Feeling of Being Watched

This is the eerie sense that someone is lurking behind you and watching you. It makes you turn around to see if someone is there.

Neurologist Olaf Blanke and his group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne were studying an epileptic patient's brain when they stimulated her left temporoparietal junction. Suddenly the subject felt someone just behind her. The apparition mirrored her movements; sometimes it sat silently while other times it wrapped its arms around her. This part of the brain may explain schizophrenics who blame their actions on illusory companions and, as the study authors note, may help us understand "psychiatric manifestations such as paranoia, persecution, and alien control."

Mirror-touch Synesthesia

Mirror-touch synesthetes feel sensations that they see from a distance, such as a pleasant caress when a couple hugs on the street corner, or pain the hero in a movie is shot.

A study by psychologist Jamie Ward, then at University College London, revealed that although mirror-touch synesthetes are emotionally empathetic, they feel sad when they see others feeling sad, they are not any better than normal people at understanding other people's problems. Their visual empathy is reflexive, not conscious. Sensations perceived by the brain are just neurons firing. For mirror-touch synesthetes, their neurons fire in response not only to touch but also to visual triggers.

Seeing Sounds

Aural vision is when people “see” by using their hearing. The blind can learn to "see" with the help of voice software that represents an object's height with pitch and its brightness with volume. There is more to vision than raw visual data about an object's brightness and height. Our brains also have to be able to discern an object's depth and position. For example, your eyes naturally interpret a bright, tall object as being nearby. Vision does not have to come from just your eyes. If you train your brain to relate specific sensory information, such as sound, to physical surroundings, those inputs can activate the brain's sight centers.

Neurologist Amir Amedi of Harvard Medical School demonstrated that the brain can learn to interpret sound in the same way it interprets light. He exposed subjects to a variety of objects and their corresponding sounds. With practice, they could "see" a grayscale world and the height, brightness, depth and position of objects simply by listening to the software's version of their surroundings.

Page 2 of 2: NEXT Back First Last | Share | Errors | Last Modified:

Subtopics: NEXT | None

Topic: Comments: Add View | Sources | Related: None

Homepage