Technology is breaking our concept of the self. It could help us heal the mind

When Arthur Tres put on Virtual reality The headphone, he became another person. The device was connected to a woman all over the room, which used to inhabit his body in swap. Their movements were synchronized with a movement sensor technique, so that every time he moves her arm, raised her arm. Every time he turns his head, around her head. It was not limited to the experience of feeling the residence of the other person’s body, but he also saw himself from her eyes.

Tres knew that he was tall, but from the point of view of the woman who participated in the experience, he saw his size in a different way.

“I saw myself as a strange body that was somewhat threatening,” Teris told “Salon” in an interview on the phone. “I could really feel that I was looking at myself, and I felt strange.”

TRES is part of a group group called Be Other Lab, which uses overwhelming technology to help people better understand what it is to be another person through virtual embodiment. It is one of the many projects that have emerged in recent years to study how this technology can affect our psyche and our own feeling.

Whether we have a “self”, it has been discussed among philosophers for centuries. In ancient Greece, Plato I thought that the self, or the soul was immortal, While Aristotle saw it was something Connected to the body. In the seventeenth century, Rene Descartes linked the idea of ​​awareness of awareness when he declared it, “I think, so I am.”

People tend to experience the world through the conception of “self”, as if a kind of directors direct our life, making decisions and helping us to implement the daily jobs we need to survive.

However, in philosophies like Buddhism, there is no fixed self. Instead, many believe that the deeper parts are to be a person interconnected with all things and constantly change – that the self is an illusion, and the exaggeration is the source of suffering.

It is possible to know if the self is real, far -fetched, and it may be something that can never be proven in one way or another. However, science can present some clues on whether or not there is the self in each of us.

“The self is a very complex system of mechanisms “Self -restoration in psychiatry.” “I think it can be out of reach because it is a very complicated phenomenon.”

There are different elements of our self. Part of the way we understand ourselves is to identify our physical body and how it moves across space in a process called proprioception. Virtual embodiment experiences such as those used to make another laboratory by sending brain signals about their location, which disrupts this process.

In trying the brain to reconcile a coherent story from the vision and smell of the environment around it from a new perspective, it concludes the conclusion that it suffers from the world from another body.

“It really leads to this perception,” said Tres. “The type of system is to redirect you to make you feel elsewhere.”

These experiments build from old studies that have played similar tricks on the brain to change perception. In 1998, scientists created an experience called They are rubber handAnd simultaneously hit a rubber hand and one of the real hands of the participants to deceive the brain to believe that both of their hands were beaten.

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When the brain defines the physical self in its environment, The sensory cortex is activated. His search He appears That the backparting scrub, along with the temporal intersection, is active in the brain when we are specific or think about ourselves. When these areas of the brain are exposed to experiments such as the illusion of the rubber hand, people reported that they feel experiments outside the body. Front Precuneus, located between the two hemispheres of the two brain, has it It was also linked to experiments outside the body.

“The same areas of the brain were active when people were Experiments outside the body that stimulates virtual embodiment exercises. She added that these same areas have been shown to have arisen with meditation or narcotic experiments. This may be the reason why many people who took a drug Their sense is temporarily melted.

“The idea with the current knowledge that we have is that the brain is no longer able to integrate these inputs in a coherent way as is the case in general,” Lingnghanar told Salon in a video call. “Using these techniques, it’s really something that the brain has not prepared.”

There are other aspects of self -feeling as well. We also have a self -concept for whom we are, form through our beliefs, feelings and perceptions of ourselves. Some researchers perform experiments to see if the apparent embodiment can change some of the characteristics that we get to know.

Some moral concerns have been raised about Using this technology to conduct experiments Partially due to the possibility that they can increase the personality removal process Described As “monitoring the world from behind the glass”. However, studies have shown that these experiments can It positively affects the body’s image of people with eating disorders, Reduce Racist and Increased sympathy. LENGGENHARAGER is currently working on the experiences in which the participants interact with a child’s copy of themselves to see if this tool can be used in psychotherapy to work with the “internal child”.

“As they do in classic psychotherapy sessions, you will invite the child or tell them everything the child needed at that stage,” said Linggenhager. “Then you switch the perspective and be this little child … and you see a great adult who tells you all these things.”

Other studies have shown that the aspects of our sense can be changed through other means. It has been shown that character features such as openness, reason and sympathy Increased after narcotic experiments. in Review many studies that explore the effect of “awe”, Participants reported that they were really less, were more generous and more morally behave in the experiences that had the opportunity to cheat.

The researchers concluded that these changes occurred greatly because the participants felt a detailed feeling: “Our investigation indicates that dread, although they are often transient and difficult to describe, serve a vital social function,” they wrote. “By reducing the focus on the individual self, dread may encourage people to abandon the strict self -interest to improve the well -being of others.”

In another Ticket It was conducted by Madeleine Gross, post -PhD researcher at the University of California, a memory awareness laboratory in Santa Barbara, the participants managed to change the aspects of their characters, such as curiosity, using an application based on mind.

“These aspects of ourselves are like customs and with intention, we can actually experience a sudden amount of change,” said Gross Salon in an interview over the phone. “Self -awareness is a large part that people can change self, and it is a kind of intuitive logic.”

While there is evidence that we can change some elements of our self -concept, other aspects of our particular sense are difficult to reach. The “self” that many people get acquainted with is not only our physical body or our psychological gossip, but the narrator to the story of our life, and linking all our experiences and sensual memories in a line. The origins of this personal personal awareness were evading researchers for decades.

“The self is the story that we tell ourselves about who we are,” said Michael Jazaniga, a cognitive nerve scientist and professor of honorary psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “There is this thing that we all called a personal consciousness, and it is difficult to separate from the concept of the self.”

Compared to our physical concept of self, this element of our self -sense is more difficult – or some argue, impossible – to get rid of it. In the sixties of the last century, Jazaniga began conducting experiments in patients with the brain division that Corbus Calos, which connects the hemispheres of the globe, was absent.

What you found through Experiments The left ball was largely the “translated translator” that made the sensory information that entered the brain. However, in patients with brain division, the left brain translator can still create a narration based on the information received independently of the brain. In experiments, patients did not report their feeling that they had narrators explaining their experience – they felt as if they had a unified feeling.

“Awareness is what the brain does, and the brain may do it very locally, but it seems only this huge and united system.” “This is because with the passage of time, any expression of any local action is seen together and gives us our sense of the conscious perfection that we all experience.”

The fact that our sense is inseparable from our personal personal experience is sufficient evidence to persuade some that the self is not present. Thomas Metzenger, a philosopher and professor of Fakhri at the University of Johannes Gothenburg in Mainz, is arguing that we instead work under something called a huge transparent self -model, which is an arithmetic entity in our brains.

“It is a full conscious being, which is so good that you, the organism, cannot recognize it as a model,” said Metzenger in a video call. “That is why you, the organism, are a kind of paste, completely associated with or recognized.”

Metzenger explained that even narcotic experiences or other experiments outside the body eventually boil to signals in the brain that can wander when the patterns of thinking or narration that tell us “ourselves” are disrupted. However, this does not mean that these cannot be strong and therapeutic experiences.

Our self -feeling helps us to identify others and form relationships. It helps us plan for the future. It can help to move to us through difficult ideas or emotions. Mark Lerry, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, said many psychotherapy models depend on the feeling of self -work.

However, a lot of self has been linked to mental disorders such as depression, where the mind wanders on the self and The body can become repressive. On the contrary, a very little self -recognition is associated with things like schizophrenia, where people feel separated from themselves.

“Many of the things that people go to see advisers, psychologists and psychiatrists around them are things that may be a real problem in their lives, but they make it worse by thinking about it,” Lerry told Salon in an interview on the phone. “When you turn on what many psychological treatments do, they often try to change the extent of people thinking about themselves or the content of what they think about.”

Metziner is a lifelong contemplation and believes that such operations have the ability to provide deep visions and knowledge that helps us understand the internal models of “ourselves”. For him, the process of revealing the answer to the issue of whether the self is present does not take away from that experience. Richard Dukens, an evolutionary biologist who talks about this phenomenon in his book, was martyred. “Rainbow.”

“Docins always said that if you see a rainbow and then tell you something about the wavelength and the electromagnetic difference, the rainbow will not be destroyed,” said Metzenger. “It’s beautiful as it was before.”