This is one that has always intrigued me. Whenever I ask a sighted person this question, without exception they always say that they perceive themselves to exist immediately behind their eyes. This is actually wrong, of course. The part of the brain that, as far as we can tell, has most to do with consciousness is not situated behind the eyes at all, but directly above them, even partially in front of them, in your forehead.
Why is this notion so ingrained among the sighted? It’s not as if they don’t have other senses too.
Nice post, Maia. It’s true that we identify most strongly with the visual sense. I’m not sure why, though I believe this has been studied? I think intellect and the visual sense are strongly related for some reason. Posture can provide interesting evidence of this – people lean forward, they crane their necks – even when they are simply thinking with their eyes closed – it’s as if they are chasing after something (maybe it’s that the thinking has a vestigial goal-orientation, like it’s a form of hunting prey). I think it’s fundamentally a form of fixation. There are exercises that can be undertaken, which involve maintaining awareness of ambient sounds, sounds that are behind you, etc. – ways of expanding our use of the senses and the relationship of the body to its surroundings. I think lightening up on the fixation can make us more at ease in our bodies. I suspect this doesn’t just apply to those with sight.
I think the question you’re asking here is more like “where are people most focused in terms of the centre of their perceptive/sensory input?”
As a sighted person, I rely heavily on my sight. Like you say, it’s not like I don’t have other senses too, but I think without my sight I’d struggle to a point that I find very difficult to even conceive. It’s not that I perceive the things that I perceive “right behind my eyes” - I perceive the sight of something over there to be over there, and the same with my other senses. But all these signals seem to come into my perception from all kinds of angles and meet with the most concentration right behind my eyes.
But your point being specifically directed towards sighted people gets my imagination going. Where in your body, if anywhere in particular, does all your sensory input seem to centre?
It’s not like anyone’s wrong about where we perceive all our sensory information to centre, it just seems to be a common interpretation of a bunch of sensory input that we all have in different measure, dependent on the respective abilities of our senses. I wonder if a dog would perceive its sensory input as centring at its nose, for example (if anywhere at all).
The part of the brain that seems to deal with this stuff is kind of irrelevant to where your senses seem to centre, because it’s not a sensory organ - it deals with sensory input, but isn’t where the sensory input enters.
When you say ‘Where are “you” in your body’, you make it sound like a question about the self, and identity. And this would explain some of the other answers you’re getting. As for the spatial location of the self, an accurate description is still evading philosophers today because it’s such an imprecise concept. For one, it depends who you ask.
If you ask someone else where they think “you” are, they’ll just gesture vaguely about your entire body.
If you ask a materialist about their own self, they will probably have to narrow it down to just their brain and/or nervous system as they’d still think of themselves as themselves without much of the rest of their body - though in practice people tend to need more than just those parts of their body to survive and contemplate such a question.
If you ask an idealist, they will probably not have a specific material location and just think of their self as the entirety of their ideas about the world.
I think philosophers need to drop their notion of a universal consensus on where the self is, which is what they would call “where the self actually is”, or “really is”, or “is objectively” etc.
I sometime feel to be in the body, and sometime out of the body, depending on how I feel (or the state of awareness, etc).
Within the body, I often feel it more or less concentrated at throat level up (to the top of the head).
Out side of the body, it can be behind the head, neck or over the shoulder, but it can be far (about 10 feet) behind body.
Sometime, I don’t feel the head, and the awareness float in the vacant place, too.
I don’t think the location of the brain and where we may feel the center of awareness is always related.
I actually feel more to the right side when I think, and to the left side when I’m more emotional, which is contrary to the side of the brain that takes care of each function (if I remember correctly).
I know some people feel themselves at the heart level and gut level, too.
I’ve heard one person feeling herself at the tip of her toe, once, as well.
your consciousness is where senses are really. we can never picture ourselves in the brain. by the way people say im in my body because they feel it as such.
why most people feel conscious behind their eyes is because it is their most active sense, no one will say that they are conscious on their legs because they “sense” it far away, the closer the sensation the closer perceived consciousness.
We feel as if we are at the locus of our senses. Since we are visual in the main - the “behind the eyes” bit is usual. If we were just eyes, then the answer would be “directly between” however, since we also have ears, and they are behind the eyes, this pulls the locus backward a little. Our sense of smell is lousy, so has little effect on our sense of self-position. Proprioception is a bit diffuse, touch mainly in the finger tips but only on contact. Taste again, only sporadic. What does your mouth taste like…?
You I suppose, being blind, will feel different - dead centre maybe…? Between the ears…? Possibly heightened sense of smell and touch…? Lotta spare brain-map space in your lobes. I wonder what has taken it over…?
Read a book called “The Brain That Changes Itself” http://www.amazon.ca/The-Brain-That-Changes-Itself/dp/0143113100. If I remember someone learned to see with their tongue. Your brain is primed to interpret the right kind of sensual data into images, with or without input from an optic nerve. Eyes are just the best vehicle to present this data, but are not irreplaceable.
Body language is learned mainly through observing others so unsurprising yours is different. Do you shrug…? That’s one of the more innate reflexive kind cross cultures.
I’m totally willing to imagine what Maia is describing since I’ve heard Alan Watts descrbing this illuision of thinking we are mainly in our heads. The question is whether the lower forehead region is the third eye, as the mystics refer to it.
I probably asked the question wrong, I guess, or at least the thread title.
For me, it’s the centre of my head. There’s a specific point of consciousness that seems (however illusorily) to be the point at which all our sensory data converges, and from which our thoughts emanate. The location of “me”. It’s just a point, with no dimension. This is why I find it difficult to understand why sighted people say their eyes, because they are just peripheral. I suppose it’s just a product of being overwhelmingly visual-dominant.
There have been some studies to suggest that those who are born blind sometimes use part of their visual cortex to process other sensory data, such as sound and smell.
I wonder what has taken it over…?