Adventures With Alien Hands

It's Saturday night, I'm at home and I just spent one of the most interesting dinner periods in my life.

(Before we go on, let's ignore the fact that I lead a very sad, boring existence please. Thank you.)

Anyway, over my plate of maggi goreng I proceeded to read Dr Raj Persaud's chapter on Alien Hand Syndrome and I found some very intriguing conclusions. Alien Hand Syndrome is a rare psychological condition in which the sufferer believes a limb (usually a hand or foot) is rebelling against their bodies or worse, actively trying to hurt them or other people.

What got me to pause my chewing was this:

"..there is also a part of our nervous system which is responsible for our belief that we have free will in relation to our behaviour...(and) if there is a part of the brain designed to make us believe we are in control of our limbs, does the very fact that such a system has to exist mean we are not really in charge of our bodies?"

Now, given that I've been getting a heavy dose of cognitive science/AI aspects throughout the week in the form of GITS, reading this put my already wonked out brain on overdrive. The rest of the chapter then goes to cite experiments which seem to indicate that our conscious actions are actually preceded by brain changes that anticipate them, or in English, our actions have been decided beforehand by our brains before we even think of acting them out. In a sense, it points to the possibility that though we may inhabit our bodies per se, we don't actually control it to the extent we think we do, and this could be scary.

The particular section of the book then continues with the author's suggestion that:

"...one of the prices we have had to pay for conscious awareness of ourselves to evolve as a function of the brain is the delusion that we are responsible for all our actions."

This chapter intrigues me because then there would seem to be a clear reason why we human beings feel the need to be in control so much of the time, even when it is obviously better to let go. The need to feel that we can however, infinitesimally, control the flow of events in our lives (for instance, who leaves or stays in AF) has been something that many people have taken advantage of in the past (the gladitorial battles in Rome) and will continue to do. In the same vein, there seems to be a scientific truth to the expression "let the flow take you" especially when it comes to sports (see ping pong players) or even actions like driving. Perhaps our "ghosts in the machine" are only hindering our brain's natural proficiency at controlling our bodies, and if the our sense of self control is only an illusion, the question surfaces: who pulls the strings?

My head hurts already, but it's a good kind of hurt. So the next time you're walking/eating/lying down/having sex have a looksee at your left/right hand. Did you want to put it there, or is it now in a comfortable position just as if it knew you were about to do what you did?

Hee hee.