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NBC
Here's a scene from NBC's new show, "Awake," in which the protagonist, played by Jason Isaacs, experiences two alternate realities.
In the new TV series “Awake,” a detective, his wife, and son, suffer a severe car crash. The detective wakes up. But he seems to live in two realities: In one, his wife is dead and his son lives. In the other, his son is dead and his wife lives. Psychiatrists in each reality tell him the opposite existence is a dream. Yet clues from these parallel lives leak into crime investigations, helping the detective solve them.
Whoa.
But could any such thing happen in real life?
“My first suggestion is that the person who wrote this needs to get some counseling,” offered University of Florida neurologist Dr. Kenneth Heilman.
That would be a “no.” But similar phenomenon do occur.
Heilman himself has a personal experience with something like it. When his mother was in the hospital after a severe heart attack that had restricted blood flow to her brain, she’d sometimes comment that she couldn’t tell if she was dreaming or was awake.
And he once had a patient with viral encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, who said the same thing. Dreaming and waking life had become conflated.
Of course, all of us experience this phenomenon when we sleep and dream. In many, maybe most, dreams, we think what we’re experiencing is real because, as Heilman likes to describe it, we’ve engaged the clutch when sleeping and disconnected our reasoning, centered in the frontal cortices.
“That’s why, in the middle of a dream, you don’t think ‘OK, I can’t be hanging on to the top of a double decker bus feeling quite excited but not afraid as the bus charges around Edinburgh,” explained University of Cambridge professor Sue Llewellyn.
We also can have “lucid dreams,” those dreams that occur, often just before we wake, when our reasoning centers in the frontal lobes began to reengage. We’re asleep, and dreaming, but slightly aware. Also, drugs like LSD can induce hallucinations that blur the boundaries between dream and reality.
Damage to the centers of reasoning and sensory input can create a variety of delusions. Reduplicative paramnesia, for example, was named in 1975 (though it was known as early as 1903) when a doctor realized that a few patients insisted, incorrectly, that the hospital was actually located at another location. Today it’s the insistence by suffers that places, people or events have been duplicated. Parkinson’s disease and strokes can cause the frontal brain lesions that lead to this syndrome, but so can severe trauma.
Like a car accident.
Related:
- Alien hand syndrome: When one hand develops a mind of its own
- Engineer lived with a bullet in his head for eight decades
- Un-paralyzed by a crash? Doctors say it's unlikely
Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.
Leave a Comment:
I'm going to guess that the show is going to end with the shocking realization that both the wife and son are perfectly fine and he's the one in the coma hovering between life and death.
At the end of the last episode the Captain had a clandestine meeting on a park bench and said something about destroying "his whole family." I think the wife and son are both dead.
Saffron77, wow, you are probably right.
Or he's going to awaken in a sweat tent after 12 hours on a peyote trip...
That or he's dead and living in his own personal hell.
When viewed as a collection of electrical signals, there is no qualitative difference between watching an activity and doing the activity. In other words, when you watch a baseball player swing a bat, your brain patterns are exactly the same as when you actually swing a bat. So to your brain, what you dream is real. I find it interesting that we can only use and understand about 20% of our brains workings just as we can interact with and understand only 20% of our universe. We know the other 80% is there, we just have no idea what it is or how to interact with it.
Watching and doing are not the same thing at all. They are both electrical impulses but that's where the similarities end. Motor neurons and the visual cortex are in different areas of the brain. That's why when you are watching a baseball player take a swing, your arms don't move.
Also, that "we only you x% of our brain" argument has been proven false about a billion times. We use 100% of our brains.
Indeed. While not all of our brain is used for cognitive thought, it is all used to maintain the functions of the human body.
We're very complex machines.
anyone know someone with 90% of there brain removed that is just fine? Thought not.
Experiencing the action in real life because you're doing it and dreaming the same action might generate the same "electrical signals" so that in a qualitative sense your brain doesn't differentiate between reality and a dream might be true, but I doubt watching someone do something generates the same signal response as doing it yourself.
Most of us have probably woken up from a dream that seemed so real that we questioned whether or not we actually did what we did in the dream. I think very few people have watched someone else swing a bat and felt that they themselves swung it.
Actually there is a medical procedure where one entire hemisphere of the brain has been removed to control seizures. It's called a hemispherectomy. It must be common because there are a lot of half-brained posts on the Internet.
The idea that we only use 10% of our brains was actually misquoted from William James, I believe. Also, I'm not entirely sure what understanding 20% of the universe even means.
Wheather this senerio is true or not, I fell asleep during awake!
Says the guy who can barely spell; so that really doesn't shock me at all.
Well, since the author of this piece can't spell either:
I'm not sure it's fair to call attention to the poor soul here who has a weak grasp of spelling, grammar, and mechanics. S/he isn't getting paid to write.
maybe we should have good spelling, grammar and mechanics even though we aren't paid. However, you really don't have to have a grasp on English to say, "would you like fries with that" so whatever...
Hmm this is all based on the question- do we live in true reality or some sort of complex computer simulation? My own theory is that if we live in true reality then absolutely nothing can be set in stone including the laws of physics. If anything is actually set in stone then odds are we are not living in true reality.
That's blatantly not true. It may not occur often, but it does occur that during a dream that makes no "sense" you do realise the discrepancy between the dream and the waking life.
I wish people would stop being so flippant about the reality of life, when it's abundantly clear to all - but to those obfuscated by their own "science" (= apparent knowledge) - that too many vital pieces of the puzzle escape us.
Awayke!
Typo. Again. Suffers, instead of sufferers.
Can't MSNBC afford a proofreader?
Or is it that everyone with a keyboard is writer, editor and proofer these days.
Distracting.
Don't watch television!
He's actually in a spaceship on his way to Mars.
(I wonder who will get that reference)