The rubber hand trick
On body perception and the brain:
This phenomenon doesn’t surprise me in the least. After my arm surgery, when my right elbow was frozen for a long time, I lost some of the sense that the arm belonged to me. It felt alien, in addition to almost useless (if you can’t move your elbow, even if your hand works okay you can’t get it to reach most places where it would be useful, such as to wash your face or button your shirt or comb your hair).
I even had dreams that my real arm had been amputated, and that the surgeons had attached a fake arm where the original had been. They had sewn it on with jagged Frankenstein-like stitches, just to make things even worse.
Fortunately, I finally found an occupational therapist who helped me regain the use of the arm—after several therapists had struck out in that department—and all was well. But I never forgot the strange perceptual dislocation, the sense of being a badly-assembled puppet, that the immediate post-surgical months engendered in me (neurologist Oliver Sacks describes a similar experience of his in his book A Leg to Stand On).
And see this fascinating information about a possible treatment for phantom pain,
which uses a technique very similar to the one in the video.
the problem they have is that the docs dont understand signalling systems
in a nerve system, how can the body tell if a nerve is not signalling from a dead line?
they imagine things akin to systems they are familiar with
but they are only familiar with them on the surface, not really familiar with how they really work, just how they work as they percieve it.
so they think that 100 bytes is stored in 100bytes
they dont know about error correction bits, and such that are on the chips to make them appear stable within the time frame of use…
but the stability is only an illusion of time and perception
our biological system cant measure like a ruler..
so how does it measure?
measures by subtraction…
stare at something for a while..
then stare at the wall…
you see a negative image
if you close your eyes you also see patterns
these are a clue
now… pain is a signal that has to come from a source, and the system has to know its there.
unlike human systems were we find it acceptable to not konw and go nutty, biology cant do that…
so what DOES it do?
easy…
your in pain right now!!!!
but at the same time, it also puts out a pain killer
ie.. it maintains a signal barely above the noise floor
so where does phantom pain come from?
its the body searching for a signal on a null line
and its also waiting for feedback
when that doesnt happen, the pain increases
so why does it stop when the mirror trick is used
feedback is feedback and your brain is not made to filter that which it has no experience..
the feedback is passing through the brain, the brain is attributing the signal correctino from the good arm to the bad arm. and so providing a feedback that says to lower the signal we have one…
search for signal by making the signal louder
but if the feedback cant hear the signal, then it keeps turning it up louder. pain itself is not the signal pain is the interpretation/perception of the results of the signal system.
by the way
go search the literature.
they have no such stuff or even an idea that way
they confuse signal, perception and so on
ie…you rub the place that hurts even if the hurt comes from a pinched nerve in the back.. becase we project the pain to the location, not perceive i where it really is, in a interpreted signal…
ah well.
Well this is definitely the weirdest post I’ve read today (so far)!
I’m just trying to figure out if there is any way I can use this illusion in my line of work. I’ll get back to you if I think of anything. Suggestions, as always, are welcome.
“…such as to wash your face or button your shirt or comb your hair:
Or brush your teeth!
Just happen to be reading Tom Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel, where he uses the examples you mention to help explain current theories of consciousness.
Optical illusions arise from the way the visual system uses tricks and shortcuts to process visual information with as few of the expensive neural resources as possible. In nature, the shortcuts work well enough, but can be fooled by exploiting those tricks’ weaknesses.
Similarly, when the mind creates a sense of self it uses various tricks to integrate multi-sensory inputs, memory, and other information available to it into a coherent whole leaving us ‘blind’ to the seams where the bits got patched together in an imperfect but functional whole.
Discover those seams, tug at the loose threads, and it starts to unravel in often disconcerting ways. I can still remember my near disbelief when I was a child hearing my grandpa tell about his phantom pains in his missing leg. If he were anyone but my grandpa, I doubt I’d have believed him. I would have thought he was, erm, pulling my leg.
We glean probably 90% of the information we use in our daily lives from vision, yet we are mostly illiterate and uncritical when it comes to understanding how vision fools us over and over again. This is why I, personally, have great interest in movies such as “The Matrix” which call into questions the reality of our own “reality.
The great medieval cathedrals are but one example of how our environment can actually be shaped (emotionally) by human hands. Likewise, see the work of Alexa Meade:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/default.aspx?id=44255806&displaymode=1247&beginSlide=1&beginChapter=1&beginTab