The Amazon Prime show “The Peripheral” is a sci-fi story that takes place simultaneously in two futures. It is based on the novel by William Gibson published in 2014.
In “The Peripheral”, two people from different futures, Wilf, from the far future, and Flynne, from a near one, find themselves mixed up in each others lives. Together they must navigate a world between the present and the future, while fighting to save both societies. As the timeline unravels, their fate and the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
The main theme is interesting but not really different than the usual ‘existential threat to the world’ drama with the hero saving the day after oodles of violent action. What really engaged me, is Gibson’s creative use of the idea of displacing our sense of self through time and space using a device which masquerades as an advanced VR gaming headset but turns out to be a quantum mechanical time-travel machine. The device is an imagined combination of VR, EEG, some type of non-invasive brain stimulation with the added ability of visualizing the future! Except for the last one, all these capabilities exist today (see the picture and web link below) with the major caveat that they cannot achieve anything remotely close to what the device in the show can do, hence we are supposed to imagine a near future where such a device will exist.
BTW, just in case its not obvious; I’m not getting paid to push product either by Prime or OpenBCI (:-))
This ‘mind-bending’ device (the one in the show, not the openBCI headset above) displaces the wearer’s sense of self which travels to the future to animate a humanoid robot look-alike (called a ‘peripheral’ in the show) in a distant future. I’m guessing that Gibson based his idea of displacing the sense of self on some very interesting experiments done by Henrik Ehrsson1, Olaf Blanke2 and others that have been reported in several papers. The videos of both Ehrsson’s and Blanke’s experiments are available on Youtube but a nice show-and-tell by Blanke is embedded below.
The idea behind these experiments was to displace people's perception of self by presenting touch stimulation that coincides very closely in time to those being ‘experienced’ by their virtual avatar which they are able to see in their VR headsets. Depending on how synchronous the stroking is at the real body and the virtual avatar, the person experiences a strong illusion of being ‘touched’ at the spot where the virtual avatar is located. In other words, the subject’s sense of self enters an illusion where the virtual avatar becomes their own body!
This is very much what we see in ‘The Peripheral’ with not just touch but all the senses, vision, smell, taste, hearing etc., being stimulated. Furthermore, an added quantum mechanical many worlds twist means that the avatar / peripheral is located in the future.
The induction of ‘out-of-body’ illusions experimentally recreated at least some aspects of drug-induced, epilepsy, schizophrenia- associated or just spontaneously occurring ‘out-of-body’ experiences that many people around the world report.
An estimated 10-30% of the general population has an ‘out-of-body’ experience at least once in their life (Twemlow et al 19823, Olson 19884). Commonly reported features of these experiences include:
a sense of separation from one's physical body, a feeling of peace and tranquility, a sense of being able to observe the physical environment from a ‘higher’ perspective, a feeling of being encased in an ‘astral’ body which is able to fly, drift, or float through the air as explained by Blanke in the show-and-tell above.
In the same video Blanke refers to a ‘supernumerary limb’ with the patient experiencing a loss of control or agency over the affected limb. This, in fact, has been colorfully described as ‘the alien hand syndrome’ in the neurological literature5. This condition is known to have lead to some sad outcomes where the patient insisted on havine the 'alien limb' amputated. The 'alien limb' syndrome can be recreated experimentally6. This experimental recreation is, of course, the famous 'rubber hand illusion', one of the most viewed videos on Youtube.
A creative version of the rubber hand illusion using mirrors was used by the Ramachandrans, to provide relief to amputees experiencing phantom limb pain in the area where their amputated limb should have been7.
To understand the rubber hand illusion or the induced ‘out-of-body’ illusion one needs to understand the concept of proprioceptive drift (or haptic drift as it is called in ‘The Peripheral’). Proprioception is the sense of one’s own body and body-parts in space. This information is thought to originate in sensory neurons in skin, muscles and joints and conveyed to the somatosensory and parietal cortices of the brain8.
Proprioceptive drift then, is the perceptual shift in body-part position from the unseen real body to a visible body-like image. When the drift is restricted to a hand it forms the basis of the rubber hand illusion, when the drift occurs for the entire body it creates the out-of-body illusion.
In every day life our proprioceptive and our visual senses are in agreement with one another which ensures our sense of self locates inside our own body. During the induced illusions, the eyes see the rubber hand or the virtual body being touched; as touch information arrives simultaneously from the real hand or body. The brain area / network that integrates these independent streams of information lets the visual information dominate and ‘assumes’ the rubber hand or the virtual body is where our ‘self’ is located. Some evidence using experimental ‘out-of-body’ experiences and transcranial magnetic stimulation applied to the scalp, below which is located the right temporo-parietal junction (TpJ), indicates the TpJ may be at least involved in this illusion9. These findings are a beginning for continued experiment and theory to unravel the neural basis for our sense of self.
There is another thought-provoking idea in the show. The main character’s (Flynne) avatar / peripheral is shown to be capable of voluntarily ‘syncing’ up with Wilf’s senses with the snap of their fingers. This allows both to see, smell, hear, whatever the other person / peripheral is experiencing in addition to their own perceptions. This could be interpreted as each sense of self distributing over two bodies! This is amazing to think about. Imagine being able to share another person’s perspective as your own.
One could then presumably just understand the other person’s deepest drives, desires, phobias and so on (Is this the ultimate aim of Neuralink?).
Wilf is a man and Flynne is a woman, what happens when they share their selves? Is the human brain capable of resolving such ambiguities? It would add a whole new dimension to the meaning of life, if this were possible. Of course, this has no real experimental correlates today though certain schizophrenic experiences may come close. Some well-known symptoms of schizophrenia include hearing voices, being convinced that someone else is inserting thoughts into one’s mind, experiencing a loss of control over one’s actions and so on. Would such a technology destroy sanity?
In that sense, The Peripheral is somewhat one-dimensional in exploring this idea of displacing the sense of self or sharing it between two physical bodies. Obviously exploring the dark side of this would make the show much less attractive to the demographic it is aimed at, but, is essential for this kind of research to make a difference.
All in all, I find this show quite entertaining on a superficial level and recommend it, if only to enjoy the glitter and glamor and violence devoid of any real meaning.
PS: we will return to our scheduled exploration of the hippocampus and its role in episodic memories and navigation in the next post. I felt compelled to write this post based on a conversation I had with Vitor in this ACX open thread (good luck finding the conversation, though). The ACX community is just an incredible resource for people interested in intellectual pursuits related to the human mind.
H. Ehrsson, 2007, Science, The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences
O. Blanke et al , 2002, Nature, Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions
Twemlow, S. W., Gabbard, G. O., & Jones, F. C. (1982). The out-of-body experience: A phenomenological typology based on questionnaire responses. American Journal of Psychiatry, 139(4), 450-455.
Olson, M. (1988). The incidence of out-of-body experiences in hospitalized patients. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 6(3), 169-174
Biran I, Chatterjee A. Alien Hand Syndrome. Arch Neurol. 2004;61(2):292–294. doi:10.1001/archneur.61.2.292
Botvinick, M., & Cohen, J. (1998). Rubber hands ‘feel’touch that eyes see. Nature, 391(6669), 756-756.
Ramachandran, V. S., & Rogers-Ramachandran, D. (1996). Synaesthesia in phantom limbs induced with mirrors. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 263(1369), 377-386.
Proske, U., & Gandevia, S.C. (2012). The proprioceptive senses: their roles in signaling body shape, body position and movement, and muscle force. Physiological reviews, 92 4, 1651-97
Tsakiris, M., Costantini, M., & Haggard, P. (2008). The role of the right temporo-parietal junction in maintaining a coherent sense of one's body. Neuropsychologia, 46, 3014-3018