The Bubble around Ourselves

What have mice, men, synesthesia, out of body experience, halos, our inability to tickle ourselves and the embrace of lovers got to do with each other? Not any, to you or me, until we read what Sandra & Matthew Blakeslee have written in "The Body Has a Mind of its Own" (2007).

Last night, I read a chapter of the book entitled "The Bubble around the Body or Why you seek your Elbow Room.".

In this chapter, the authors explore the question of what has loosely been called "personal space". They start off by describing Himba, a nomadic people living at Kaokoland, a harsh desert in north-west Nimibia next to Skeleton Coast where they herd cattle and goats. They explicitly posit and live the personal space around the body: their women cream their bodies twice a day with a mixture of rancid butterfat and ground ocher scented with an aromatic resin from a local shrub. They think that each person literally has a bubble extending from their body, moving with each of their movement and that this bubble constantly intermingles with those of another member of their tribe and so they are never really quite alone and that no one is really isolated in space!

Each culture has different ideas about what is a comfortable personal space. Richard Nisbett of the U of Michigan and Feng Kaipeng, of the U of California have studied how different cultures perceive personal space and found that when American students are shown an aninated underwater scene, they focus on the big fish among the smaller ones, that Japanese focus on the scene in general and that when shown a tiger in a jungle, Americans' eyes focus on the animal but East Asians would fixate on the objects in the background, with an occasional look at the the big cat itself: Americans focus on the indvidual whilst Asians tend to look at the whole picture. Now there is a whole new science of sensory anthropology which focuses on how different cultures stess different ways of knowing through "body maps" and the "senses": sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, balance, propioception and personal space. To the Anlo of Ghana, balance is most important: their language have more than 50 terms for describing different kinesthetic styles and think that one's way of walking says a lot about a person's moral character and ritual dance, in which they have to move eight or none part of their body independently, is an essential part of their life. While the Paluti of Papua New Guinea believe that personal space is defined by sound, the Ongee of the Andaman Islands believe that personal space is defined by smell and the Dogon of West Africa speak of "hearing a smell": good speech smells sweet, bad or impetuous speech smells rotten and a mouth too ready to speak is likened to the rectum. Edward T Hall has found that Mediterranean and Asian cultures have relatively closer personal space zones while northern Europeans have more distant zones and Americans have four zones: intimate space ( for embracing a lover, comforting a child or whispering )extends from 6-18 inches from their body, personal space (for talking to a friend) extends from 18 inches to 4 feet, social space (for talking to acquaintances, strangers or your boss) extends from 4 to 12 feet from their body and public space (used for addressing an assembled group) about 12 feet or more from the audience. In each context, you tell the object of your speech your emotional distance from them by your gestures, eye contact, posture, facial expression and how much attention you pay to their speech. When you feel your personal space violated you may feel uncomfortable, threatened or upset. In the subway, you make yourself as small as possible and try to avoid body contact and in an elevator, you avoid eye contact, emotion-laden expression and loud speech but at a sports event or popp concert, you may feel intimate with the crowd and bask in collective sensorium.

In fact, according to Blakeslees, our personal space or more exactly our peripersonal space ( the space defined by the sphere described by the furthest reaches of our arms), are mapped by certain groups of cells in our brain called place cells, disovered by John O'Keefe and John Dostrovsky in 1971( which attune ourselves to landmarks in our environment, telling us where we are in relation to specific landmarks) and grid cells found by Edvard Moser of the Norwegian Univeristy of Science and Technology in 2005 ( which are context insensitive but are based more on our own movements) at that region in our brain called the entorhinal cortex .Such cells together help us to navigate safely in this world.

Scientists have discovered something called "hemispatial neglect" a condition usually caused by stroke or damage to the right parietal lobe. A neglect patient is completely unaware whatever appears on the left side of the faces and the left hand side of one's body or both. When pressed for an explanation of why he did not see anything on the left hand side,he would invent an explanation. Such patients merely see those thing on his right hand side and when asked to draw, they will draw only stuffs which appear on the space on their right hand side, and when they read a clock, they will read only half the face of the clock dial. Recent studies of the brain have shown that the sensory maps of external space in our parietal lobe are also de facto motor centres with massive direct inter-linkages to the frontal motor system so that they participate directly in our motion. Thus they actively transform vision, sound, touch, balance and other sensory information into motor intentions and actual movements.

Neuro-scientists have now discovered that the senses interact with one another. Thus a sudden touch on one hand can improve our vision near that hand and seeing a friend speak across a crowded room can help us hear what she is saying and a picture of a snake or a spider shown near our hand draws our attention to our hand faster than a picture of a rope or a flower. In the kind of reaction called "parachute skin illusion", if we rub our palms together while listening to different sounds, we will find that higher frequencies will make us feel as if our hands are rough while lower frequencies will give us the impression that our hands are smooth and when the overall sound level of an electric toothrush is reduced, we will feel it more pleasant and may feel that our gums and teeth are less rough. Our brain will do its best to reconcile mismatching information wherever it can.

In 1994, Michael Graziano and Charles Gross of the Princeton U found that when they inserted electrodes into monkey brains, they discovered that when they touched a monkey on say the back of a its hand, one or more the cells in the brain's sensory maps's for the hand would fire and that if they moved an object to within 8 inches of the same spot which the monkey could see, the same cells would also fire. In other words, these cells are mapping not just touch but the nearby bubble of space around the body. When the seen object moves closer to the moneky's hands, the cells fire faster and when they move away, the cells slow down! Even the sight of anticipated motion will be sufficeint to trigger a response eg, we only need to wiggle our fingers above our child's rib cage and our child will start to giggle. When we see a needle about to be inserted into our skin, we will already wince with pain, a result of these touch-vision cells going into overdrive.Our brain produces what is called an "efference copy" of the relevant anticipated motion but when we "tickle" ourselves, we will not laugh because our brain fully predicts the force , location and speed of our own movements there is no mismatch between the actual motor response and the sensation of the self-touch. Incidentally, our over-anticipation operates in such a way that when someone hits us , we will always hit back with greater force because our brain "over-estimates" how hard we are hit. This is why street brawls so often spiral out of control. We got cells in our brain which track each part of our body in space. We also have multi-sensory cells that keep track of our body parts and the sounds around such body parts. Thus blind people are experts at tracking sounds around their bodies using such cells.

Scientists have discovered that about 5 percent of the population have synesthesia in which normally separate sensations are joined together. For some people, taste may have shapes,  numbers or letters may have colors, and color may have a smell and voices may have flavors and certain sounds may look like glass shards! The painter Kandinsky said that when he saw colors, he also heard music and he developed his style of abstract painting by capturing the rhythm of music on canvas! Some people can consistently associate words with colors. In the same way, we have numerous reports of many people around the world who claim to be able to see other people's "auras" and experience them as real as looking up into the sky and seeing rainbows. Such auras may well have been a construct of our parietal lobe! But people who sees auras usually attribute auras not to labile body maps but to supernatural forces, astral planes, leaky chakras or energy fields of pure life force that emanate from living things or even quantum fields.

Many people have had the experience of being "pressed" by a ghost during sleep in a way that they feel they could not move. In fact, every night when we are dreaming, our body is totally paralyzed from the neck down via inhibitory circuits in our brain stem . Failure or errors in this system may cause sleep violence and sleep-walking.  Such experiences of being pressed by "ghosts" in fact result from errors in the neural connections between the motor regions in our brain desire and our cognitive region: we feel we cannot move because our motor system is still paralyzed during sleep and has not yet been switched on. 

When people enter into deep meditation or trance, they say that their bodies and minds expand out into space. Body awareness fades and they are left with a unitary yet diffused and non-localized sense of themselves and along with this come feelings of joy, clarity and empathy.When Buddhists monks meditate, neuosceintists have found that the activity in their parietal lobe plummets. It is the shutting down of their body and space maps which cause them to have the feeling that their bodily self has dissolved and merged with the world

Olaf Blanke of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne has found that "Out of body experiences" (ODEs) can also be induced in healthy person by delivering a mild electric current to specific spots in the brain e.g certain spots in the right angular gyrus! When given such stimulation, one woman said that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body and stimulation to the left angular gyrus gave another woman the uncanny feeling that a shadowy person was behind her back and that he was intent on interfering with her actions!

In the last twenty years, scientists are discovering that many of the experiences which people previously associated with the supernatural are in fact delusions or the abnormal or unusual ways certain neurons and neural circuits in our brain operate. With careful study and observation of our neurons, their circuits, and the interconnection and feedback loops of its various circuits with the assistance of constantly improving brain imaging techniques, our brain is slowly yielding its secrets from such systemmatic studies.  Often unusual experiences are the result of the failure of connections or the making of sudden connections between various circuits inside our own brain. Thus more and more of those experiences we previously thought of as being attributable to the workings of supernatural beings are shown to be the working or the failure to work of certain specific regions or neural circuits inside our own brain. For this, we must thank the patient and ingenious ways our scientists work to help us understand more and more of the way our brain works.

In fact, when we dance, our personal space becomes our medium of expression: by extending the lines of our body into space, by arching and bending, we are setting our space into motion and shaping it for others to admire. Professional dancers say that the dance is a spatial extension of the body that reaches out to touch other bodies and involves "leaking into space" by making use of even shadows to change other's perception of our personal space. Tai chi is another structured exploration of personal space with the aim of achieving total unification of mind, body and intention through a body in motion.

When a mother hugs a baby and lovers hug each other, they feel each other's in a shared personal space where they feel safe, intimate and loved. In the same way that our brain need a system to keep us from bumping into furniture and staying a healthy distance from a cliff, we need a system for allowing others to come close inside our mapped body spaces. When people work together, we plan and execute our actions in relation to what they predict the other person will do, in the shared space mapped by each brain.

In all traditional healing through touch e.g shamanic healing, energy healing, universal life energy, Reiki, chi kung etc. practitioners use a combination of visual imagery, motor imagery and gestures to merge their own peri-personal space sense with that of their patient's. The experience, provided that both parties believe in its efficacy, may feel very real and both may feel the shifting of the relevant energy current or fields they believe are there. The brain's touch, movement and peripersonal space maps go far in explaining many of the key elements of these beliefs and experiences. Peripersonal space is physically, literally mapped in our brain's parietal and frontal lobes and so are our motor intentions within that space. Our sense of owning this space is so real and encompassing that we may be tempted to feel that we can actually direct or manipulate the space as if it has substance and intrinsic energy because we experience our brain's representation of that space rather than the space itself.

In our higehr-order action and peripersonal space maps, our body mandala is constantly blending the objective with the subjective: the objective consisting in our physical movements and the feedback sensations we receive by ineracting with the things around us; the subjective consisting in our motor plans, both real and potential, eg. the possibilities for action, including the affordances which we subconsciously perceive and automatically simulate and the actions of other people which we also simulate in our body mandala. Because of this seamless blending, it is easy to perceive the subjective component as if it were objective. And because the many maps of the body mandala share information back and forth, these beliefs can even percolate down to the primary touch maps and generate phantom sensations like tingles and gentle forces, that the mind interprets as "perception". This establishes the feedback loop, reinforcing the belief in mystical energy fields all the more. The forces we seem to feel on the pointer of the Ouija board in fact come from our and our partner's muscles--but the illusion of outside agency is incredibly convincing! Therefore, the idea that peripersonal space can be harnessed to treat and cure human ills is widely accepted in cultures around the world and the fact that metaphysical/spiritual  healing practices endures says something important about their efficacy because they often work through the placebo effect. Hence in all such "healings", it is essential that the patient believe that they will work because expectation and belief are primary engines of health and of disease.

Lovers hold hands, their fingers intelaced and children and friends hold hands but with palms touching. By intertwining their fingers, are lovers mingling their body maps? Lovemaking is the ultimate instance of the blending of personal space: the act brings two bodies and their bubbles of space into one body, one space,becoming one entangled and inseparable unit!