Reality: An Imagination

Sometimes we feel overwhelmed by the pace of the advancements in technological space. One of these advancements is the area of virtual reality based inventions. Big companies have betted on virtual reality. One company has developed a dedicated department in haptics, in which human touch and motion senses are stimulated remotely using specially designed devices. Companies have been able to digitized the touch and motion senses. It means that the touch sensation which you perceive by coming in contact of your pet, that sensation itself can be stored and transferred through a computer and the stored sensation can be fed to your brain anytime, even in absence of your pet also.

Let’s just imagine, you are sitting in an hotel room, distant from your family. Using the technology, you are able to feel the hug or touch of your little son, just the same way you feel when he is sitting in front of you.

To accomplish this, you put on a bodysuit filled with haptic sensors and your son sitting at your home hugs a dummy-body, which is also patched with similar bodysuit. Your son hugs or touches the dummy-body, pressure sensation felt on the dummy bodysuit is transferred to your bodysuit. Your bodysuit transfers the same pressure points in same geometry, on your skin and your response also gets transferred to your son’s body. Haptics technology would be working in similar way as it works in case of video chats today. In video chats, visual signals are captured and transferred using camera through your computer and then signals are reconstructed into a picture on a screen at receiving end. In case of haptics, similar transformations would be happening with signals consisting information about how touch is felt on your body.

This technology is part of development of a bigger platform called virtual reality, in which lots of other things also would be digitized. if we think slightly deeper, we come to know that the technology is mostly just leveraging the power of learning of our brain and senses together. In the example we just talked about, at sender’s end, technology is encoding human touch pressure points into electrical signal and on receiver’s end it is decoding electrical signals back into pressure points. Then these signals are fed to our brain through our skin. This development astonish us, but the virtualization at much bigger scale takes place inside us, since we have come into this world, but it is so common and natural to us that either we do not realize it or we consider it the absolute reality.

To understand it better, let’s ask ourself a question. Why do some people enjoy a roller coaster ride whereas, for others it is a shocking pain? We can leave the discussion about people those are not physically fit enough to perform such tasks. If roller coaster ride is universally an act of joy, everybody would have enjoyed it. But it does not work in the same way for all of us. Our senses transfer signals to the brain and brain construct a reality for us. Some brains construct a fearsome reality whereas others construct an adventurous one. What a brain would construct, depends on the unique circuit built in every brain. There are several factors which contribute in constructing these circuits, like how a brain was trained, genetics etc. You can gauge the magic of the brain training by the fact that we enjoy watching a horror movie, which intrinsically is a frightening event. In childhood when we watched a horror movie first time, most of us perceived it frightening. Then subsequently we trained our brain to make us feel it an exciting and enjoyable activity.

In case of what we see around us, different people construct their own version of reality. At coarse level, we can say almost everyone perceives a cube, as a cube only. This basic brain training has been genetically acquired by us. But, there is a certain degree of differences in perception of cube also. Those differences could be due to differences in eye sight, differences in the way visual information passed from eyes to brain, and finally differences in how the brain processes the received information and reconstructs the image inside the brain. We see these differences more clearly in another context, when two persons perceive and absorb different details from the same picture. Two persons perceive different meaning of a piece of art. All these differences exist because our brains are not trained in the same training ground and construct different virtual realities of the same environment.

An extreme case of it can be seen in a documentary movie, “sick: life and death of Bob Flanagan”. In this movie, Bob, who performed a masochist, his brain was trained to enjoy physical pain mixed with sexual activity, in the same manner as we feel fear and excitement both in watching a horror movie. His brain was trained to do so unintentionally. He had a serious medical condition and due to that during his childhood and teens, he went through extensive painful medical procedures, when several medical practitioners performed the procedures while he was laying down naked on the procedure table. During those days he started getting feel of triumph after completion of the procedure, considering the process was necessary for his survival. Norman Doidge, in his book, “The brain that changes itself”, mentions that most of the sadism and masochist performers have gone through some painful procedures/experience during their critical learning period, childhood or adolescence. This learning mixes the feeling of pain with some other sensations and affects the version of reality to be created by their brain for them.

Many war amputees suffer phantom limbs, which is a side effect of the virtual world our brain creates for us. Patients of phantom pain, feel the pain in their non-existent limbs. Most of the amputees suffer this chronic pain, often lifetime, if not treated well. Interestingly, the treatment of this also includes the creation of another virtual system to make the brain unlearn. See the invention of the mirror box by Dr V S Ramachandran

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._S._Ramachandran?wprov=sfla1

In another experiment, Dr. V S Ramachandran proved that our brain works like a virtual reality machine and creates a virtual image of the body, Dr called it body image. In normal cases our materialistic body is the exact replica of the body image which brain creates and we cannot realize the virtualization which brain has created for us. In case of amputees, materialistic body and body image differ. The amputated limb does not exist in materialistic body, but it exists in the body image created by the brain. In that case, patients of phantom limbs suffer pain, sensation, numbness etc in the limb which exists virtually in the body image, but not in the materialistic body. If you have read about the mirror box invention by Dr V S Ramachandran, you will understand how mirror box helps amputees in aligning their body image with their materialistic body. Aren’t we having a virtual reality machine inside us which is much more advanced than what we are seeing or experiencing outside these days?

In a series of few other demonstrations, Dr V S Ramachandran showed that with proper stimulations, it is possible to map a non-living external objects in our body image. Like a rubber hand, table top etc. After such mapping, brain starts generating sensations when someone interacts with the corresponding external object.

Vestibular disorders change the reality of the world around. Vestibular system is a set of 3 loops, sits in our inner ear, provides quick information about our movements in three dimensional world, to the brain. Brain, in turn generates compensatory movements to maintain balance of our body. Sometimes when this system gets infected, patients starts feeling the ground shaking. Dr. Bach-y-Rita, a renowned neurologist, treated one such patient who almost completely lost her vestibular system due to postoperative medication side effects. Dr. Bach-y-Rita fits an electronic accelerometer in patient’s hat and feeds accelerometer’s reading using an array of electrodes under patient’s tongue. After few days of training, patient’s brain started processing this balancing information received through tongue and patient improved. Isn’t it amazing to see the brain’s abilities to create a virtual image of patient’s position to maintain her balance, that too using the information which is coming in completely new form through tongue and received in a completely different part of the brain?

Doesn’t it feels like us being a pod in famous sci-fi movie “matrix”, when we experience dreams, or hallucination? We can feel everything, which actually happens just in the brain. While dreaming, brain acts like the matrix program generating a virtual reality for us, in which physically we are sleeping on a bed, but we are able to perceive all the sensations related to the events in the dream.

For a long time neurologists believed that brain sensory functions work unidirectional. Our senses sent sensory signals to the brain and then brain responded the signals. Neurologists have shown in recent researches that similar brain response can be initiated from brain without getting any sensory signals. It means that using right stimulation brain can make us feel that someone has touched us on our shoulder without actually someone doing it. In one of the experiments, neurologists have shown that a group of people were able to strengthen their finger muscles by just using focused mental exercises for corresponding physical exercise. This group of people did not actually perform the exercise, they just did focused imagination. Their muscle strength was very close to the another group of people who actually performed exercises. Brain stroke patients, who unfortunately get paralysed, neurologists suggest them many mental exercises to gain basic strength back. Initially they gain strength back partially in the affected limbs by using imagination and “talk to your body” techniques. Once they are able to move the affected limbs they do physical exercises to further strengthen.

Imagination is the core of all this, and also the limitation for the reality our brain can create for us. Whatever one can imagine, can become the reality for him. That’s why imagination is given so much importance in fields of innovation. More imaginative people tend to innovate better. If you are right handed person, and if you imagine to write using your left hand, your left hand would be a slower than your right hand, even in imagination.

Neurologists have proved that spending concentrated efforts in imagining a task can give similar results as in actually doing that task, because everything happens in brain first. Even in some of the extremely physically involved activities like athletics, many athletes complete the run in their mind before actually running the race. A cold war prisoner in Russia, Anatoly Sharansky, practiced both sides of chess during his prison years, without chess pieces. After getting out of prison, he settled down in Israel, and became a minister. In a political cum charity event, world chess champion Gary Casprov defeated all ministers of Israel, except Sharansky.

Yuval Noah Harari, a great historian, also mentions the importance of the role of imagination in human evolution. He mentioned in his popular book ‘Sapiens’ that we cannot get back a banana from a monkey by promising him to give twelve bananas next day in return. This power of imagination exists with humans only. All great things which we see today around us, were first built by someone in his imagination. There are numerous great examples of imagination like war strategy, currency system, games, constitution, high-rise buildings, cars, machines etc. In ancient world, great wars were won by using right strategies. Strategies are basically practising the event in brain first. If we go back further, during the age of hunters and gatherers, hunters were able to hunt down mammoth sized animals using strategies. We barely witness any small animal trying to hunt down an animal bigger than itself, except trying out sheer might or genetic advantages. As a human being only we possess the great power of imagination and also liable to use it wisely. Positive imagination can be life changing. Probably we all can spend few minutes in imagining a more cohesive world without discrimination, pollution, wars, hate. We can imagine some more trees around us. We can imagine cleaner water. We can imagine lesser plastic use and many more such things. I am sure our collective imagination will bring a good enough changes before we do much greater goods.