
The Disturbing Consequences of Seeing Your Doppelgänger - prismatic
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150821-the-dangerous-consequences-of-seeing-your-doppelganger
======
mrob
This sounds similar to the much more common false awakening dreams:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_awakening](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_awakening)

I get these occasionally, sometimes with multiple nested dreams, and the
sensation of waking is highly realistic. It can last a subjectively long time
until some detail tips me off that it's not real (usually attempting to read
and the text reading like Markov chain output). If I'm capable of generating
all this highly believable imagery it seems only a minor change to also
generate a model of my own body.

~~~
zkhalique
It's interesting how you sometimes can't tell if you are awake or not, when
you are sleeping, but you can ALWAYS tell if you're awake when you're awake.
Looks like some faculties are working robustly when you are awake which aren't
when you are asleep.

That said, I've had dreams where characters in my dream knew things I didn't,
and even made fun of me. When I woke up, I realized that they were actually
quite interesting, fully developed characters with their own personalities and
knowledge! And they would develop over several months of dreaming. Sometimes I
also awoke with a solution to a problem I had been thinking about the night
before.

So... interesting!

------
dx211
I had an interesting experience a few days ago: I was walking to my office,
through a small cluster of other buildings in the same complex, and I ended up
walking perpendicular to someone who I immediately recognized, based on body
shape, face, hairstyle, dress, and shoes, as myself. Of course my rational
bits knew it was just some other guy who looked a lot like me, but it was a
close enough match that my recognition bits would intermittently "lock on" and
tell me I was watching myself from 20 feet away. And that was disturbing as
hell.

Anyway, now I know I have a doppelgänger working two buildings over, so I need
to figure out what team he's on so I can crash his next office unwinder.

~~~
gamegoblin
When I was in high school, my girlfriend texted me a photo of me kissing some
girl (not her) who was sitting in a swing.

At first I thought "Woah who is taking secret pictures of me?!" but then I
realized I didn't recognize the girl I was kissing in the photo.

So at that point I'm really confused -- there is a photo of me kissing a girl
I don't know, in a park I've never been to. Photoshop? Is this a prank?

My girlfriend then quickly follows up with "Weird right? I met this couple at
the park and he looks just like you from the side. From the front he has a bit
of a wider face, though. And he's Italian."

Had she not told me that, I would have completely believed that I'd been
photoshopped into a photo. I couldn't spot a single dissimilarity.

I wonder if any relationships have ended because someone's significant other
saw what looked like them with another person.

~~~
robertk
Phenotype space is probably not continuous given genome structure. So it
appears like you can vary features almost arbitrarily, as you see in the
Oblivion video game, but in fact you see a lot of genetic collisions due to a
much smaller search space combined with the birthday paradox.

------
sethammons
Story time. When I was 4 or so, I fell asleep at my aunt's house on the couch.
I recall being above my body, looking down. I then looked over to the table
where the adults were, still looking down. I could look down upon the table
and its contents, something I could not see normally (hey, I was 4 and small,
I could not see over the edge of the thing). This is the first time I ever saw
square pizza. From Dominoes. The experience of being out of body was not
meaningful to me at the time, but, man, square pizza?! I remember thinking
that was quite novel.

~~~
robertk
I've heard enough of these stories to have no doubt this is a real experience,
but what could a scientific explanation of this possibly look like? I take
coherence of worldview very seriously and will rewrite my entire ontology if
necessary, but I'm having difficulties here. I don't want to accept the
cognitive dissonance and say you're making it up or are fabricating the
memory, or simply dismiss this comment altogether. On the other hand, it seems
a very difficult hallucination to conjure.

~~~
adventured
This one has an easy explanation. The child was making noises while sleeping,
perhaps having a bad dream, prompting an adult to pick him/her up. The child
was exceptionally sleepy, groggy, slipping in and out of awareness. The adult
walked back over to the other adults, and the pizza, while holding the child.

If you've ever seen how out of it a very tired child can be, you understand
that's more than enough to explain the sense of out of body + seeing above the
table. We're talking about a four year old after all, their comprehension of
the awake/asleep line in that circumstance would be extremely low. Even for an
adult, it can be easy to confuse whether you're still in a dream briefly upon
waking.

~~~
simonh
There;s a pretty good chance this is the answer, but even if the child
couldn't see the table from above but only reach and see things near the edge,
if they could interact with objects on the table at all they'd still have some
kind of mental model of the objects on the table and their positions and
orientation. That could be enough to be able to generate an impression of
seeing the table from above.

When my eldest was about 6 or 7 she woke us up because the was wandering
around upstairs opening all the doors. I lead her to the toilet and when she'd
finished took her to bed and tucked her in. The next morning she told me she'd
had a weird dream that she'd been going around the house opening all the doors
looking for something, but had no memory of me or going to the toilet.

------
jonah
François Brunelle did a photoseries called "I’m not a look-alike!"
photographing unrelated people who _do_ look alike. Pretty neat.

[https://portrait.photogrist.com/francois-
brunelle/](https://portrait.photogrist.com/francois-brunelle/)
[http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2013/02/me-myself-and-i-
fra...](http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2013/02/me-myself-and-i-francois-
brunelle-and-his-doppelganger-project-find-your-look-alike/)

(His site is down otherwise I would link to the source.)

------
brusch64
All that happened a long time ago, but in 2001 I went to a event in the next
bigger town. There were lots of people strolling around, suddenly a girl
greeted me a little bit too enthusiastic. I didn't know her at all, but
greeted her and started small talk with her.

She was obviously bugged and asked me if I didn't know her ? I declined, but
she didn't give up. She thought she knew me from a party from a town about
15km away and had an affair with him on this party. She was very angry, that I
didn't recognise her and didn't remember any thing. She even knew which school
this guy went to (different school) and some things about his friends.

She didn't trust me that I wasn't this guy and was pretty angry that I didn't
recognize her.

Never met this guy. Don't know if he was really so similar to me, but it was a
really strange experience.

------
jarin
Reminds me of the classic "Tulpa" creepypasta:

[http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Tulpa](http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Tulpa)

------
ChuckMcM
Doing a sensory deprivation experiment once gave me an OOBE. It was pretty
wild, didn't have enough time to start doing research though. One of the
experiments I would run is have an assistant go into another room and write or
draw something on a pad, then do your OOBE, go over to the room and read the
pad, then come back into your body, wake up and tell them what they wrote (or
reproduce it). That was a claim made by the Eckankar[1] people, back in the
70's, I wanted to test.

The interesting bit from this research is that it adds a bit of credence to
the notion that you can at least perceive you are outside your body, given the
right conditions. The question being then how you do this to yourself on
demand without sticking an electrode into your head in order to do some
research on it.

[1] [http://www.eckankar.org/whatis.html](http://www.eckankar.org/whatis.html)

~~~
declan
>That was a claim made by the Eckankar[1] people, back in the 70's, I wanted
to test.

I take it you were unable to reproduce any psychic claims! :)

If you could, it would be a trivial way to win $1M: [http://web.randi.org/the-
million-dollar-challenge.html](http://web.randi.org/the-million-dollar-
challenge.html) The fact that the James Randi challenge has existed (in one
form or another) since 1964, and no psychic in over half a century has ever
passed the challenge, well, that should speak volumes about
psychic/paranormal/parapsychology claims.

~~~
robertk
To play devil's advocate, it could also indicate Randi is using a god of the
gaps type play and psychics have given up knowing he won't part with the
money.

~~~
btilly
Nope.

He works with the psychic to agree on a test of what the psychic claims to be
able to do, with low enough probability that you can't pass by chance. (I
believe the threshold is somewhere below 1/million.)

Doesn't matter what ability you think you have. A test can be set up and
agreed to.

A number of psychics have wound up concluding that their abilities won't work
under the influence of unbelievers. But nobody that I know of has complained
that Randi was not willing to set up a fair test.

~~~
aussieindian
>> But nobody that I know of has complained that Randi was not willing to set
up a fair test.

I remember reading about how people who claimed that Randi would not test
them.

ref : 1. [http://dailygrail.com/features/the-myth-of-james-randis-
mill...](http://dailygrail.com/features/the-myth-of-james-randis-million-
dollar-challenge) 2\. [https://weilerpsiblog.wordpress.com/randis-million-
dollar-ch...](https://weilerpsiblog.wordpress.com/randis-million-dollar-
challenge/)

I guess its his test, his rules.. pity rational people mischarecterise it as
Scientific.

In the words of Chris Carter, author of Parapsychology and the Skeptics:

If Randi were genuinely interested in testing unusual claims, then he would
also not insist upon odds of at least one million to one against chance for
the results. Anyone familiar with scientific studies will be aware that
experimental results against chance of say, 800,000 to one would be considered
extraordinary; but results this high would be, according to Randi, a
“failure.”

~~~
seren
To be fair most people who claims to have psychic power also claim that, even
if not perfect, have a statically significant success rate.

I mean if you really had a psychic power that worked 1 in 800,000 trials, a
single life wouldn't be long enough to discover it. By comparison, we only
live about 30,000 days. I would not hire a water diviner finding water with
such low success rate.

~~~
aussieindian
I think you have it the wrong way around..

Anyway, the only way a tester can prove their point is by running the tests at
their own expense and they need a fair number of them.. but Randi restricts
them to just a few and set the rules on who, how its done and who witnesses
it..

Which means even on successful tests, he and his skeptic friends will assume
that they were tricked and then use fraud to mess with the results.. They are
judge and jury, no witnesses. Randi is self-confessed fraudster and has been
caught red handed as well.

This was an extract from a Randi Volunteer who saw the light :)

I realize that there is almost no interest in holding Randi and the MDC to the
standards that they claim for themselves. I’ve always been in a ridiculed
minority when I make these suggestions. It is clear that the Challenge is not
about allowing people to demonstrate their claims, but rather about providing
examples for our ridicule – partly for education, partly for group-bonding (my
guesses). I am in the process of moving on from the idea of trying to persuade
anyone to care to that of trying to get the JREF and Randi to be more upfront
about this instead, in order to thwart criticism. I fully realize that this
will be a futile effort as well. I also continue to tell people to quit
smoking. (…)

------
Phithagoras
This story reminds me a lot of the Dostoevsky novel "The Double". Does anyone
know if Dostoevsky himself suffered an incident like this, or of any similar
incidents at the time that he may have heard about?

~~~
dang
He definitely used his own experiences with epilepsy and pre-epileptic visions
when writing _The Idiot_ , but that was much later. I think _The Double_ had
more purely literary antecedents. Doppelgängers were an established trope by
then, which Dostoevsky got from the German romantics—people like E.T.A.
Hoffmann, who specialized in stories with weird phenomena that _could_ have a
natural explanation (e.g. the mentally ill hero's delusional imagination) but
are uncanny and probably magical all the same.

 _The Double_ was only Dostoevsky's second novel but it was one of the best
things he ever wrote. It's fabulous! And short.

------
smoyer
I've seen pictures of a guy that was once a college student in our city.
Though I never met him, my sister walked up to him and started a conversation
- convinced it was me. When his voice didn't match she still thought it was me
trying to prank me. Finally she called me at work and heard my voice while he
was talking to someone else. I wish I'd have bumped into him while he lived
here.

------
givan
I don't view the "electrode stimulation and see what happens and then believe
it's probably the same as patients experiences" as something scientific.

Given that we don't exactly know how the brain works, what if out of body
experiences are real and the scientific explanation just tries to fit it in
the general accepted world view as a brain bug just because it's too strange?

~~~
stupidcar
Nobody's disputing that OOB experiences are “real”. What's at issue is the
mechanism(s) by which they occur. The hypothesis in the article is that it's a
psychological effect that can be exacerbated by brain injury. And the evidence
outlined, such as experiments that can reliably produce equivalent effects,
and similar brain lesions accompanying the most extreme examples provides
some, although not overwhelming, evidence for the hypothesis.

If you're suggesting that people's perceptions and consciousness are actually
physically separating from their body, well then that's just another
hypothesis. One that needs supporting evidence and a proposed mechanism before
it can be taken seriously. That is how science works. Simply saying “this
phenomenon is strange” doesn't change anything. It doesn't make it immune to
scientific inquiry, and it doesn't lower the standard of proof required of
explanations. Science has successfully explained many phenomenon far weirder
than OOB experiences.

~~~
phkahler
>> One that needs supporting evidence and a proposed mechanism before it can
be taken seriously.

IMHO it only needs supporting evidence - good solid evidence. A proposed
mechanism is nice but is it really necessary? Do they really know how aspirin
works? If so, did they prior to widespread use? Does anyone have a mechanism
for quantum physics? Did Kepler have a mechanism for planetary motion?

I think a lot of science is actually people looking for the mechanism to
explain accepted phenomena.

------
coldcode
The more we learn about the brain the more amazing/frightening it becomes.
What if this type of experience can be triggered on purpose via drugs or other
mechanisms. It would make a scary as hell weapon.

------
giltleaf
Why is there so much bbc content today? The episode of the man jumping out the
window is terrifying though.

~~~
yclept
Probably submitters are inspired by Oliver Sacks' death.

------
rainer_muell
Will these insights induce the next paradigm shift in the science of torture?
Simply hook the victim to a brain stimulator and alter his perception of
reality. Can be administered by the press of a button and is even cleaner than
water-boarding.

------
yeukhon
So how do you actually create doppelgänger on your own?

