Recently some neuroscientists in Sweden published a study that shows just how much the mind likes to move around. The lab-coats wanted to understand how the mind draws the body into the sense of self that lies at the heart of our experience. Usually the body in question is, of course, the biological home-base where our individual brains and eye-stalks comfortably reside. But some folks report that they don't recognize their hands or limbs as their own. At the same time, certain perceptual tricks can induce this sense of ownership, so that people experience a fake rubber hand as an extension of themselves. The Swedish researchers took this trick much farther: Using an ingenious camera set-up, they proved that a normal person's mind will readily feel ownership of another person's body, and even the plastic flesh of a mannequin. The phenomenon was so powerful that subjects were able to experience inhabiting another person's body even if that person was looking directly at the subject in question!
Welcome to the mind. Maybe you think you are your mind, or maybe you think you just have one, but either way the mind-thing has been around since you can remember, and will probably, hopefully, stick around until your final breath. Though you don't know where it comes from, though you don't know much about how it works, though it tricks you and distracts you and makes you do things you (think you) don't want to do, nothing is as intimate with you as your mind. Not your body, not the sound of your lover's voice, not the taste of that delicious chocolate already melting away on your tongue. Because at the end of the day, all of these things are really just happening in the mind.

But where is your mind? Look for it in a book or a computer, those archetypal creations of the mind--and you won't find it; chop up a human brain into squirmy little pieces and you won't discover it either. It almost seems as if the mind is playing hide-and-seek with us, always eluding our grasp, slipping through our fingers.

The technology that allowed the peculiar phenomenon discovered by the aforementioned Swedish scientists was a form of telepresence, the technological translocation of the senses. Subject wore goggles that piped in the real-time visual information from a pair of cameras that were worn over another person's eyes (or, in the case of the mannequin, where the eyes would painted.) Similar telepresence rigs are already routinely employed to control robotic tools used in remote surgery, deep sea exploration, and hazardous materials management. In these situations, incoming visual data is bolstered with tactile force-feedback signals to create even less perceived distance between operator and remote location; Softer forms are used in teleconferencing and goofy virtual reality entertainments.

The Swedish study showed that telepresence set-ups can do more than pipe in enough remote sensor information to make people feel sufficiently present to operate heavy machinery. In some situations, the sense of the self travels as well, snuggling into a distant body as if it were a newly born avatar of the mind. While the study's subjects found it much easier to translocate into a mannequin than a cardboard box, who knows what sorts of objects (asteroid smashers, tarantulas, dildos) we may potentially be able to body-snatch? But perhaps the greatest mystery is what happens when, like the subjects in the study, we can use these new tools to get an objective third person view of ourselves, directly and in real-time. For in a sense, this is what makes today's nueroscientific revolution so personally rewarding to track: it gives us new, if sometimes alienating, perspectives on ourselves, new ways to step outside our own skin. These perspectives are great because, as telepresence proves, the mind likes to cruise around and check stuff out. You can even look at the course of a single day as a journey through very different states of mind. When you pour the first cup of coffee, you leave sleepyhead world and enter the bright and enthusiastic world of caffeine. When you walk through the office door, you enter a social world with different rules and expectations than your home crib. When you read a novel or boot up a video game, the mind gets its passport stamped yet again. Whenever we plug ourselves into new technologies, whenever we explore altered states of sex or drugs or extreme sports, whenever we plunge, yet again, into the intense psychodramas of our drives, we are partly motivated by the mind's inherent desire to move. If the mind is a traveler, then it needs a travel guide, and that's what this modest section of Looking Glass aims to be. Whether we are reporting on the latest research in consciousness or the latest designer drug, whether we are exploring inner feelings or the outer limits of the human imagination, whether we are looking for extra-solar planets through telescopes or reading the Akashic Record with our yogi-fied third eye, we want the mind to feel ready and willing wherever it goes. So where is your mind? You probably don't know, because it's one step ahead of you. But this may be a good place to start.