How do we perceive the presence of others around us when vision isn’t involved? We all have the ability to do this, sometimes with great accuracy and at other times with very poor results. Its a deceptively simply question, but science offers very few answers about the process behind it, especially when it comes to understanding and explaining the brain mechanisms that are involved.
But inroads are being made. In scientific lingo, the sense of someone being close by is called a “feeling of presence,” or FOP. Scientists have been able to induce this feeling using a robot, and the results of that study and ongoing related ones have profound implications for understanding brain function, consciousness and mental diseases such as schizophrenia.
The most profound study was done by researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, who studied the brains of a dozen patients with neurological disorders (mainly epilepsy) who had experienced FOP.
They found lesions in three areas of their brains – the insular cortex, the frontoparietal cortex and temporoparietal cortex. All three areas play into our self awareness, spatial positioning and movement, and the study found that when sensorimotor signals in these areas get confused or compromised, people can sometimes feel the presence of others who aren’t actually there.
This premise was further supported by another experiment in which a robot gave confusing sensorimotor signals to healthy subjects. When this was done, subjects were able to create FOP on command by controlling the robot using a stick in front of them, causing a metal arm band to touch them on the back.
When they did, the robot’s touch was either simultaneous with patients movements or delayed by a half second.
So what does it all mean? In some cases physical impairment can be the cause of a false presence, but these studies also imply that our brains don’t always have a comprehensive understanding of what our bodies are doing, i.e., there’s a kind of body/mind separation that occurs.
“The brain has multiple representations of the body,” explains researcher Giulio Rognini. “And these are usually integrated to give us a unitary experience of the body in space and time.
We have shown that when there’s some damage to the brain or a trick played by a robot, a second representation of our body arises in a way that gets perceived by us but not as our body but as the presence of another human being. Physically this presence is already hidden in our minds.”
To test this process, the next step in the research is to have the schizophrenic patients try to use the robot in the same fashion as healthy subjects, to control their ability to perceive touch and presence. This should provide additional insights into how the relevant body/mind mechanisms work, as well as why they don’t work when illness is involved and errors occur.
This explanation is also closely related to the phenomenon we call “ghosts,” which could be explained by science as false presences that are perhaps caused by the kinds of scenarios currently being investigated.
The research obviously won’t provide a complete explanation of the seemingly inexplicable, but it does represent an important step in understanding our way of perceiving the world around us.
Bob McCullough
Source: The Atlantic
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