The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [55]
A sister event to RAAM is the one-thousand-mile nonstop Iditarod sled dog race from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska, in which mushers go for nine to fourteen days on minimum sleep, are alone except for their dogs, rarely see other competitors, and hallucinate horses, trains, UFOs, invisible airplanes, orchestras, strange animals, voices without people, and occasionally phantom people on the side of the trail or imaginary friends hitching a ride on their sleds and chatting them up during long lonely stretches. Four-time winner Lance Mackey recalled a day when he was riding the sled and saw a girl sitting by the side of the trail knitting. “She laughed at me, waved, and I went by her and she was gone. You just laugh.”25 A musher named Joe Garnie became convinced that a man was riding in his sled bag. He politely asked the man to leave, but the man didn’t move. Garnie tapped him on the shoulder and insisted he depart his sled, and when the stranger refused Garnie swatted him.26
What is happening in the brain during an agent-filled sensed-presence experience? Because they happen under such differing environments, I strongly suspect that there is more than one cause. If it happened only at high altitude, for example, we might finger hypoxia as the suspect, but arctic explorers experience it at low altitudes. Perhaps it is freezing cold temperatures, but solo sailors and RAAM riders in warm climes sense presences. I suspect that extreme environmental conditions are a necessary but not sufficient explanation of the sensed-presence experience. Whatever its immediate cause (temperature, altitude, hypoxia, physical exhaustion, sleep deprivation, starvation, loneliness, fear), a deeper cause of the sensed-presence effect is to be found in the brain. I suggest four explanations: (1) an extension of our normal sense of presence of ourselves and others in our physical and social environments; (2) a conflict between the high road of controlled reason and the low road of automatic emotion; (3) a conflict within the body schema, or our physical sense of self, in which your brain is tricked into thinking that there is another you; or (4) a conflict within the mind schema, or our psychological sense of self, in which the mind is tricked into thinking that there is another mind.
1. An extension of our normal sense of presence of ourselves and others in our physical and social environments. This process of sensing a presence is probably just an extension of our normal expectations of others around us because we are such a social species. We have all lived with others, particularly in our formative childhood and teenage years, and we develop a sense of their presence whether they are there or not. Under normal conditions, you come home from school or work expecting your fellow family members to either be home or to arrive soon. You scan for telltale cues of cars or keys or coats. You listen for their familiar sounds of welcome. Their presence is either sensed or anticipated. For years after my mother died, whenever I visited my father at the home where I grew up I had this overwhelming feeling that she would come around the corner at any moment, even though my rational brain kept correcting my emotional expectations. For eight years after my mother’s passing my stepfather kept close company with his demonstrative black Lab Hudson, and whenever I stopped by the house Hud would always come running to greet me; even after he was gone I still felt like he’d come running to the door. So ingrained are these sensed-presence expectations that even years later, whenever I was in my ancestral home, I had the eerie feeling that my stepdad and I were not alone.
2. A conflict between the high road of controlled reason and the low road of automatic emotion.27 Brain functions can be roughly divided into two processes: controlled and automatic.