What If Fight Club Is Real?
Have you ever tried to tickle yourself? It’s hard, isn’t it? Yes, probably you will not laugh. But for some schizophrenic people, it’s no problem at all! This is a question: so then why?
In general, schizophrenics people have lost the feeling that they are in control of their bodies. For example, if they do something like lift a glass, it doesn’t feel like they were the ones who told their body what to do. This may cause them to think that they’re possessed by someone else who is making them do things.
This might also explain why so many schizophrenics hear strange voices. It may just be the usual mental chatter that every person experiences — they simply fail to recognize it as their own.
To get an idea of how this mechanism works, imagine that you want to kick a football. Your motor cortex then sends two signals: one command to move the leg, and a copy of this command to other parts of your brain. With this copy, your brain makes predictions regarding the sensations that your leg is going to encounter during this action, such as the impact of the football.
A schizophrenic person’s brain fails to send this copy command, leaving it unable to make predictions about the sensations the body is about to experience. Without these predictions, your actions don’t feel like you actually initiated them. Instead, it feels like someone — or something — else is responsible.
To make this effect understandable, I want to make a simile: open this article on your smartphone and give your smartphone yo your friend. Then ask him/her to randomly moving the smartphone. Probably you can not predict where the smartphone is going and you can not read this article properly a result of that. So then, hold the smartphone in your hand while you randomly moving it. This time you can able to read the article effortlessly.
This explains why some schizophrenic people can tickle themselves so easily. Their brains can’t predict the movement of their hands; the body is unprepared and can thus be tickled.
One morning he woke up… It was the usual Zurich morning. In the last night, he was discontinuing his seizure medications and drank too much beer. This morning he decided to stay in bed rather than go to work.
As he got out of the bed later, he turned around dizzily only to see himself still lying in bed. When he saw this lazy “self” in bed, he was very angry. Then he shouted and shook the person lying in bed.
At this time, he began to saw himself in bed and another “self” of him shouted himself. While this was going on, this consciousness shifted rapidly from one body to the other, leaving him unable to discern which of the two men was actually him. Horrified, he leaped from his window but luckily survived.
So what causes these complex hallucinations? Neurologists call this phenomenon is doppelgänger effect.
People who have this disorder that they feel like their center of awareness jumps between their real body and the hallucinated one.
There is a region of the brain named the anterior insula which is responsible for integrating all kinds of sensory signals. This brain region that gives you the feeling that you are located inside of your body and that identifies where your body is located in space.
People who experience the doppelgänger effect have a damaged left anterior insula and, as a result, lose the feeling that they are situated in their body. Their brain no longer knows where they are, resulting in hallucinations that place them elsewhere.
