Anil Seth has recently been experimenting with a new tool in his study of human consciousness: strobe lighting. A powerful strobe lamp, according to Seth, is capable of inducing altered states of consciousness, while allowing him to record brain signals at the same time. "It looks like we're simulating an altered state of consciousness, but we don't know for sure yet," Seth says. "We have to be careful. When you flicker a strobe light at someone you get messy data."
Comment: Think about this the next time you see a cop car with its strobes blaring, or enter a room with this type of lighting.
Seth, the co-director of the University of Sussex's Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, has been studying a fundamental scientific problem for most of his career: the question of how consciousness happens. "All my research is geared towards understanding what happens in the brain during conscious perception," Seth says.
The standard experimental setup of cognitive experiments used to involve seating someone in a dark room, at a desk, and administering a computer-based test. These experiments, although valid, are not what scientists call "ecologically valid" - in other words, they don't replicate the environment and complexity encountered in real-world experiences. Now, Seth uses various different experimental tools, ranging from strobe lights to psychedelic drugs.
In recent years, Seth has been experimenting with virtual reality. "It's been a longstanding goal that came about when trying to understand, from a neuroscience perspective, the notion of presence, the question of how and why we typically experience things are being real, as in really existing in the world. When we start asking that question, VR becomes an important experimental tool."
Seth is using VR to manipulate the way we experience being ourselves, the experience of embodiment and body ownership. "We can manipulate those in very interesting ways using VR, which wouldn't otherwise be possible," Seth says. "The potential for VR in neuroscience is enormous and is just getting going. In five years, it's going to be game changing."
Here are three examples of how in Seth, with colleague Suzuki, is using virtual reality to get a better understanding of our conscious experiences of the world and of the self.
Unreliable objects
In this experiment, Seth and postdoc Keisuke Suzuki test something called perceptual presence: do we perceive objects as being there as opposed to perceiving them as images of those same objects? "With a real object I can perceive the back of it even though I can't see it," Seth said. "I perceive it as an object with a back." The question, for Seth, is how the brains perceives objects, instead of images. One hypothesis for why this happens is that the brain is predicting how sensory signals would change if one picks an object and moves it around. Using augmented reality, Seth and Suzuki built different categories of virtual odd-shaped objects that don't behave normally: one of the objects, for instance, always displays the same face to the viewer no matter how much they rotate it; another responds to movement in an unreliable manner.
Hallucination
Using Google Deep Dream algorithms, Seth and Suzuki are investigating what happens in the brain during visual hallucinations akin to psychosis or psychedelic trips. In this example, we see the University of Sussex campus transformed into a trippy hallucination with dog faces everywhere.
Comment: Boy oh boy, Google sure has its hands on quite a lot lately: Big Brother Google designs algorithm that restricts access to anti-war web sites
Rubber hand
The rubber hand illusion is an excellent party trick and a key experiment for understanding the notion of body ownership. In the standard version of the experiment, a fake hand is put on a table in front of the subject, while concealing his real hand behind a piece of cardboard. The other hand and the fake hand are then simultaneously stroked with a paintbrush, resulting in the illusion that the fake hand is actually ours. In Seth's VR version, a virtual hand can be made to flash in synchrony with the heart beat or change in size and colour, allowing him to explore not only how malleable the experience of body ownership is, but also how people sometimes misperceive their own bodies in cases of body dysmorphia.
For a more... brutal example of how we can come to perceive a rubber hand as our own, watch the video below from the University of Freiburg.
Reader Comments
Obey all rules and submit to all procedures performed on you.
We (my wife and I) were on our way to our daughter and son-in-law's for a fish fry and birthday party when we stopped at a WaMart because the fish needed some tartar sauce. Going to WalMart is not one of our usual activities, as we get our food elsewhere. But it was 'on the way' and right off the freeway that we were traveling on.
While sitting in the WalMart parking lot waiting for my wife to exit the 'store', I noticed that everyone walking around was a zombie. Every single 'person' there was a walking scientific lab experiment. There were no real people, none that were intact. They were zombified, even the children appeared to be.
My wife came out of the 'store' and we thought together, 'Let's get out of here.'
Things are not good.
And they are getting worse.
Have a great day. Don't try to farm, grow your own food or to be self-sufficient or do manual types of labor, in some out-moded completely archaic way or to live in a community where people are allowed to think and feel and express themselves in a natural way. Be a zombie, instead. Everything belongs to the government and to the corporation and to the rich and heavily invested, who are building a better world.
OBEY ALL RULES AND SUBMIT TO ALL PROCEDURES PERFORMED ON YOU.
A better world.
Yeah.
ned,
out
Oh, you're so speshul, ned.
All that signifies is that you're suffering from an extreme case of malformed Jean-Paul Sartre, existentially-subjective-pancake-consciousness. i.e. You think like a surly dog.
Had you not considered that the person in the next vehicle might have been having exactly the same surly-dog-thoughts as as you, but had included you in the pack in the place that you had allotted him?
Inner world of man + Outer world of man + Self-remembering = Third state.
From third state, you would have experiences an entirely different 'state of affairs'.
Anyway, i would like to discuss the centres, the moving centre, the lower emotional centre, the lower thinking centre. Perhaps if others chime in here, maybe discuss the sex centre, the higher emotional centre, and the higher thinking centre. Good to learn more about this topic i think, and share ones viewpoint.
So the moving centre first, as i understand this, the moving centre is fully functional at birth, unlike the lower emotional and lower thinking centres. This is very significant me reckons!! The moving centre is polarized into 2 halves, the positive motor centre, and the negative instinctive centre. These have three sections each. The motor/motor, motor/lower emotional, motor/lower thinking, instinctive/instinctive, instinctive/lower emotional, instinctive/lower thinking. As this centre is fully functioning at birth, its fair to state that it is functioning when in the womb. Some wombs are like 5 star hotels, others, shark infested, many variations in between etc. So, the postures that are imprinted on this centre before birth, and how would this imprint upon the developing lower emotional and thinking centres? Also the postures imprinted upon the moving centre in early life, do they inform the primary postures of the lower emotional, thinking centres? How significant is the stop exercise then? and other exercises that focus on the moving centre, whether one is a man/woman 1, 2, or 3? The question here is, do the primary, and early postures recorded upon the lower emotional, and thinking centre receive these "programs" from the early imprints from the instinctive /emotional/thinking centre and motor /emotional/thinking centre? Even the imprints received within the womb? Then run on repeat thereafter like a deep groove, with only minor adjustments to the main groove? At this point i am really talking about the moving centre. I guess what i am saying/asking is, the postures in the lower emotional and lower thinking centres may have deeper roots than just conscious memories, experiences, and so on. So work bringing these centres into fully functioning may require a lot of work on the moving centre, as well as the lower emotional and thinking centres. Hope what i am asking here makes sense, and would like to take this further, and talk about the other centres.