I’m working on a literature review for my Master’s thesis. The thesis is about identity formations for healthy humans who use technical body enhancements, like exoskeletons, brain-computer interfaces and other gadgets, making them achieve abilities they could not achieve without the enhancements.
Today I have finished reading Olaf Blanke and Thomas Metzinger (2008) influential paper Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood (Read the full article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2008.10.003). It saddens me to say that while I write this text, I do not fully understand what is the minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS) that they talk so much about it in their paper. Maybe, and I hope that while I continue writing this post, I will find more meaning to MPS.
Blanke and Metzinger, in their 2008 paper, explore our sense of self is closely tied to how the brain experiences the body. A healthy brain not only recognizes your hand to belong to your body, but also recognizes your entire body as “you” and knows where you are in space and time. They point out that it’s not just about feeling that our arms or legs belong to us–it’s also about feeling that we are located inside our body as a whole. This feeling comes from parts of the brain working together to keep track of where we are in space and from which point of view we experience the world – the first-person perspective (1PP). When areas like the temporal-parietal cortex are damaged, this sense can break down, sometimes leading to out-of-body experiences.
WAIT—speaking of out-of-body experiences!!! – Something from my past connects to me now!
How many of you have heard about people who unfortunately ended up in car accidents? You know, accidents where they hit their head or experienced big physical force pushing the brain toward the inner skull. These people have told stories about how they floated around the place, seeing their body and the full scene of the accident from above. This has also been shown many times in movies like Flatliners, Ghost, What Dreams May Come, and books like ‘Life After Life’ by Raymond Moody. Those who believe in spirituality think it’s their spirit that got detached from the body. But Blanke and Metzinger believe it’s actually a damaged brain or messed up connection between brain parts that starts the floating out-of-body experience. Oh, the joy of science, which gives us actual explanations instead of mystical ones!
The brain regions that Blanke and Metzinger mention that affect how we feel ourselves in our body are VIP (Ventral Intraparietal area) and area 5. Both of these are involved in how we combine what we see, feel and sense about our body. Area 5, for example, helps connect touch and movement signals, so the brain can understand the body’s position. So when you’re lying on your left side in your bed, and you know that, it’s because of your healthy area 5 working properly.
If you want to dig deeper, there’s more information about how VIP plays a role in perception in David T. Field’s 2019 article (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116679) “The role of the ventral intraparietal area (VIP/pVIP) in the perception of object-motion and self-motion.” And for Area 5 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brodmann_area_5), you can start with Wikipedia if you’re curious.
While I was reading Blanke and Metzinger’s paper, several questions popped up in my healthy (hopefully) brain. Mainly, how our identity is linked to our body, and how this connection might change with age. If parts of the brain that help us feel “in” our body wear down over time, could this explain why some older adults report strange, floating sensations or out-of-body feelings?
I’ve never heard of children experiencing such things. This is probably because their brains are still developing and haven’t been affected by various factors like alcohol, drugs, or stories heard and seen over and over again that might mess with adult brain function over time. And of course there’s time and physical trauma like hits and impacts and forces that mess with brain connections. Children’s brains just work and are fully connected.
So Blanke and Metzinger talk about that complex idea I frankly still don’t understand, called “minimal phenomenal selfhood.” It’s something related to the concept of embodiment and the simplest form of understanding being yourself. But what’s clear to me is that my brain plays a big role in making me feel like who I am inside the body I feel. And if I ever see my body–not from a mirror but from outside my own perspective–being separate from where my eyes are, I’ll know that something is seriously wrong with my brain. And what is not clear is how then I can see the car accident scene from above like a floating spirit? If in reality, I’m not there and that is just my brains playing tricks on me while I’m hurt inside the car. Is that all simply an illusion and an image of what it could be that the brain creates for me to see? Why does the brain do this? And, is it possible that the image is an accurate representation of the true accident scene what it would look like if I were actually floating above the scene?
These final questions get me sidetracked from the actual relevance to my thesis. The connection is this: if we understand how the brain naturally creates our sense of being “in” our body, it might help us figure out how people adapt when they use technical enhancements that extend their abilities beyond their natural body. Pretty cool connection, right?
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