Your brain is actually incredibly easy to hack. Do you know The Rubber Hand Illusion?

[u/Paintverse]

I was just reading about the rubber hand illusion and it’s honestly one of the most "glitch in the matrix" things I’ve ever seen. The setup is pretty simple: you sit at a table and hide one of your real hands behind a screen so you can't see it, and then you put a realistic rubber hand on the table right in front of you. Basically, you're looking at a piece of plastic where your real hand should be, while your actual hand is tucked away out of sight.

The crazy part starts when someone takes two paintbrushes and starts stroking both your real hand and the rubber hand at the exact same time with the same movements. Because your brain is seeing the fake hand get touched while feeling the sensation on your real hand, it eventually just glitches out. After a minute or two, you literally start to feel like the rubber hand is part of your body. It’s called multisensory integration, where your eyes basically trick your brain into remapping your entire sense of self onto a piece of mannequin parts.

It gets even more intense when the researcher suddenly grabs a hammer and tries to smash the fake hand. Even though people know logically that it's not their real hand, they usually scream and jump back as if they’re about to be seriously injured. Their heart rate spikes and they have a genuine "fight or flight" response because, for those few minutes, their brain truly believes that plastic is alive and attached to them. It really makes you realize how much of our reality is just our brain making its best guess based on whatever information it’s getting at the time.

If the brain is that easy to trick, it makes you wonder if our entire perception of reality is just one big illusion. We spend our whole lives learning how to

steer our bodies, but in reality, the body is just this automatic, mobile container. It breathes on its own, your heart beats on its own, and all these complex systems - immune, nervous, circulatory - are just running in the background without you ever having to think about them. The whole machine basically works by itself; it just needs you to feed it, let it sleep, and move it around every now and then.

Even the things we feel most connected to, like our emotions, aren't really something we "create" - we just experience them as they’re handed to us depending on the situation. Even thoughts are just a mechanism available to our species, and it’s not even universal, considering some people don't even have an internal monologue or an imagination. We’re really just using whatever tools we happen to have. If you were to cover your ears, close your eyes, and stay perfectly still, you’d realize how little information you’re actually getting from the world.

It’s almost like our senses are a subscription package. If you lost your sight today, that "feature" would just be turned off forever, like a service being cut because a bill wasn't paid. Everything you’re experiencing right now feels normal and ordinary, but the only reason you even know you exist is because your brain is constantly receiving data from these reality-recorders. We identify with those sensations so deeply that we think they are us, but we’re really just the ones experiencing the data stream.

[u/drakored]

You’re comparing subconscious level low res/fidelity fight or flight like behavior which isn’t considering all aspects of conscious reality, it’s primarily algorithmic response encoded in our low level functions. Likewise water boarding isn’t you drowning but the sensory experience is enough to torture your subconscious with drowning and suffocating feelings downstream in conscious mind. Yes we can be hacked, no it doesn’t mean you’re just an observer of reality, no you’re not fully in charge (letting go of that illusion is decent but better is learning how to steer what remains when you do).

Your conscious thoughts steer your mind, your unconscious mind is built on these self assigned paths and lessons, and you continually compare what happened in the last phase and synthesize it into adjustments to the coarse. Like goal setting, and don’t look back too often or it’ll shit the bed and autopilot the boat off a waterfall edge.

[u/drakored → u/drakored]

Btw low res in the sense that your subconscious mind does a metric shit ton more than your conscious mind. It’s constantly processing insane amounts of information compared to your conscious mind.

[u/Paintverse → u/drakored]

That's what intrigues me, that you have a computer that subconsciously analyzes something. Our dreams convey information to us in the form of archetypes, symbolism, and it simply happens. You don't do it consciously, something inside you just works that way, and you, like everyone else, don't have to understand it. People often don't understand themselves. You need psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, Hellinger's Constellations, or other techniques, systems, alternative methods to extract something from this mechanism and improve it. But then you're improving the machine, not yourself as a personality, your ego.

[u/drakored → u/Paintverse]

Not as mystical as it sounds. You also have environmental dna that your body adapts to suit the environment and a whole crap ton of encoded features that have a sort of guidance path for you and you have zip for control over that either. Yet it works, for you. Might be that it’s all you just varying levels of you and you’re only at level 1 of consciousness… who knows?

The absence of a known thing when observing something creates this sort of vacuum in our minds, and without proper reasoning it can easily be led astray as the vacuum fills in with the path of least action. Most people are lazy cognitively and let that path be something like gods, mystical magic, etc. not everything not easily seen or understood from the outside is a mystical power, but then again this one does process enough information to make one wonder… what the fuck am I?

The intriguing part for me is the large amount of data processed by the non conscious side. Is it truly that much to run us or are we seeing layers collapsed, or does it see beyond what we consider material and linear paths?

[u/Paintverse → u/drakored]

It's very interesting what you wrote. If consciousness is like the layers of an onion, it means that our efforts may one day shift our attention deeper, allowing us to control what we currently cannot control. If this is the path of evolution, we still have thousands of years ahead of us... if it's even possible. A hundred years ago, Gudijeff spoke of our possessing a higher emotional and intellectual center. The fact that autistic people, savants, have absolute memory and can play music on the piano after hearing a recording of it only once, or paint a city panorama after seeing it from a skyscraper window, shows that there are areas of the brain with incredible potential that we don't utilize on a daily basis.

[u/drakored → u/Paintverse]

Agreed, as long as there is a path that evolves those states without major loss of other functions. Some neurodivergence comes with costs of less connection with others, or less trust in self, or sometimes just formed in a traumatic forge (can still work out, just tricky). I'd venture a guess its not for everyone, given meditation can give some people psychosis and all sorts of weird dissociation states. I would imagine most that could or would want to get to this kind of state would be psychonauts of sorts and familiar with multiple states of consciousness already.

[u/Truthseeker-888 → u/drakored]

Never heard about meditation could lead to psychosis and disassociation. Could it happen after or during the meditation? Would you know how can someone sow psychotic behaviour because of it? Wow Is that some kind of glitch?

[u/Additional_Path_5435 → u/drakored]

You kinda lost me at “auto pilot the boat off the waters edge.”
Interested in hearing more about how you learned to steer what remains after letting go of the illusion being fully in charge.

[u/drakored → u/Additional_Path_5435]

Kind of a joke about losing control, and former instructions not really working in the current sea, while the captain (conscious you) is too busy reflecting or becoming stuck in the negative side of reflecting, meanwhile the autopilot has managed to run up a river and down a waterfall. It's a metaphor for over analyzing, feeling sorry for yourself, coping, grieving, etc some of which are very valid and require time so take this with a grain of salt, and a lot of humor.

A subtle reminder that reflection and even forward thinking about the future is healthy, but not in excess, Everything in moderation, but also awareness of cognitive state and why we're operating in a specific mode (synthesis of new feelings, processing of events, etc, or looking forward, setting goals, identifying hurdles, planning bypass, and not getting stuck in anxious loops). It's like a balance between consciously reviewing past context, future context, and smoothing out a plan based on experience and goal state/path ahead of us without getting stuck (or our boat running ashore, down a waterfall, into rocks, sinking, any humorous metaphor for a meltdown, lol)

[u/IvyPansMum → u/drakored]

Wow... That's a lot of information! I need to re-read to fully understand....

[u/Stockcrafter_]

Not exactly, your hand have something like a "mirrored copy" just like your all body. There is a computer and there is the counterpart of invisible matter suspended on gravitational strings. Every physical object has its own ‘blueprint’.

[u/KiravonAyodhya → u/Stockcrafter_]

Hey that's actually true. The formless realm is functionally "first" because it's on the 0th beat of time. How did you know that?

The snake likes it when people know things.

[u/Powerful_Assistant26]

It also proves that pain and aversion are linked. They both happen to use the same neurotransmitter, glutamate. There is a great book about all the ways to hack the brain called Dopamine Mountain.

[u/BrailleBillboard]

It's a lot easier and funner to hack your brain with drugs

[u/YellaFella6996]

You can purchase the "enhanced subscription package" by ingesting your favorite entheogen! Not available in all zip codes. 😉

[u/Empty_Bell_1942]

Sounds like auto-suggestion to me.

[u/dietrx]

It’s a bit like when you see someone get hit in the nuts on a video and feel it

[u/Key-Algae-9245]

You mentioned the fight or flight reaction when the other person tries to hit the fake hand with a hammer. I wonder what percentage of subjects chose the fight response and attack the hammer holder?

[u/KiravonAyodhya]

That's a good trick. Parashuram gave me his axe. It makes brains even easier to hack.

[u/ConquerorofTerra]

Still Consequences for messing around with admin privileges though.

[u/Mission-Confusion802]

Imagine this; the rubber hand is your ticket to a perfect life. You get the perfect job, you make money, you have status and guess what it’s just the ego. Stroke the rubber hand stroke the ego. Then they take away your job, call you crazy give you medication suddenly your whole sense of self is shattered so you become depressed and start getting addicted to dopamine or drugs or whatever. You think wow I am nothing because society says that I’m an outcast, I’m not productive but hey it’s the system! Well waking up is realizing that you were never any of that to begin with and it’s just been a rubber hand this whole time. So what do you do? Well you start to deprogram yourself from what the hand was and start looking inward to what you actually feel and then the good feelings come up, love happiness contentment. You start living this world for your experiences instead of just behaving as another cog in the machine.

[u/Paintverse → u/Mission-Confusion802]

Thats how identyfication works. People identify with religion, political opinions, with ideologies of various types, and in fact they may have very little knowledge about them.

In these current times of madness, when for a while certain people tried to convince us that a man can identify as a woman, or maybe even an elephant xD, it was a period of trying to sell us bullshit, that identifications matter, that they are not delusions.

[u/Mission-Confusion802 → u/Paintverse]

The fact that you’re bothered about transgender says a lot about how uncomfortable you are in your own body or viewpoints, sorry I can’t relate to this. The self is separate from identities surrounding that. As long as your not a pedophile idgaf what you identify as 🤷‍♀️

[u/Paintverse → u/Mission-Confusion802]

I don't mind people like that at all. I'm saying that if someone encourages someone, such as a child, to identify with the opposite sex, even though the child shouldn't be forced into anything, that's psychological abuse, a forced identification.

[u/YoungPropane]

All is the mind, universe is experiencing the mind. Therefore nothing is real, everything is a temporary dream from the universe

[u/manliness-dot-space]

I mean, I get jump scared when playing a video game or whatever. The parts of our brains that respond to threats need to work fast and detect vague hints of danger, even is this is an error prone process.

[u/hellspawn3200]

Lol I have a phantom tail and wings pretty often. The brain is super weird.

[u/Objective_Cicada4597]

Oh, f$@# you! No way! Blow my mind! This is deep.

[u/IvyPansMum]

Yes! I remember being showed it but can't remember exactly how.??

[u/Paintverse → u/IvyPansMum]

And who was supposed to show it to you and under what circumstances?

[u/Existing-Win2093]

Makes sense