71. This was shown experimentally by Brady and Levitt in a 1966 study, in which they suggested to hypnotized subjects that they “see” (i.e., hallucinate) a moving visual stimulus (a rotating drum with vertical stripes). The subjects’ eyes, as they did this, showed the same automatic tracking movements (“optokinetic nystagmus”) that occur when one is actually looking at such a rotating drum—whereas no such movements occur (and they are impossible to feign) if one merely imagines such a visual target.
72. The term “out-of-body experience” was introduced in the 1960s by Celia Green, an Oxford psychologist. While there had been
stories of out-of-body experiences for centuries, Green was the first to systematically examine a large number of firsthand accounts, from more than four hundred people whom she located by
launching a public appeal through the newspapers and the BBC. In her 1968 book,
73. Several of Celia Green’s subjects described similar feelings. “My mind was clearer and more active than before,” one wrote; another spoke of being “all-knowing and understanding.” Green wrote that such subjects felt they “could obtain an answer to any question they chose to formulate.”
74. August Strindberg noted, in his autobiographical novel
This unknown man never uttered a word; he seemed to be occupied in writing something behind the wooden partition that separated us. All the same, it was odd that he should push back his chair every time I moved mine. He repeated my every movement in a way that suggested that he wanted to annoy me by imitating me. . . . When I went to bed the man in the room next to my desk went to bed too. . . . I could hear him lying there, stretched out parallel to me. I could hear him turning the pages of a book, putting out the lamp, breathing deeply, turning over and falling asleep.
Strindberg’s “unknown man” is identical with Strindberg in one sense: a projection of him, at least of his movements, his actions, his body image. Yet, at the same, he is someone else, an Other who occasionally “annoys” Strindberg, but perhaps, at other times, seeks to be companionable. He is, in the literal sense of the term, Strindberg’s “Other,” his “alter ego.”
75. It is likely that there was popular or folk knowledge of the phenomenon long before there were any medical descriptions.
Twenty years before Weir Mitchell named phantom limbs, Herman Melville included a fascinating scene in
Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?
[The carpenter replies:] Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?
It is, man [says Ahab]. Look, put thy live leg here in place where mine once was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair, do I.
76. The importance of first-person accounts was emphasized by William James in his 1887 paper “The Consciousness of Lost Limbs”:
In a delicate inquiry like this, little is to be gained by distributing circulars. A single patient with the right sort of lesion and a scientific mind, carefully cross-examined, is more likely to deepen our knowledge than a thousand circulars answered as the average patient answers them, even though the answers be never so thoroughly collated by the investigator.
77. The reason for this was not to be clarified until a century later, when it became possible to visualize, with fMRI, the gross changes in the brain’s body mapping that could occur after an amputation. Michael Merzenich and his colleagues at UCSF, working with both monkeys and humans, have shown how rapid and radical such changes may be.
