When Arthur Tres put on the virtual reality headset, he became another person. The device was connected to a woman across the room, who inhabited his body in the swap. Their movements were synchronized with motion sensor technology, so that each time he moved an arm, it lifted her arm. Each time he turned his head, it turned her head. Not only did he experience the sensation of inhabiting the other person’s body, but he also saw himself from her eyes.
Tres knew he was tall, but from the point of view of the woman he shared the experience with, he saw his size in a different way.
“I saw myself as this extraneous body that was a bit threatening,” Tres told Salon in a phone interview. “I could really feel like I was looking up to myself, and that felt super odd.”
Tres is part of a collective called the Be Another Lab, which uses immersive technology to help people better understand what it is like to be someone else through virtual embodiment. It’s one of several projects that have emerged in recent years to examine how this technology can impact our psyche and our sense of self.
Whether we have a “self,” has been debated between philosophers for centuries. In Ancient Greece, Plato thought the self, or the soul, was immortal, while Aristotle saw it as something that was connected to the body. In the 17th century, René Descartes connected the idea of the self to consciousness when he famously stated, “I think, therefore I am.”
People tend to experience the world through the perception of a “self,” as if it were some sort of director steering the ship of our lives, making decisions and helping us carry out the everyday functions we need to survive.
Yet in philosophies like Buddhism, there is no fixed self. Rather, many believe that the innermost parts of being human are interconnected with all things and ever changing — that the self is an illusion, and overattachment to it is the source of suffering.
"The self is a very complex system of mechanisms that serve as a way to bridge our physical, individual body to our social, cultural and physical world."
Finding out whether the self is real is likely to remain elusive, and it may be something that can never be proven one way or the other. Yet science can offer some clues about whether there is or is not a self in each of us.
“The self is a very complex system of mechanisms that serve as a way to bridge our physical, individual body to our social, cultural and physical world,” said Şerife Tekin, a mental health ethics researcher at SUNY Upstate Medical University and author of "Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry." “I think it can be elusive because it is an extremely complex phenomenon.”
There are various elements of our sense of self. Part of the way we understand ourselves is by recognizing our physical body and how it moves through space in a process called proprioception. Virtual embodiment experiences like those used in the Be Another Lab work by sending the brain confusing signals about where it is, disrupting this process.
In the brain’s attempt to reconcile a coherent story of seeing, smelling and touching the environment around it from a new perspective, it draws the conclusion that it is experiencing the world from the body of another.
“It really triggers this override of perception,” Tres said. “The system kind of reroutes your perception to make you feel like you are somewhere else.”
These experiences build off of older studies that played similar tricks on the brain to alter perception. In 1998, scientists set up an experiment called the rubber hand illusion, in which they simultaneously stroked a rubber hand and one of the participants’ real hands to trick the brain into thinking that both of their hands were being stroked.
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When the brain is locating the physical self in its environment, the sensory cortex is activated. Research has shown that the premotor and posterior parietal cortices, along with the temporoparietal junction, are active in the brain when we are locating or thinking about ourselves. When these regions of the brain are disturbed through experiments like the rubber hand illusion, people report feeling out-of-body experiences. The anterior precuneus, situated between the brain’s two hemispheres, has also been linked to out-of-body experiences.
Bigna Lenggenhager, a neuroscientist at the University of Zurich, said these same regions of the brain were active when people had out-of-body experiences stimulated from virtual embodiment exercises. These same areas have also been shown to be triggered with meditation or psychedelic experiences, she added. This could be why many people who have taken psychedelics report things like “ego death,” in which their sense of self temporarily dissolves.
“The idea with the current knowledge we have would be that the brain is no longer able to integrate these inputs in a coherent way as it does generally,” Lenggenhager told Salon in a video call. “Using these technologies, it’s really something that the brain has not been prepared for.”
There are other aspects of the sense of self, too. We also have a self-concept of who we are, shaped by our beliefs, feelings and perceptions about ourselves. Some researchers are conducting experiments to see if virtual embodiment can change some of the characteristics we identify with.
"These aspects of ourselves are more like habits and with intentionality, we can actually experience a surprising amount of change."
Some ethical concerns have been raised about using this technology to conduct experiments due in part to the possibility that they could increase depersonalization, a feeling of detachment from oneself that has been described as “observing the world from behind glass.” However, studies have shown that these experiments can positively impact body image for people with eating disorders, reduce racial bias and increase empathy. Lenggenhager is currently working on experiments in which participants interact with a child version of themselves to see if this tool could be used in psychotherapy to work with the “inner child.”
“Much like they do in classical psychotherapy sessions, you would call the child or tell them whatever the child would have needed at that point,” Lenggenhager said. “Then you switch perspective and be this little child … and you see a big adult who tells you all of these things.”
Other studies have shown that aspects of our sense of self can be changed through other means. Personality traits like openness, mindfulness and empathy have been shown to increase after psychedelic experiences. In a review of several studies exploring the impact of feeling “awe,” participants reported feeling less entitled, were more generous and acted more ethically in experiments where they had the opportunity to cheat.
The authors concluded that these changes largely occurred because participants felt a diminished sense of self: “Our investigation indicates that awe, although often fleeting and hard to describe, serves a vital social function,” they wrote. “By diminishing the emphasis on the individual self, awe may encourage people to forego strict self-interest to improve the welfare of others.”
In another study conducted by Madeleine Gross, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara Memory Emotion Thought Awareness lab, participants were able to change aspects of their personality, like curiosity, by using a mindfulness-based app.
“These aspects of ourselves are more like habits and with intentionality, we can actually experience a surprising amount of change,” Gross told Salon in a phone interview. “Self-awareness is a big part of people being able to change the self, which kind of makes intuitive sense.”
While there is evidence we can change some elements of our self-concept, other aspects of our sense of self are harder to access. The “self” many people identify with is not just our physical body or our psychological chatter, but a narrator to our life story, tying together all of our sensory experiences and memories in a throughline. The origins of this personal subjective consciousness have been eluding researchers for decades.
“The self is the story we tell ourselves about who we are,” said Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “There's this thing that we all have called personal subjective consciousness, and that becomes hard to disentangle from the concept of self.”
Compared to our physical concept of self, this element of our sense of self is more difficult — or some would argue, impossible — to shake. In the 1960s, Gazzaniga began conducting experiments in split-brain patients whose corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres, was absent.
What he found through his experiments was that the left hemisphere was largely the “interpreter” making sense of sensory information that entered the brain. However, in patients with a split brain, the left-brain interpreter could still create a narrative based on information the right brain had received independently. In the experiments, patients did not report feeling like they had two narrators interpreting their experience — they felt like they had a unified sense of self.
“Consciousness is what the brain does, and the brain may do it very locally, but it only appears as this massive, unified system,” Gazzaniga told Salon in a phone interview. “That’s because over time, any expression of any one local action gets stitched together and gives us our sense of conscious wholeness that we all experience.”
The fact that our sense of self is inseparable from our subjective personal experience is enough evidence to convince some that the self does not exist. Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher and professor emeritus at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, argues that we are instead operating under something called a transparent phenomenal self model, which is essentially a computational entity in our brains.
“It is a conscious whole organism model, which is so good that you, the organism, cannot recognize it as a model,” Metzinger told Salon in a video call. “That is why you, the organism, are kind of glued to it, fully attached to it or identify with it.”
Even psychedelic experiences or other out-of-body experiences ultimately boil down to signals in the brain that can be jarring when they disrupt the thought patterns or narrative that our “self” has been telling us, Metzinger explained. However, that doesn’t mean these cannot be powerful and therapeutic experiences.
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Our sense of self helps us identify with others and form relationships. It helps us plan ahead. It can help navigate us through challenging thoughts or emotions. Many psychotherapy models rely on the sense of self to function, said Mark Leary, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Duke University.
Still, associating too much with the self has been linked to psychiatric disorders like depression, where the mind ruminates on the self and the body can become oppressive. Conversely, too little identification with the self is linked to things like schizophrenia, in which people feel detached from themselves.
“So many of the things that people go to see counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists about are things that may be a real problem in their life, but they are making it worse by how they're thinking about it,” Leary told Salon in a phone interview. “When you dig down into what a lot of psychological therapies are doing, they are often trying to change either how much people are thinking about themselves or the content of what they are thinking about themselves.”
Metzinger is a life-long meditator himself and thinks processes like these have the power to bring deep insights and knowledge that help us understand internal models of our “selves.” To him, the process of uncovering the answer to the question of whether the self exists does not take away from that experience. He cited Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist that talks about this phenomenon in his book, “Unweaving the Rainbow.”
“Dawkins always said that if you see a rainbow and then they tell you something about wavelength and electromagnetic variation, the rainbow isn't destroyed,” Metzinger said. “It's just as beautiful as it was before.”
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