- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
Blurring the boundaries between the different ‘persons’ becomes important here
too, as in the reflexive model we explored earlier. In the ‘enfacement illusion’, for
instance, seeing someone else’s face being touched at the same time as your
own changes your recognition of your own face and reduces the difference you
see between theirs and yours. The effect also extends to things like seeing the
other person as more attractive and tending to conform more to their behaviours
(Paladino et al., 2010). And the size of the effect depends on how sensitive you
are to your bodily states: less sensitive participants experience a stronger illusion
(Tajadura-Jimenez et al., 2012). Together, findings like these suggest that the
shared contingencies of social and multisensory interactions might explain how
the self as subject and the self as object are tied together: ‘how the “I” comes to be
identified with “me”, allowing this “me” to be represented as an object for others,
as well as for one’s self ’ (Longo and Tsakiris, 2013, p. 2).
If the problem is how to combine the benefits of first-person immediacy with
third-person reliability, the second person could be part of the solution, for exam-
ple if a trained interviewer helps people describe their experiences accurately. This
mediator would not be distanced or neutral but would take an empathic stance
allowing them to investigate an experience together with the participant. One
proposal for avoiding bias is to make the mediator blind to the stimulus which the
respond to us depending on our actions; in mere observer relationships, they do
not (Longo and Tsakiris, 2013). This idea of action-based contingencies has become
important in thinking about first-person experiences as embodied and enactive
(Chapters 5, 6, and 8), and systematic feedback from the social environment may
prove to be as powerful in shaping self-other consciousness as sensorimotor feed-
back seems to be for more ‘private’ forms of perceptual consciousness.
PRACTICE 17.2
SOLITUDE
Being alone is very rare, and the rarer it becomes the more potential there
is for us to learn from it. Keep a whole day and night clear in your diary,
and prepare in advance so that you will have no contact with anyone else:
prepare all the food and drink you will need, tell people you will be out of
contact, and switch off your phone and computer and all other electronic
devices. The experience will be much more powerful if you avoid reading
and writing too. If the only place you can be on your own is in a single
room, do it there; if you can go alone into nature, even better. This task may
seem daunting, and probably should: for most of us it is a big undertaking.
But the difficulty is in direct proportion to the amount we stand to learn
about ourselves from stepping outside our social selves for a day.
How does your sense of yourself, and of how time passes and how you
relate to the world, change as the day wears on? How does the experience
compare to your expectations? What is it like to be you, alone?
