Altered States of Consciousness: Can Your Brain Do This?
I thought I’d do a couple or a few or maybe a series of posts on ASCs. I guess pain could count as an altered state of consciousness, so that last post got me started.
Here’s one of the most unusual – and trivial – that I’ve ever had. To me the triviality is interesting because you usually think of an ASC as being significant or at least unusual in a more or less spectacular sort of way.
Fortunately this only happened the one time. I’ll add that although it was the seventies, this was not a drug induced experience. As you may begin to suspect, I didn't need drugs.
So I’m in a modern poetry class at the University of New Hampshire circa 1977. I’m really bored. The classroom’s hot and stuffy. I don’t care much for the poetry we’re reading. It might have been that one about the chicken and the red wheelbarrow.
My eyes wander to the other side of the room where I notice a girl and have the following stream consciousness:
She’s kind of cute even if her glasses are funny.
But what’s she doing with her mouth?
Why does she keep wriggling her jaw around like that? It’s too much for gum.
Is she having some kind of . . . dental problem??
This is so weird . . . She just keeps moving her jaw around.
But she seems cool with it. Doesn’t really look – bothered or anything . . .
But why? How come? What’s she doing it for?
Then, after a full thirty to forty seconds, I realize that the voice I’ve been hearing in the background all along belongs to her. She’s been, uh – talking.
I sit up straight and look around at everybody in the room, but nobody else is moving or acting like anything had just happened. Which is about what you’d normally expect. I had just come up with the answer to "2 + 2" but everyone was taking "4" for granted, and I could see the futility of trying to raise the group's consciousness.
- I’ll add that I normally write with my right hand, but if I use my left, it comes out perfectly, only backwards.
- Back in the sixties and seventies when the vertical or horizontal adjustment would go out of whack on the TV and those annoying bands would go up and down the screen, instead of getting up and banging the side of the TV I could just stay on the sofa and bang the side of my head to fix it.
- OK, I made up that last one . . .
Anyway, I'm betting that you never had the “Jaw in Motion Vision,” right? But did you ever have any other sort of ASC that was interesting but not so profound? We can talk about profound ones later . . .
Here’s one of the most unusual – and trivial – that I’ve ever had. To me the triviality is interesting because you usually think of an ASC as being significant or at least unusual in a more or less spectacular sort of way.
Fortunately this only happened the one time. I’ll add that although it was the seventies, this was not a drug induced experience. As you may begin to suspect, I didn't need drugs.
So I’m in a modern poetry class at the University of New Hampshire circa 1977. I’m really bored. The classroom’s hot and stuffy. I don’t care much for the poetry we’re reading. It might have been that one about the chicken and the red wheelbarrow.
My eyes wander to the other side of the room where I notice a girl and have the following stream consciousness:
She’s kind of cute even if her glasses are funny.
But what’s she doing with her mouth?
Why does she keep wriggling her jaw around like that? It’s too much for gum.
Is she having some kind of . . . dental problem??
This is so weird . . . She just keeps moving her jaw around.
But she seems cool with it. Doesn’t really look – bothered or anything . . .
But why? How come? What’s she doing it for?
Then, after a full thirty to forty seconds, I realize that the voice I’ve been hearing in the background all along belongs to her. She’s been, uh – talking.
I sit up straight and look around at everybody in the room, but nobody else is moving or acting like anything had just happened. Which is about what you’d normally expect. I had just come up with the answer to "2 + 2" but everyone was taking "4" for granted, and I could see the futility of trying to raise the group's consciousness.
- I’ll add that I normally write with my right hand, but if I use my left, it comes out perfectly, only backwards.
- Back in the sixties and seventies when the vertical or horizontal adjustment would go out of whack on the TV and those annoying bands would go up and down the screen, instead of getting up and banging the side of the TV I could just stay on the sofa and bang the side of my head to fix it.
- OK, I made up that last one . . .
Anyway, I'm betting that you never had the “Jaw in Motion Vision,” right? But did you ever have any other sort of ASC that was interesting but not so profound? We can talk about profound ones later . . .
Posted by Paul at 12:06 PM Permalink
7 Comments:
I understand what can happen to someone's consciousness under the influence of drugs, not that I have ever used drugs myself but only heard about it. But your experience was not tied to drugs.
This is something different it seems to me.
Did this experience happen accidentally for you? Or did you pursue the experience because you were bored? I wonder if the heat in the room caused it.
Can you give another example of ASC that would help me understand it better?
I suppose that hallucinations and religious experiences are the most well known altered states of consciousness. For that matter, maybe dreams would qualify as the best known of all. This is the only sense I’ve ever been able to make of my experience:
Way back as infants or toddlers, it must be that we integrate the various stimuli coming at us, including the connection between the sight of flapping jaws and the sound of the human voice. It seems that I briefly lost this connection. In other words - I may as well say it before someone beats me to it - I had a screw loose!
I have no idea why. I’ve been in much hotter, stuffier environments. My best guess is that it was more the boredom – that as my bored gaze wandered across the room, my sluggish mind somehow failed to entirely keep up and stay with the program.
CRYSTAL: I had one drug-induced one accidentally in the course of all the medical stuff I've been through. "Bad trip..."
On deja vu, I think I once read that these experiences are most common in youth. If that's the case it corresponds with my experience.
I think I know where you are taking this with your introduction. I gather that ASC can be employed to our advantage in many ways. True?
The writing thing was a discovery I made in gr. six. Had strained my right wrist, it was bandaged up. Went to write my name at the top of the paper and my left hand moved right-to-left and started writng my name backwards. So I don't have to think at all. In fact, if I think about it, I mess up.
I had the chance to pull this trick with lots of elementary aged kids, both when I was a child and when I became a school counselor and got to act like one sometimes. And of course friends and relatives once in a while. I only met one other person with this, uh, "talent..."
Interesting that it sounds like they've actually studied people who write that way. I never really thought of it as an unusual ability, just something weird about me!
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