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September 29, 2006
Brain may explain feeling of being followed
If you ever get the creepy feeling you're being watched, join the crowd. Virtually everywhere we go nowadays, we are subjected to the watchful gaze of surveillance cameras and other ways of tracking our activities and movements. But what if you could never get away from that sense of surveillance, even on a walk in the woods or in the privacy of your own home?
Researchers in Switzerland have found that electrically stimulating a part of the brain can induce a feeling of continual surveillance. Here's New Scientist's report:
Ever had the feeling you're being followed? Neuroscientists have accidentally induced this creepy feeling in a woman with epilepsy while electrically stimulating the left side of her brain.The woman described how a shadowy man clasped her in his arms when she hugged her knees, and tried to pull cards out of her hands as she read them (Nature, vol 443, p 287). Olaf Blanke at the University Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland, and his colleagues realised that the "man" was in fact mimicking her own actions.
They believe the stimulated area, which is known to process information about where our body is, may be affected in psychiatric patients who suffer feelings of paranoia, persecution and alien control.
Source: New Scientist magazine, 20 September 2006, page 16
This could help explain the many people who believe their movements and thoughts are controlled or observed through the use of brain implants. (See entry below.)
-Katherine Albrecht
Posted by Katherine Albrecht at September 29, 2006 10:05 AM