Philosophy Series: The (Extra)Ordinary Self – Leaving the ‘Ordinary’ Sense of Self behind

The Philosophy Series continues with Dr. Anna Ciaunica giving a lecture on the topic: The (Extra)Ordinary Self – Leaving the ‘Ordinary’ Sense of Self Behind

When you wake up in the morning in your home, you expect your walls to be of a certain colour, your hands of a certain shape and size. When you look in the mirror, you expect to see a face that is ‘familiar’ to you: your face. You may experience some changes: for example, today your room is colder than usual and your face looks more tired than usual. But you can still recognize your ‘self’ in your familiar environment, your home.

Across times and cultures, humans constantly and intentionally aimed to radically change their selves, by ‘losing’ or ‘escaping’ their familiar, ordinary self via spiritual practices, psychedelics and creatives endeavours. In this talk I will explore radical changes in self-experiences, spanning from the ‘ordinary’ to the ‘extraordinary’ sense of self.

Specifically, I will explore the contrast between the feeling of ‘losing’ the sense of familiarity with one’s self and body in Depersonalisation experiences (DP), psychedelics and creativity. I will propose that higher flexibility in one’s sense of self may allow the individual to ‘leave behind’ certain habits, perceptual rigidities that holds the person ‘stuck’ in certain behavioural patterns. And to open to new ways of perceiving and integrating self- and world-related information.

By contrast, DP may be linked to lower control in the acquisition of new self- and world experiences, leading to non-flexible (rigid) (dis)integration of ordinary/habitual self experiences, and a consequent feeling of being ‘stuck’ in one’s mind. While controlled (dis)integration of habitual self-experiences and consequent re-integration may have positive effects, uncontrolled (dis)integration of habitual self-experiences triggered by unpredictable life events may be overwhelming and lead to self-detachment and potentially adverse clinical outcomes.

Contrasting these two modes of alteration will allow us to outline the importance of the controlled ability to flexibly integrate, disintegrate and reintegrate multisensory bodily signals, and its impact on the human sense of self and agency.