any way. In recent decades, the science of perception has emerged a flow of embodied cognition ("bodily thinking"), the forerunner of which, American psychologist James Gibson, wrote in 1979: "The world is perceived not by the eye, but by a system of eyes, body and brain."
In 2011, Professor Henrik Ershon, in an experiment with dolls, was the first to prove Gibson was right: the body is a measuring device that we carry with us everywhere to comprehend reality, just as Cezanne wore a black hat and white scarf in order to have absolute criteria for blackness and whiteness. And it's not limited to assessing the size of the surrounding objects; in recent years, works have appeared that say: we generally comprehend the world, in its most diverse manifestations, largely with the help of the body.
For example, if you hold a pencil parallel to your lip under your nose, nothing happens; and if between the lips, then the comic that we read will seem funnier - that is, the muscles stretched out in a smile serve as a measure of the comic for the brain. If we paralyze facial muscles with Botox, our ability to read the emotions of other people at a high speed drops sharply: these muscles make micromovements, imitating the movements of the interlocutor, and the brain makes its measurements on them, figuring out how, for example, someone else's sadness is sincere.
Thinking is so tied to the body that touching "props" are found, ways to help thinking: dreaming about the future, we help ourselves by leaning forward a little (and if, as another study showed, getting on the train facing forward, many thoughts will come to mind about the future - and vice versa, sitting with his back in the direction of movement, a person will sooner think about the past). If the volunteers are given a glass with a warm drink and are shown on the screen photographs of people they know, the participants in the experiment perceive them as closer than when they are holding a cold drink in their hands. As if there was literally a warmer relationship between them.
For ultra-precise and fast measurements, the brain uses not only the body, but also the space around the hands - where our ancestors developed tool activity. Ershon found special neurons all in the same parietal cortex, which are engaged in calculating only the information received around the hands: they allow him to make a decision - for example, to pull the hand back in danger - faster than ordinary visual neurons.
Perhaps this means that when driving, you should always keep your hands on the steering wheel and raise the steering wheel higher: the field of vision around the hands will receive special brain resources for ultra-fast decisions. And someone will make a conclusion for themselves about what temperature should be set in the meeting room if you want to arrange or reject the interlocutor. It is more important that these particular features of our “bodily thinking” will soon determine the design of computers and cars: since for accurate and quick decisions we need to use the connection between the mind and the body, we need to change something in the design of all the devices we use.
Full body avatars
Ershon writes in several of his works that it will be useful if surgeons can incarnate into microrobots during operations, and marine engineers - into giant humanoid robots walking along the bottom: their decisions will be intuitive and swift, because they will rely on the innate motor programs of the brain …
Body thinking should help us simplify relationships with various devices and cope with technological progress that is changing the world faster than we can adjust to it. Since man uses his body to perceive the world, his primitive tools, such as a knife or hammer, work as an extension of limbs. This is easy, because since the perception is so tied to the body, it is not difficult to control such objects. Civilization, on the other hand, requires us to continuously manage a large number of devices, none of which looks like an extension of a limb. This is hard labor for the nervous system!
The worst thing is the computer; we sit for hours, buried in a flat monitor - where is the place for the body? Computer interface theorist Paul Durish writes: “We don't say 'light switch skills', but we say 'computer skills'. We need to make a computer interface that would make our virtual life closer to the physical one”. More precisely, even closer; the fact is that the only reason why we can somehow manage computers is a number of inventions thirty-five years ago, which took the first important steps in this direction; but since then the matter has practically stood still, and only today - with the advent of touchscreens - something starts to change.
“In the seventies, Xerox brought together a group of psychologists, inventors and philosophers to come up with interface elements that would make virtual reality more accessible to our brains. The main achievement was the metaphor, namely the metaphor of the surface of the desktop, on which folders with documents are located, as on an ordinary desk,”- the virtual reality theorist Mel Slater from the University of Barcelona told me.
“The computer mouse was the same breakthrough because it creates the illusion that we are moving our hand in real space and dragging objects there,” Henrik Ershon echoes. It is clear that any invention that will allow us to feel ourselves inside virtual reality, to be transported there and start using innate motor algorithms, will remove the heavy burden from perception, which for the time being is forced to do without the usual help of the body. The existing interfaces for video games with special glasses do not actually give anything: they do not create the illusion of moving into virtual reality, because they do not use the sense of touch, as Ershon does in his experiments. How to solve this problem? How do I get my brain to believe that the avatar is really my body?
In 2008 Ershon and Slater did a joint work: they managed to create the illusion of a “rubber hand” in the virtual space. They became interested in making fun of the artificial limb, because it can be modified as you want. It turned out that it is possible to extend the virtual arm telescopically, but not too far from the body; and such a hand must not be bent at unnatural angles - this destroys the illusion. The next step is to create full-fledged, more precisely, full-body avatars, living in which we will act in virtual reality.
“And if we make humanoid cars and incarnate in them, will we become more careful on the road and make better decisions?” - I asked Ershon. And he got into the top ten: “I think yes - we will become more careful and more accurate. In cases where we need to react quickly and intuitively, there is a limit to what we can do while driving a complex machine. If we are acting within the illusion of reincarnation, we simply use our motor skills and react - this should make our ride safer."
Already on the plane, on the way from Stockholm to Moscow, while my thoughts wandered from one application to another, I caught myself feeling: I seem to be missing something important. Something that has changed globally in my self-perception from all these experiences with transmigration to other bodies. If the body is so loosely bolted to my personality, then what does this personality look like? Who am I? And one more thing: who are all these people - wife, children - whom I love so much? After all, my wallet contains photos of their bodies … One of the readers of my blog wrote that just reading about these experiments "blows away" and she "wants to shoot herself"; "The realization of all this is a deadly, hopeless longing." Why? “Because let's take, for example, the issue of attachment: here we get attached to a person - it doesn't matter, mom, child, beloved, - and we remember the sensations, smell, all this aura,including the physical body, this is generally the only understandable connection with reality, for everything else is dust. And if this is dust, then it is generally not clear where the fulcrum is …"
To answer this question, you must completely leave your body.
Where is the body and where am I?
A 17th-century scientist would answer this question simply, as the philosopher Rene Descartes answered: body and mind are two separate entities. They influence each other (for example, when the spirit is unable to resist the requirements of the mortal flesh and requires food or sex), but they have nothing in common and can exist without each other. Perhaps Descartes would have accepted Ershon's experiments as a way to finally get rid of what my reader longingly called "dust" and to live spiritually.
The result of the 19th century was an objection to Descartes; Zarathustra in Nietzsche said: “The awakened one who knows, says: I am the body, only the body, and nothing else; and the soul is only a word for something in the body […] Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a more powerful ruler, an unknown sage - he is called Himself. He lives in your body; he is your body."
This judgment was intuitive, and only in the 21st century did scientists come to understand the reasons for such a structure of our psyche and even to the possibility of manipulating these mechanisms.
I called Cambridge psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, who's a big fan of Ershon's experiments, by the way, to discuss with him how body and soul are connected (he is the grandson and son of Nobel laureates and the author of nine books on self-awareness). He sees it this way. A two-year-old child stretches his hands, rejoices, makes plans and implements them, but in his head there is no “I”, but only a set of separate aspirations and emotions. What unites them into "I" over the years? Humphrey gives an example with an orchestra before a concert: musicians tune instruments, make sounds, cough, but do not form any unity. Descartes would say: “And then the conductor comes …” - but in fact, there is no conductor in the brain, and in a real orchestra it is not a man with a baton that is more important, but a joint project to create a work of art, they play music together and at this moment become one …
And in the same way, says Humphrey, different parts of consciousness are combined to create a single work of art - the existence of this physical body in the world. Without a body, they simply would have nothing to do together. And therefore, the body remains the bulwark of self-identification throughout its life. Here Humphrey mentioned an experiment that Ershon invented, the most radical in terms of self-awareness, albeit surprisingly simple. So much so that I directed it myself three days before our conversation, when I was in the Swedish laboratory.
I asked the graduate student Bjorn to put the twin cameras on a tripod a meter behind my back; put on video glasses and saw himself from the back. Bjorn began stroking and tapping my breasts - and at the same time fumbling and poking with his other hand into the area under the video camera so that glasses would give me a believable picture of an approaching hand at the level of my chest. This is the simplest illusion: I immediately feel that I am standing a meter behind the back of this well-known and very nice individual to me, but he is not me.
When Ershon came up with his experiment in 2007, the scientific world was in a rush. "We used to think that leaving our own body is a topic from the yellow press, science fiction and psychedelics, but the day has come when a scientific method has been found and we can begin to figure out how it works," the psychologist wrote in a commentary in the journal Science Greg Miller.
To leave the body really means to leave the limits of your psychic “I”; hence the excitement that these experiments cause, and hence the irresistible temptation to try some kind of manipulation of the psyche, as, for example, in the most recent, not yet published experiments of Ershon. First-year students taught a chapter from a neuroscience textbook in the lab. An actor disguised as a professor came, tested them and then screamed at them. A few days later, the students were asked to recall this story and at the same time assessed the degree of mental trauma they received.
The students were divided into two groups: one experienced this unpleasant episode in her body, the other in video glasses, under the influence of the illusion of “leaving the body”. In addition, during recollection, each group was divided into two more: some were asked to remember in the first person, and others - looking at themselves from the side. As a result, the centers of emotional stress worked much weaker for those who were beaten on the "empty skin", and even talked about themselves in the third person. What if in this way we protect people from severe stress, the occurrence of which is known in advance?
Humphrey warned me not to be too optimistic - he considers it dangerous to try to treat personality problems with a change of body: excesses are possible if you unsuccessfully return to your homeland. It turns out that running out of the body means running away from yourself, and this is unsafe. The Swedes juggle with parts of bodies and whole bodies, but, contrary to the opinion of my reader, "I" is not an illusion or dust. Self-awareness grows out of the body like a mycelium from a stump; and it is this fragile symbiosis that makes our life so unique and fulfilling. And the fact that we are learning to freely manage this bundle creates, perhaps, some risks, but also opens up many prospects that only science fiction writers previously thought about.
Ilya Kolmanovsky