The Power of the Mind and the Phantom Hand

Such stuff as dreams are made on—William Shakespeare

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Diane Rogers-Ramachandran at the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California in San Diego conducted an incredibly illuminating experiment on mind and perception (reported in the Premiere issue of Scientific American Mind, Feb 2005).

Briefly, the experiment involved a subject whose right hand was concealed from her while a fake plastic right hand was placed in full view. The experimenter repeatedly tapped or stroked the person’s concealed hand, while simultaneously doing the same to the plastic hand. After half a minute the person whose concealed hand was being stroked began to feel the fake hand being stroked! “The sensations seem to emerge directly from the plastic rather than from [the person’s] actual hidden flesh,” reported Ramachandran and Rogers-Ramachandran. This illusion was first reported by Matthew Botvinick and Jonothan Cohen at the University of Pittsburgh in 1998; they suggested that look and proximity of the fake hand to the hidden real hand was enough to fool the brain.

But there’s more.

Best Aliens in Science Fiction

"Name your Choice of Best Alien in Science Fiction," was the question John DeNardo over at SF Signal posed me and several other SF authors such as Tobias S. Buckell, Louise Marley, Dean Wesley Smith, Jay Lake, to name a few.

"Aliens are a classic trope dating back to the earliest days of science fiction," John said.

In a previous post of mine entitled "Dream and Perceptions: the stuff of Science Fiction"I discussed what I felt science fiction did well: it makes commentary on humanity through our interaction with" the other ".

Have you ever done that? Looked craned backward or while driving through a familiar scene to gain a different perspective? And just felt different for a moment? Like you'd entered a different dimension and briefly glimpsed "the other "?

What is it like to meet "the other?

Dreams and Perceptions…The Stuff of Science Fiction

It was several days ago, as I was driving home from a friend’s place in the sultry dark of night that I noticed the change…

Perhaps it was the rain and the winding road that nudged my psyche to wander into that other realm. Or was it the motion picture The Fountain that I’d seen the evening before—a surrealistic journey of the mind and the soul through crisis and toward enlightenment, true love and “ever-lasting life”? Or had it more to do with the fact that I’d been, for various reasons, without sleep for over forty hours, that I glimpsed the ordinary in an extra-ordinary light?