Did you catch the story on NPR about experiments designed to create an “out of body” experience?

Of course, I can often have an out of body experience watching the broadcast news, but that’s a different story.

In this experiment, you put on a pair of goggles with tiny electronic displays that show the view from two cameras just a few feet away, looking back at you so that you see yourself. Slightly different perspectives for the left and right eyes, as your brain expects. So you’re looking at yourself from the camera’s point of view.

At this point, Meda was already getting queasy.

Then the good stuff happens.

Now, here’s the second key thing. We then – I then move my hand towards the cameras. I touch a point just below the cameras. And every time I do that, we deliver a touch on the person’s chest or the person’s body, which he or she can’t see. Right?

FLATOW: Yeah.

Dr. EHRSSON: So all you see, you see yourself sitting in the middle of the room from this outside perspective. And you see the scientist’s hand coming up towards the cameras. And every time you see that hand coming up towards the cameras, you feel touching your body.

Now, this is what happens. Suddenly, you experience that you are there under cameras. You can sense your body there. And all you see yourself – and you’re perfectly well understand that you’re still sitting there in front of the cameras. You can see yourself. It feels like a different person or maybe a mannequin, because your brain have now recomputed or recalculated, you know, your position in that room. And you feel that you’re outside of your body and you loss the sense of, you know, self-recognition of, you know, the real physical body.

Reading about the experiment left me feeling much as I did trying to understand the “double bind” theory of Gregory Bateson, who was briefly here at UH in the late 1960s, later articulated by R.D. Laing.

Bottom line? Brains, and resulting perceptions, are very complicated and malleable things. And how do these complicated things play out in social and political affairs? We pretend such complicating factors don’t exist.