The Effect of Asynchronous Touches on the Brain

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When you get people into this situation and they start to get something essentially a kind of whole body illusion where they feel like either they move forward or that they're touching their own back. And the reason that happens is that our brain takes all the evidence it has, knows we're moving but doesn't know there's another touch behind us. It comes to the conclusion two plus two equals five it's me touching my own back this is all part of me. Not anybody else going on here. People with Parkinson's are particularly susceptible to this phenomenon because you've broken that linkYou set up an expectation of self and then you've pulled the rug with these asynchronous touches.

Shermer and Alderson-Day discuss the psychologist’s journey to understand the phenomenon of sensed-presence: the disturbing feeling that someone or something is there when we are alone. Using contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and philosophy, Alderson-Day attempts to understand how this experience is possible. Is it a hallucination, a change in the brain, or something else? The journey to understand takes us to meet explorers, mediums, and robots, and step through real, imagined, and virtual worlds.

Ben Alderson-Day is an Associate Professor in Psychology and a Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing at Durham University. A specialist in atypical cognition and mental health, his work spans cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and child development. His new book is Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other.