In my previous post, I talked about how your brain maps out the space immediately around you. Neurologists who study this phenomenon refer to this space as peripersonal space. Think about this: your brain literally knows not only where your body is in space, but how the area immediately around your body is relating to the rest of your environment, and it knows this through the same mechanisms that it knows where your limbs are and what they’re doing.

Conjure up the feeling of having someone stand too close to you, or even stand at arms length with one hand a few inches from your body. The sensation is clearly not the same as that of being touched, but it shares many common elements, most particularly the feeling of having someone in personal territory. Imagine, now, what this space looks like. Where are its edges and boundaries? How far out does it extend from your body? How does it move when you move? Does it change size depending on how much attention you’re paying to it? There are real, testable, neurological answers to these questions.

And this brings us into the teaser I gave in the last post about so-called psychic perceptions. It is reasonable to assume that some people have tuned their awareness onto their own peripersonal space to the degree that they have a fairly constant perception of it. In fact, according to the Blakeslees, there are even some tribal cultures that say that people are surrounded by a bubble that connects them to their environment and to each other. Couple this perception with various sorts of synaesthesia effects and it’s not difficult to imagine otherwise normal and ordinary people seeing colored fields around people, or auras.

I don’t wish to be a reductionist and claim that this is the true nature of these perceptions without exception. What I do wish to do is offer an opportunity for perceptual systems (such as psychic abilities) to be realistically examined from a dispassionate perspective, without getting bogged down in the vocabulary and jargon of any one particular model of reality.

And speaking of models, in my next article I will be discussing a functional mindset I’ve been playing with lately that teases apart the notion of “theory” from the notion of “model.” I’ve found this distinction to be a useful tool, and hope you will as well!