How we observe ourselve by the way of re-presenting ourselve to our selves.

Magritte’s La reproduction interdite 1937

For years I have listened to people (some quite serious) boning on about Out of Body Experiences. It usually runs like this:                      

  ‘...and this woman she was in the hospital yeah, and she found her self floating up till she was almost to the ceiling and then she was looking down on the doctors and the nurses, it was if she had left her body and...'

So let us try and nail this one. I suggest you close your eyes and remember the last time you were walking along a beach. The visual memory of you observing yourself will be that of looking down at the scene itself, from somewhere up above.

Susan J. Blackmore has drawn our attention to the remarkable fact that the visual cognitive maps are most often than not from a bird’s eye perspective.

Why is this? If we turn to Darwin we find our distant cousins found it safer up a tree than not, from where they would have a bird’s eye view of possible dangers.

If this theory is too reductionist there is always the metaphysical, “It was as if I had left my body and was floating...”