How ordinary water can affect our consciousness

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

People are often unhappy with themselves. Some make special efforts to look at the world in a new way and find hidden opportunities in themselves. They go to the mountains, attend trainings or “open the chakras”. Their goal is to become a different person, an improved version of themselves. And since the desire for their own upgrade in people is inexhaustible, the development of science will help to realize it with frightening efficiency. Although in the future, it is possible that short-term personality changes will be in high demand.

This is convenient in a situation that requires qualities that you do not have. For example, a shy person turns into an orator for an hour and speaks at ease in front of a large audience. It is realistic to expect this even during our lifetime, and this forecast does not require excessive imagination. After all, it is possible to temporarily change some properties of the psyche today. Moreover, without effective drugs or electromagnetic effects.

Fred Mast, Professor at the University of Bern, Head of the Department of Cognitive Psychology, Perception and Methodology at the Institute of Psychology:

“From the point of view of behaviorism, any purchase is a struggle between pleasure and pain: the pleasure of owning a thing and the pain of parting with money when paying. On one side of the scale - the attractiveness of the thing, on the other - a comparison of the price and the maximum amount that the buyer is willing to pay. The caloric test does not affect the maximum possible price, but stimulates the activity of the insular lobe of the cerebral cortex. The insular lobe is usually responsible for signals of disgust, which reduces the attractiveness of the item, thereby reducing the likelihood of a purchase."

For the sick

If a person shows unjustified optimism, it is very easy to bring him back to earth. It is necessary to rinse his left ear canal with a little cool water. After this safe and painless procedure, the person begins to assess the situation more realistically. And it's not about the experienced discomfort - washing the right ear will not give such a result. The perception of the surrounding world changes due to stimulation of the right inferior frontal gyrus.

By pouring water into your left ear, you stimulate some areas of the right hemisphere of the brain (and vice versa). Such an experiment was carried out by scientists at the University of London together with colleagues from the universities of Basel and Zurich.

Some patients, as a result of neurological disorders, completely ignore one half of the space. If you ask them to draw a clock face, they will draw a circle, but fill it with numbers only on one side - say, 12-1-2-… 6. After a caloric test in the left ear, they draw the dial in a completely normal form. Ignoring temporarily disappears, the perceived world expands twice.

Ear canal lavage is a long-standing technique well known to neurologists as the caloric test. The patient's head is tilted back at a certain angle, about 20 ml of water is gradually fed into the external auditory canal through a flexible tube, which is then poured back.

Depending on the selected temperature, water leads to cooling or heating of the liquid media of the inner ear, which causes convective movement of the endolymph in the horizontal semicircular canal, irritating its receptors. Usually this test is used to diagnose the vestibular apparatus (its English name is Caloric vestibular stimulation, CVS). However, the potential of this procedure is much higher.

Experts have found that it stimulates specific areas of the brain and allows you to influence the cognitive and psychological states of a person.

With a similar syndrome, anosognosia, the patient is unaware (and denies) that he has a problem, such as visual defects or paralysis of the limb. When the patient's ear is washed, he is temporarily transformed: he begins to recognize his paralyzed hand and recognizes its immobility.

Although the effect is short-lived, the caloric test is able to improve speech perception in aphasia (speech impairment due to damage to the speech cortex of the brain), reduce phantom pain, and even relieve symptoms of mania in a situation where antipsychotic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy are not helping. All these results of such a simple procedure are caused by the stimulation of several areas of the brain through the action on the receptors of the inner ear. But scientists began to discover the most unexpected consequences of ear washing recently, working with healthy volunteers.

And for the healthy

Neurophysiologists from the University of Bern (Switzerland) have found that caloric breakdown can influence the desire to make a purchase. In their experiment, about forty young women chose the products they were willing to purchase. If the subject studied the catalog after pouring cool water (20 ° C) into her left ear, the attractiveness of the product for the customer decreased and the number of her purchases decreased markedly. The warm infusion had no such effect.

The caloric test demonstrates how closely everything is interconnected in the brain. Flushing acts on the vestibular system, somatosensory areas, arousal can reach areas associated with emotions and motivation.

The experiment with female customers is especially interesting in that the conscious choice of a healthy person was influenced. Moreover, it turned out that it depends on the temperature in the area of the inner ear! It turns out that even the highest mental functions of a person can be accessed from completely unexpected places. What humanity, of course, will not miss taking advantage of. Take care of your ears!