Living Life From A Third Person Perspective

[.org]

O.K. fellas - since I started law school last August I feel from time to time as if I'm living life from a third person perspective. Not literally, of course, but that statement is the closest to the feeling I could get. Does this resonate with anyone else? Does anyone else feel similarly?

[Ninja1]

Only when I'm drunk. So yes.

[Savvy?]

I'm not sure if that'd be similar to an out-of-body experience. The latter can be achieved "at will" by entering a certain state of mind between sleeping and being awake (sleep paralysis). To do this, you have to be extremely tired, e.g., you only slept 2 hours last night. Then you have to take a nap during the day. To make up for lost time, the brain will put you directly into REM sleep, which is usually only achieved hours after falling asleep. However, your brain knows you are tired, so you go straight to REM sleep. Now you have to sort of "wake up." The best way to do this is to take your nap with something really important in mind. For instance, choose to take the nap before having to go to class in 20 minutes.

Naturally, you will think to yourself that you cannot sleep, since there isn't enought time. But since you are so tired, you actually do fall asleep, without the desire to sleep. Because of this, you may enter a state of "sleep paralysis," where you can see perfectly fine through your eyes (looking straight at the ceiling) but your body is fully paralyzed (since the brain still has you under paralysis believing you are fully asleep). At this point, you can sort of let your mind wander, and any dream can come true. You just think whatever you want and you are dreaming it (lucid dreaming).

The first thing you must do is get out of bed. Since you are paralyzed, your body is not going anywhere. So you have to use your mental strength to "pull" yourself out of bed. Now, you can look back at the bed and guess what, there you are. You can also fly to the ceiling if you want to see yourself from up there.

[manypulate]

A stash of mind-altering drugs and a near-death experience... just what a physicist needs to uncover the true nature of the universe, says Stephen Battersby

http://www.astro.sk/~msaniga/pub/ftp/Einstein_on_acid.pdf

[Ninja1]

A stash of mind-altering drugs and a near-death experience... just what a physicist needs to uncover the true nature of the universe, says Stephen Battersby

http://www.astro.sk/~msaniga/pub/ftp/Einstein_on_acid.pdf

.sk... that's a TLD you can trust...

[co-cain]

It happens when you feel depressed. It's like you're watching the movie of your own life, and you have no control over what happens. But I do not really mind the disassociation. It gives me an ability to think outside the box since I am "observing." You get a sense of what's really going on, and all the ambiguities in perception that arise. It can be frustrating sometimes, though, when you have to make an interaction decision 'cuz now with all that extra knowledge it's not like you can just be impulsive.

[Modus Barbara]

It can be precipitated by overwhelming stress. This stress may be provoked by seeing or experiencing an accident, a disaster or a traumatic event, including sexual abuse, and especially during childhood.

More on the case, depersonalization is an 'alteration' in the perception or experience of the self so that one feels 'detached' from, and as if one is an 'outside' observer of, one's mental processes or body. A feeling of watching oneself act, while having no control over a situation. It can be considered desirable, such as in the use of recreational drugs, but it usually refers to the severe form found in anxiety and, in the most intense case, panic attacks. A sufferer feels that he or she has changed and the world has become less real, vague, dream-like, or lacking in significance. It can sometimes be a rather disturbing experience, since many feel that indeed, they are living in a "dream." Chronic depersonalization refers to depersonalization disorder, which is classified by the DSM-IV as a dissociative disorder.

Derealization is a similar term to depersonalization, and the two are often used interchangeably. However, more specifically, derealization is the feeling that "nothing is real," while depersonalization is the feeling that one is "detached" from one's body or world. Though these feelings can happen to anyone who is under temporary severe anxiety/stress. Derealization and depersonalization disorder are most prominent in anxiety disorders, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, sleep deprivation, and some types of epilepsy.

[toss 2 score 3]

Great thread - listening attentively

[American Ale]

An NYT article quotes a couple of studies by Lisa K. Libby and colleagues. One of them looked at the behavior of voters and found that when they were asked to visualize themselves voting from a third-person perspective, they were more likely to be positive towards the idea of voting and more likely to actually vote than voters who visualized themselves voting from a first-person perspective. This finding is obviously very useful for motivation and behavior change therapy.

The implications of these results for self-improvement, whether sticking to a diet or finishing a degree or a novel, are still unknown. Likewise, experts say, it is unclear whether such scene-making is more functional for some people, and some memories, than for others. And no one yet knows how fundamental personality factors, like neuroticism or extraversion, shape the content of life stories or their component scenes. But the new research is giving narrative psychologists something they did not have before: a coherent story to tell. Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become.

"The idea that whoever appeared onstage would play not me but a character was central to imagining how to make the narrative: I would need to see myself from outside," the writer Joan Didion has said of "The Year of Magical Thinking," her autobiographical play about mourning the death of her husband and her daughter. "I would need to locate the dissonance between the person I thought I was and the person other people saw."

[What Are You Waiting For]

[...] It can be considered desirable, such as in the use of recreational drugs [...]

Our mammalian neural programming has been growing more complex. Not only has cranial capacity been increasing, but it seems that even the degree of crosstalk between the two hemispheres has been increasing. The so-called "bicameral mind" may be scientifically controversial, but if humans 2,000 or 3,000 years ago did have less communication between the hemispheres, it is possible that their sense of self -- a single, fully intact sense of self -- was comparatively weak and they heard voices coming from within. Today's schizophrenics, or more technically multiple-personality disorders, may have similar characteristics. The sense of self -- the awareness of oneself -- is a complex phenomenon that evolved slowly. But it can be argued that to perceive the world in a logically coherent manner you need to possess logically coherent senses.

A sense of self, regardless of baser mammalian programming, would be a necessary condition to make scientific progress. A sense of detachment brought about by hallucinogens may be fascinating, but to the extent that these mental states interfere with our ability to function logically, the sense of detachment would be counterproductive. If hallucinogens can induce various mental states, it shows that we are electrochemical systems, but more importantly, it shows that such states are possible, but not 'normal'. Evolution has rooted out these states, which may once have been the norm! Evolution is moving us forward in a direction that is leading to greater intellectual capacity. Rather than reprogram ourselves by interfering with processes we do not understand, we could let evolution continue to move us forward through processes that have been highly successful to date.