A 'shadow person' might reside in our left temporoparietal junction.
Credit: Wikipedia
SYDNEY: Ever feel as though you're being followed? As if someone is behind you, shadowing your every move? It might be your ‘shadow person', created by unusual activity in a specific brain region, a new study shows.
The paper, published in the British journal Nature, describes the case of a 22-year-old woman with no history of psychiatric problems who was being evaluated for treatment of epilepsy. When a region of her brain called the left temporoparietal junction was electrically stimulated, the woman described encounters with a ‘shadow person' who mimicked her bodily movements.
"Electrical stimulation repeatedly produced a feeling of the presence of another person in her extra-personal space," said Olaf Blanke, co-author of the study conducted by a team of researchers from University Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland.
When the patient was lying down, stimulation of this brain region caused her to feel that someone was behind her. She described the person as young, of indeterminate sex, "a shadow who did not speak or move, and whose position beneath her back was identical to her own", according to the researchers.
When the patient sat up, leaned forward and clasped her knees, she felt that the figure was also sitting, embracing her in its arms - a feeling she described as "unpleasant".
During a language task, in which the seated patient held a card in her right hand, she described the person sitting next to her and trying to interfere with the task. "He wants to take the card … he doesn't want me to read," she said.
Because it was possible to induce the sensation repeatedly, and because the ‘shadow person' closely mimicked the patient's posture and movements, the researchers conclude that the patient was experiencing a perception of her own body.
"The strange sensation that somebody is nearby when no one is actually present has been described by psychiatric and neurological patients, as well as by healthy subjects," said Blanke. Until now, however, it was not understood how the illusion was triggered in the brain.
The temporoparietal junction is known to be involved in creating the concept of ‘self', and the distinction between ‘self' and ‘other'. According to the researchers, stimulation of this region interfered with the patient's ability to integrate information about her own body, leading to her experience of a ‘shadow person'.
Although the woman was aware of the similarity between her own movements and those of her doppelganger, she didn't recognise the experience as an illusion of her own body.
Similar shadowy encounters have been described by people with schizophrenia, as well as by healthy subjects, leading the researchers to believe that: "Our findings may be a step towards understanding the mechanisms behind psychiatric manifestations such as paranoia, persecution and alien control."
shadow people
Hi,
I was very interested in this subject, because I have seen photos of "Shadow People ". If they are caused by the brain functions at all why would they show on film if they aren't really there?
Photos? Where? Are they
Photos? Where? Are they proven - or fakes?
Did you even read the
Did you even read the article?
Er...
...maybe, just maybe, you're talking about something completely different?
completely different
They don't show on film and they aren't really there.
The article is saying there are people who get this unexplainable feeling as if there's somebody behind them.
There are no "photos of shadow people". Unless you mean a photo of somebody's shadow.
That's completely different.
Shadow People
I think that one of the problems we are having is if a scientist comes up with an explanation of one kind of phenomenon, others rush to it in order to explain all other similar phenomenon. I this particularly true with atheists. Even if a scientist is in no way using the experiment to explain everything, those who want it to mean that it explains everything are saying, "See! I knew it all along, it's all in everyone's head."
I have seen "shadow people" myself. That's what I call it, but it was at night and there was no shadow to be had; I was in bed. It didn't look like me, it wasn't fully formed yet, and I was not hoping for it, or even thinking about it (so I wasn't scaring myself into having a hallucination).
Any of these mind experiments do not explain the anomaly fully, or perhaps at all. When I see a scientific study, I try to look at it for what it is saying, not what people who wont believe in anything supernatural even if it bit them say.
what if
What if we're actually only telepresences inside a MMPORG, and messing with the temporoparietal junction is messing with the place where we jack in... and the "shadow selves" are actually our "real selves" in some metauniverse outside of everything?
*cue twilite zome musik*
the problem with shadows as a game reality:
If we exist as avatar's of actual identities playing a game, and our consciousness is an artificial projection or simulation of a "real conscious entity," then we can make several conjectures. One is that the universe in which the game is created is infinitely more complex than ours, and like our contemporary video games employ simplified physics to create a simple simulation of reality, the physical laws of their universe would be at least as much more complex as the ratio of our own simulations to our reality.
As entities with limited consciousnesses, guided by an external source, it's naive to think of those external entities as our "real selves" since their thought processes and motives would be external to our own (which must, if those playing the game were involved in its creation, be infinitely-seeming more complex than our own meager intellectual ability). As such, the ability for the avatar to become aware of the hand that manipulates it would be either be a bug in the program, or a tacky, self reflective and indulgent choice on the part of the game's staff.
Congratulations, we're living in an MMO created by hacks.
Kinda like Star Ocean 3!
LOL I totally get your explaination and it sounded similar to the game Star Ocean 3 when the characters actually go into a 4th dimension and find out (spoiler) that they are actually programs (SHOCK!) Only in this case, it's the other way around with the shadow person is in our dimension and interacting with us. I don't know if that makes sense but there are a lot of weird things yet to be explained.
why
Why does it have to mean that the universe in which the game is created is more complex? Maybe it is simplistic and composed of "nothing." I mean, think about this world and its complexities. What makes something complex? The universe and all things in it are basically systems composed of other subsystems that act as an interconnected web with logical and hierarchical paths and dependencies (ie cause and effect). All things are relative in value and nothing can exist on its own without being a part of something else. That is to say that nothing is simply one single absolute thing -- everything is actually something more, both "above" and "below" in scope.
Perhaps, if there is a "greater" reality that is more "real" than ours, it is composed of no parts and is not a system at all -- rather, it just is.