Becoming Unbound: Felt Sense

This is a story about embodiment—or disembodiment, as the case may be. Actually, it’s several stories, with a common takeaway about what it’s like to be an embodied human being. Since this is all we know, it’s hard to imagine that our "default" setting might be an embodiment that’s in any way malleable. But as we hear from certain exceptional people, we’ll consider exactly that: that our "felt sense" (our body-based awareness, a term coined by psychologist and philosopher Eugene Gendlin) can actually extend beyond our body—and result in perceptions that are far different than the ones we take for granted.

The first story is from Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon who, at a family barbeque in upstate New York in 1994, was struck by lightning and had a mesmerizing out-of-body experience. Cicoria was making a call from a building payphone at the time; when lightning struck, it shot through the phone just as Cicoria was hanging up. He describes what happened next:

"I heard this loud crack, and this big flash came out of the phone and hit me in the face and just sent me flying backwards. And… suddenly I felt myself moving forwards… [I] was just confused…because I had seen the lightning, I knew that I’d been hit, and I knew I’d been sent flying backwards, but here I was standing there, and I’m looking at the phone, the phone is just dangling, and I’m not making any sense of it. And then… I see my mother-in-law who’s at the top of the [building] stairs, and I’m at the bottom, and she’s screaming, and she’s running down the stairs toward me… I noticed that as she got down close to me, she was looking at me like I wasn’t there. At that moment, the only thought that came to me was, “Holy ****, I’m dead.” And that was the first realization I had that something bad had happened. So I’m standing there, looking at this body that’s 10 feet away, and my mother-in-law’s running toward it and screaming, and at that point, I’m calling out to them, and I can hear what they’re saying, I can see them, but they can’t hear or see me. And suddenly [I] have this realization that, oh my God… I’m having thoughts just like I normally would. And the realization came that… whatever’s on the floor is nothing more than a shell."

Next, we have a recollection from someone who has a condition called mirror-touch synesthesia. This is where he/she feels the sensations other people are presumably feeling—regardless of whether those people are physically present or being seen in a movie or on TV. The sensations follow from wherever the individual is directing her or his attention.

Research demonstrates that mirror-touch synesthetes aren’t "making it up" or speaking metaphorically. When they report pain, for example, when viewing someone else in pain, greater activity registers in the parts of their brain relating to both physical and emotional hurt. In this instance, the person is recalling when she watched Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci during the 1976 Olympics:

"As Nadia moved through her routines, my body would twitch, and my muscles would move as she moved, and my friends just considered me a freak, and I couldn’t explain it, and I wasn’t trying to do it, and I just found the more I watched her the muscles in my legs would fire, and my legs would move. I remember being not able to explain what I was doing or why I was doing it, or even really realizing that I was doing it until my friends would point things out to me."

Another mirror-touch synesthete has this to say:

"If I were to attend to a lamp or a potted plant, I feel my body become many of their elements—the roundness of the lamp or the hollow, round sensation of the lampshade… I sense my body shaped with the pointed characteristics of the branches of the plant and smooth portions corresponding to its leaves."

It would seem that, for mirror-touch synesthetes, the boundary between self and other is blurred. For people who don’t have the condition, normal perceptions can be significantly altered when something stunning or overwhelming happens—such as being struck by lightning or going through an accident. Below is the recollection of a young racecar driver whose vehicle had been thrown 30 feet in the air:

"Everything was in slow motion, and it seemed to me like I… could see myself tumbling over and over in the car. It was as though I sat in the stands and saw it all happening…. Everything was so strange…. I remember being upside-down and looking backwards. And I saw the man who won the race pass under me. The guy looked up, and I remember that he had an amazed look on his face."

Synesthesia Essential Reads

The Alchemy of Synesthesia

Is Synesthesia Learned?

Drug experiences can engender similar effects. People who’ve been on LSD, for example, are known to describe their experience as “spaced out” or “mind-blowing.” By the same token, each one of us has felt less definitively embodied at different times in our lives… when drifting off into a daydream, "losing ourselves" in a good book, or feeling merged with someone we’ve made love with.

In my next post, we'll look at a remarkable person with autism - the late Donna Williams - whose memoir suggests the possibility that each of us may come into the world "wired" just this way.