Ecstasy, Touch, and the Sense of Self

It looks like I may be doing some posting about music, so let’s gather some ideas. We need, for example, ideas about what came to be called altered states of consciousness (ASCs) back in the 60s – which, of course, invites the question: Just what are the ‘ordinary’ or ‘unaltered’ states of consciousness? So, we’re stepping into a conceptual minefield.

Still if you read widely enough, you’ll come up with accounts of musicians, dancers, and listeners experiencing loss of self (whatever that is), or even standing outside oneself: ecstasy, as the Greeks called it. No doubt you’ve had your own experiences in these directions.

I’ve offered some relevant personal testimony in earlier posts (gathered here), and I may well offer up some third-party anecdotes later on – I’ve got a bunch that I’ve collected over the years. But I want to go abstract in this post.

How is it that one could possibly be outside oneself? How could that happen? The way one approaches such a question depends, of course, on the conceptual system you use. I tend to favor one based on Western science. And that doesn’t give much conceptual equipment at all. It barely even admits of statements of the phenomenon. Still, there’s a little. And I took some of that and crafted it into these paragraphs from Beethoven’s Anvil (154-156):

Thus it is perhaps not so strange that an altered sense of one’s own body parallels the cessation of inner speech. Think of the system for inner speech being coupled with the integrated body sense as a system we could call the Self System. An alteration in one component might affect the other as well. It is as though the mere existence of inner speech serves to anchor one’s sense of intentionality in one’s body. When that speech ceases, the anchor is gone and one floats free, outside one’s body.

This, of course, does not constitute an explanation of the out-of-body experience that sometimes accompanies musical performance. It is merely a suggestion of where we might begin looking for such an explanation. Some other observations seem pertinent. For one thing, sensations of floating and flying are not unusual in dreams. The brain seems quite capable of manufacturing such sensations. What is strange is that it is manufacturing them in the brain of someone fully awake and in touch with the external world.

We must, however, keep in mind how very much our sense of the world depends on the brain’s highly-evolved constructive activities. It takes many specific processes to turn raw sense data into the world we experience. Consider the sensation you have when hammering a nail. You feel the impact of the hammer on the nail head, but you have no sensory organs in the hammer head. The sense organs responsible for this sensation are located in the skin of the fingers and hand and in the joints of the arm, hand, and fingers. You must learn to project these sensations to the appropriate point in space—a process that may also involve relating these sensations of touch and movement to visual space.

Georg von Békésy was interested in such matters and performed some very interesting experiments with touch in the 1960s. He used a pair of vibrating needles to stimulate the tips of two fingers. Each of the vibrators was actuated by the same series of timing pulses, but von Békésy introduced a lag between the delivery of the pulses to the vibrators. Where the delay was relatively long, three to four milliseconds, the subject experienced sensations in the two fingers, as one would expect. But when the delay was about one millisecond, the subject would feel only one vibratory sensation, in the finger that received the first click. If the delay was reduced still further, the subject located the vibrations at a point between the fingers, where there can’t possibly be any sensation. Even more dramatically, von Békésy was able to obtain the same effect by stimulating a person’s knees. Imagine sitting with your knees spread and feeling a sensation that you locate in the air midway between them. Nothing is there, but you feel the vibrations nonetheless.

This bit of trickery is certainly far different from feeling yourself float to a point near the ceiling, but it strikes me as being in the same general range of weirdness. Both phenomena have to do with one’s sense of one’s body and how touch and movement are integrated with visual awareness. These sensations converge in the parietal lobes of the neocortex. The right parietal lobe is one of the structures where Damasio locates the integrated body sense. Perhaps what we need to know is just how the sound of one’s own voice becomes localized in space. How is it that you come to hear your voice as emanating from a point below your nose and between your ears? To be sure, that voice does not sound during inner speech, but knowing how it is localized might give us a clue to how one may feel outside one’s body when inner speech ceases.