Moving this out of a subthread, but I can't find any sources corroborating the the phenomenon described in this article. In fact a lot of the literature from NASA seems to explicitly contradict the claims in the article[0][1]. Obviously not dispositive, but this article reads to me at least partially like AI confabulation. Perhaps my Google-fu is lacking here but I had Claude do a search as well for good measure and couldn't find any supporting evidence that way either. Without the author offering more primary sources I would advise against placing too much if any stock in this piece.
I spent months underwater on a US submarine and felt the same thing. Later the Navy pdoc labelled it dissociation, which is in the DSM.
Common Types and Symptoms
Depersonalization: Feeling detached from your own body, mind, or actions, like watching yourself in a movie.
Derealization: Feeling that the outside world is fake, dreamlike, or foggy.
Dissociative Amnesia: Forgetting important personal information or blocks of time that go beyond normal memory loss.
Identity Confusion or Alteration: Feeling unsure of who you are or experiencing shifts in your personality.
Causes and Triggers
Trauma and Stress: Acts as a defense mechanism against overwhelming stress, abuse, or frightening events.
Everyday Triggers: Loud noises, strong emotions, or reminders of past trauma.
Mild States: Getting lost in a book, daydreaming, or "highway hypnosis" while driving.
There is no observer in realization. Dissociation is having your self be separated from reality. Safe from the trauma, but not whole. Mystic union is more like having seeing the boundaries between self and other as illusory, and fully experiencing.
The deeper you get into dissociation, the more a LOT of mysterious or mystical human experiences start to make sense. The public generally doesn’t understand the mechanism or that our brains can do it, or how far it can go into structural dissociation.
I think you all might be using the wrong terminology here. The Observer Effect is a part of quantum physics. I was shocked to learn there was a psychological phenomenon by the same name and went to read up on it, but there doesn't seem to be such a thing and I'm not really sure what you're referencing.
Is there another name you might know this by? Disassociation is the only thing I can find that sounds similar.
No one but you capitalized it. They are referring to what TFA describes ... it uses the phrase "observer sensation" rather than "observer effect", but it is an effect.
I’d be curious to learn about what you were experiencing, what the astronauts experience and the third man syndrome that Everest hikers experience. I don’t know if they are similar but I’d be curious to learn more about how our perception and attachment to our bodies changes while enduring these extreme conditions.
As a side note, it seems pretty naive to believe that humans would be able to handle going to Mars without serious psychosis. I have no idea, but it would not be surprising to find out it is an insurmountable obstacle to becoming an interplanetary species.
I would be extremely surprised if it's insurmountable. It may turn out that this effect is triggered by environmental factors that are entirely controllable that we simply never had any reason to control.
There are so many unknowns when it comes to crewed space travel and habitation that it's difficult to say much of anything with certainty.
I’ve always thought the same thing with regards to early explorers. Being on a ship, sailing into the complete unknown, for months. How would you not go insane?
Wow, I would sign up instantly for such a voyage to Mars. I am probably too old but knowing why you are engaged in a heroic task makes one happy to tolerate all kinds of problems. Sure they might get a bit twitchy but gonna stay basically glued.
Back around 2015, I did an experiment where I spent most of my working day in VR (mostly spent iterating on some interaction space designs in TiltBrush). I had many of those feelings directly after. It actually felt uncomfortable to be around people. It felt like everyone was too close and were about to clip though me at any second.
I spent about an hour in a VR entertainment space, where you donned a headset and played a game designed for a large play-space.
It was incredibly fun, but afterwards driving my car home I felt like the driving experience wasn't "real", and I had to put more conscious effort into my driving than usual to remain a safe driver. It took a few hours to wear away.
(This was a very distinct experience from what I have felt when binging a VR game like Half-Life: Alyx at home, where I get urges to teleport-move around my house and my hand-perception is off).
This somewhat reminds me of the cognitive layers as understood by Nisargadatta Maharaj.
»The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness; you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way. Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it.« —Nisargadatta Maharaj
We are usually submerged and self-identify with what is known experience and therefore rarely ever question it. When the lived context of the cognitive environment we take for granted profoundly changes in unexpected and not yet experienced ways the absence of being submerged into the known emerges. And then the so called witness state of perception is suddenly obvious.
I have felt this many times after extended travels and stays in other cultural spheres where other languages (which I manage fine) are spoken.
As a high-functioning autistic person, the description of being “a half-step outside the frame” perfectly captures the way I live.
I am, and have always been, aware that I am experiencing the world and my own sense of self slightly removed from how people typically experience the world. It is very much like playing a first-person game with the POV set so the view is through the character’s eyes, but you remain aware that you are controlling an avatar in the game nonetheless.
Edit: interesting how they describe the degraded sense of proprioception as part of the cause, given it is often a problem for autistics.
Being an astronaut seems cognitively expensive. Your time is regimented down to the minute. Your space is regimented down to the inch. The things you bring up and down, including yourself, is measured to the pound. I would imagine you have to constantly be evaluating, assessing, and thinking critically about everything you do all the time. And then to suddenly not have to do that and just live in the moment has to be a massive readjustment.
You gotta fight for time to use the restroom even: https://idlewords.com/shepard_pee.htm I mean it makes sense in a way. It's probably more cost effective to have 100 people on the ground spreadsheeting out your entire day to the minute than have 1 astronaut hour spent planning, but it would probably drive me completely insane. Reminds me of that story about the earring that slowly absorbs your mind as you let it make every single decision for you: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yva...
There's a popular clip from Joe Rogan out there where he says "Be the hero of your own movie. If your life was a movie and it started now. ... What would the hero of your life’s movie do right now? Do that. Do those things."
So it's interesting that this cognitive state is helpful for some people to visit in a transient or metaphorical way but becomes weird when it's persistent. But it does seem potentially related in that maybe it originates from a kind of conscientiousness in the astronaut profession
Why would I want to be the hero at the START of the movie? That's when I'm just doing my daily shit and I'm showing off all of my character flaws. That's the worst possible moment of the movie to be aping the hero.
Your comment lead me down a rabbit hole of space micromanagement. OSTPV (onboard short-term planner viewer) is the software they use to basically schedule every minute of your space flight. Basically every day someone from earth decides what you do, when you eat, when you exercise and will make changes in realtime.
I used to spend weeks outdoors in the wilderness without ever entering a building (I would sleep in a small tent) and I used to have a similar range of sensations when coming back home and/or going into an enclosed building for the first time. This used to last maybe for a couple days.
Two more things that I used to experience, which are not among the phenomena described in the article, is that I was hyper aware of how sound echoed through a room, and I used to be hyper aware of how hard the floor was (carpeted floors are not common where I grew up, most rooms have tiled floors) I guess these two are something specific to the outdoor->indoor change and so they don't apply to astronauts.
I feel some of that when I return from international trips. Like an outsider looking in. Not to the same degree as what the article describes though.
Being in a different culture, hearing and speaking a different language, different foods, sights, and smells. Then a day of travel later on the return and everything familiar feels oddly new and the same. While dealing with sleep deprevation on top of that because I can't easily sleep more than an hour at a time on airplanes.
I have worked remotely for years after being in the office for years and I get a similar feeling when I go back twice a year. Nothing really has changed but to me it's sort of new so the overall feeling is pretty surreal.
Same feeling when I go back to the village I grew up in. I have been away for decades but at the same time nothing and a lot has changed.
I was reading the article trying to find a source cited where I could see where the depersonalization symptoms are better described but didn’t find it. Anybody have a better link to primary sources?
I can't either. In fact a lot of the literature from NASA seems to explicitly contradict the claims in the article[0][1]. Obviously not dispositive, but this article reads to me at least partially like AI confabulation. Perhaps my Google-fu is lacking here but I had Claude do a search as well for good measure and couldn't find any supporting evidence that way either.
The mind works with benchmarks on a constant basis. Everything is a comparison - to your prior experiences, other people's experiences, your identity, etc etc etc
Introducing a new benchmark creates a new perspective to measure old perspectives against. In essence, de-sycing your perceptions of self, reality, etc until the new and old normalize out.
(You see this with psychedelics a lot which is why it can be such a valuable therapy for depression and PTSD)
It is no wonder that being put in a giant space bullet, shot into the darkness of space, with the light of your world reflected back at you like the ultimate out of body experience leads to an "observer" sensation.
I get this sometimes when I wake up at night and once or twice when looking in the mirror. A persistent notion that "wow, this is really weird to be in a body, what a weird experience!" It used to be a little scary, but as I've gotten older I've come to like it. I think it's funny that we call this state "dissociation", when, frankly, not one of us knows what the heck any of "this" is anyway. Is it "real"? What if the dissociative state is actually more like a temporary loss of the illusion of life?
I had that one time. I was kind of ill at the time and it lasted about an hour. That is some freaky shit if you don't know what is going on. My continuing thought was "Is this going to last forever?"
[0] https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/Evidence/reports/BMed.... [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-30583-2_...
Is there another name you might know this by? Disassociation is the only thing I can find that sounds similar.
As a side note, it seems pretty naive to believe that humans would be able to handle going to Mars without serious psychosis. I have no idea, but it would not be surprising to find out it is an insurmountable obstacle to becoming an interplanetary species.
There are so many unknowns when it comes to crewed space travel and habitation that it's difficult to say much of anything with certainty.
It was incredibly fun, but afterwards driving my car home I felt like the driving experience wasn't "real", and I had to put more conscious effort into my driving than usual to remain a safe driver. It took a few hours to wear away.
(This was a very distinct experience from what I have felt when binging a VR game like Half-Life: Alyx at home, where I get urges to teleport-move around my house and my hand-perception is off).
Drug use can also cause dpdr
»The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness; you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way. Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it.« —Nisargadatta Maharaj
We are usually submerged and self-identify with what is known experience and therefore rarely ever question it. When the lived context of the cognitive environment we take for granted profoundly changes in unexpected and not yet experienced ways the absence of being submerged into the known emerges. And then the so called witness state of perception is suddenly obvious.
I have felt this many times after extended travels and stays in other cultural spheres where other languages (which I manage fine) are spoken.
I am, and have always been, aware that I am experiencing the world and my own sense of self slightly removed from how people typically experience the world. It is very much like playing a first-person game with the POV set so the view is through the character’s eyes, but you remain aware that you are controlling an avatar in the game nonetheless.
Edit: interesting how they describe the degraded sense of proprioception as part of the cause, given it is often a problem for autistics.
So it's interesting that this cognitive state is helpful for some people to visit in a transient or metaphorical way but becomes weird when it's persistent. But it does seem potentially related in that maybe it originates from a kind of conscientiousness in the astronaut profession
Great read here with a video of someone using the actual software: https://blogs.esa.int/iriss/2015/09/09/playing-with-playbook...
Two more things that I used to experience, which are not among the phenomena described in the article, is that I was hyper aware of how sound echoed through a room, and I used to be hyper aware of how hard the floor was (carpeted floors are not common where I grew up, most rooms have tiled floors) I guess these two are something specific to the outdoor->indoor change and so they don't apply to astronauts.
Being in a different culture, hearing and speaking a different language, different foods, sights, and smells. Then a day of travel later on the return and everything familiar feels oddly new and the same. While dealing with sleep deprevation on top of that because I can't easily sleep more than an hour at a time on airplanes.
Same feeling when I go back to the village I grew up in. I have been away for decades but at the same time nothing and a lot has changed.
[0] https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/Evidence/reports/BMed.... [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-30583-2_...
“I woke up one morning, and all of my stuff had been stolen and replaced by exact duplicates.
I couldn't believe it.
I called my roommate in and said, 'Come here, look at this stuff, it's all an exact replica. What do you think?'
He said, 'Do I know you?'”
Introducing a new benchmark creates a new perspective to measure old perspectives against. In essence, de-sycing your perceptions of self, reality, etc until the new and old normalize out.
(You see this with psychedelics a lot which is why it can be such a valuable therapy for depression and PTSD)
It is no wonder that being put in a giant space bullet, shot into the darkness of space, with the light of your world reflected back at you like the ultimate out of body experience leads to an "observer" sensation.