Everybody's favorite quasi-liberal newspaper of record, The New York Times, featured a fascinating article that the Pentagon must be working on right now, or should be, as this is a marvelous way for them to snatch a badly-needed bit of credibility from the jaws of incredulity.
Essentially, researchers have finally tackled the pressing (or at least metaphysically pressing) issue of the "out-of-body experience". You know, that feeling some have whilst in labor, of looking down from the far corner of the labor room ceiling at herself and her significant other panting away at Lamaze breathing, or perhaps under the baleful but entertaining influence of nitrous oxide, turning a painful extraction into a Head Trip of the Forth Kind. Well, it turns out that it wasn't just your fevered imagination but, no, it doesn't mean that your virtual eye was actually floating just below the drop ceiling, either.
Your ordinary, standard-issue human brain (without special psychic or other guru-level certification) manages the altogether neat trick of fooling it's host into thinking that it is not simply a few pounds of pudding contemplating the universe from within a vat affectionately called "the skull". Instead, the illusion that usually pertains is that we inhabit a physically contiguous meat-robot, to whom we are forever bound in a love-hate relationship of such familiarity that we address it on a first-name basis as "my body".
However, this cozy relationship can be disturbed by various means, either accidental, or now, experimentally. When the various cues from body and mind don't add up in the expected way--bam!--there you are, looking at your usual body from the ceiling again
...until--blat!--you're inside your usual body, as usual. This is alternatively described as entertaining or terrifying, depending on whom you ask.
The problem with (non-experimental) out-of-body experiences was they are rather all-to-often burdened and obscured by occult interpretations, which often form in the minds of blokes both impressionable and blighted with the typical non-education that most people seem to labor under now-a-days.
The fact that such eerie stuff is now experimental eerie stuff is a Good Thing because it takes some wind out some of the crazy-making interpretations of out-of-body experiences, which will presumably remove OOBE from the realm of the unverifiable and personal and will eventually place it in the realm of treatable conditions.
I just hope that people will be allowed to savor some of these experiential distortions anyway, if they choose. But, given the moral outrage generated by huffing and puffing idiots about LSD, mescaline and peyote, to the detriment of research into their actions, a better understanding of brain function, and possibly more humane ends for the terminally ill, out-of-body experiences are possibly headed for a last stand of their own, and on their own last virtual legs, too.
But not before out-of-body experiences experience a last hurrah due to the forward-looking researchers at the Pentagon. If they are not at it already, they should be, even if they have to get the idea from this heretofore unnoticed blog. (I can offer the Pentagon a reassurance right off the bat: We strive here to be As Straight as Time's Arrow, so, No need to ask...). In the spirit of the cutting-edge economic approach that did in John Poindexter in Aug 2003, rather unfairly, I think (which I'll elaborate at some later date) this newest psycho-physiological research could evolutionise the brutish business of torture right the hell out of the namby-pamby laps of those ethically-challenged philosophes in Geneva, who purport to hold some sway over the manly doings of the U.S. Government in [redacted] ... all buried as deeply as possible in [redacted] levels of National Security [redacted].
Now, it's interesting that one researcher described in the article, Dr. Olaf Blanke, is a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland. Not Geneva, but close enough, and Blanke is a pleasantly auto-redactant name... He is described as "stroking" people on the back with a "stick". This sounds innocent enough, until you recall that in Singapore, strokes are the units of caning, their controversial way of altering behavior by scarring the buttocks. Although the efficacy of caning is unknown, it doubtless hurts. But isn't that the whole point. Huh?
Hmm. Sounds as it this might have some application in the secret [redacted].
From the article:
"A separate set of experiments was carried out by Henrik Ehrsson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm."
"Last year, when Dr. Ehrsson was “a bored medical student at University College London,” he wondered, he said, “what would happen if you ‘took’ your eyes and moved them to a different part of a room.”
Now, this fellow seem ripe for a career in, or perhaps is already in the employ of [redacted], because the CIA, at least by reputation, is capable of moving eyes, or other arbitrary pairs of spherical objects that you so quaintly thought had been "part of your body" just moments ago, and, yes, move them across the room, sometimes a room the size of a warehouse in a remote location. The only problem is that sometimes it proves rather more difficult to move them "back to where they belong".
The article continues:
"Then Dr. Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat response as measured by sensors on their skin. They sweated, and their pulses raced. They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get hurt."
Now we are moving very close to a full, but still virtual, disclosure that this is the "New Torture" everybody has been praying for so fervently within the Bush Irreality. [A footnote: The fact that Dr. Ehrrson uses a hammer as his weapon of choice is easily explained by his being a Swede; it's a simple case of Thor-atavism, with Thor being, of course, the no-nonsense Norse god of Thunder, the original hammer-thrower. Thor, however must have been a bit dim, like his namesake, Tom The Hammer DeLay, as he only ended up hanging his name on Thursday. Freya, on the other hand must have been more ... persuasive, rating Friday, with TGIF (Thank Gods Its Freya), being one of the most powerful mimes of the post-modern era...]
Anyhow, all of this suggests that the operant phrase in the Pentagon is, or shortly shall be, "True Virtual Torture". More later.
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