Dr. Baland Jalal
speaker
177 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Baland Jalal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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and said in its own ways, it has this fluidity to it. So that's kind of my view of the brain overall, that it's a dynamic object. But beyond that, let me also explain some of our experiments. So the way that we approach science and probing the human brain is through experiments where we look at conceptual experiments in neuroscience.
So for example, there's the rubber hand illusion, if you probably know that.
So the rubber hand illusion is this illusion where you have a chap, he puts his hand right here, and then you have his right hand underneath the table, right? And so me, Balan, the experimenter, will stroke and tap the hand of the experimental subject. I'll go stroke, stroke, tap, tap, tap, tap, stroke, stroke underneath the table. And I'll stroke and tap the table in front of Joe, the subject.
I'll go tap, tap, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, tap, tap. Yes, sir. And about two minutes of me doing this, he will feel touch sensations arising from the table. And I don't mean this in kind of an abstract metaphorical sense. I mean this literally. He will have touch sensations, somatosensory regions of his brain becoming active from this process.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's an embodiment, right? So in two minutes, I turn this subject into a table, right? And then more than that, if I, me, you know, Balan, was to take a hammer and go like this on the table, he'll go, you know, he'll feel pain sensations, right? So the pain regions of his brain will light up if I was to look in a scanner and, you know, look at the neurons there.
So it shows you that in that way, you can take... First of all, you can create a sensation of this table belonging to you, but then... Being part of you. Big part of you, right? It becomes an embodied part of you. But then beyond that, you afflict pain now to the table, in fact, and then you will feel... Yeah, well, that would also be part of social perception, I presume.
It's very interesting. So we actually, we were the first group to show that people with OCD who has very fixed sense of self, right? So they wash their hands all the times, washing and scrubbing.
When they do this illusion, they have a much more sensitivity to it to the extent that there's a control condition for this illusion where you, so the illusion, for the illusion to occur, you have to stroke and tap, tap, tap, stroke and stroke and tap in a synchronized manner. That's important, right? So that's key.
But in people with, oh, so the control for this, by the way, is if you do it in a random sequence, like tap, tap, stroke, stroke, but everything is just random. Right. And you do, again, the touching and stroking is random. Then the illusion will not occur or it would be slightly. So you have a slight illusion there or most of the time, no illusion. So this is the key control for the illusion.
Right.
Correct.
Yes. Okay, so elaborate on that. Absolutely. And I just want to, just one point here is that I mentioned a table. So the original experiment was done with a rubber hand, right? Right, right. But I'm using table because it's more, it illustrates the experiment better, I think, and you can have a table as well.
Right. So instead of a table, you just have a rubber hand that looks like your own hand, and then you stroke and tap the rubber hand, right, in front of the person.
Right, right, exactly.
They flinch if there's a threat to it, right?
Correct. Or in fact, you can do it in air. So you do know Rich McNally? Yes. He's a common friend, right? Yeah, yeah. So one day McNally and I did it in the air. So I did it on Rich, call him Rich. So it's stroke, stroke, tap, tap in the air. And he felt the rubber, like his own hand was floating in the air. It was kind of spooky. Wow. He went, my God, what's happening?
I feel my hand is floating in the air.
And I do want to differentiate between plasticity and then the dynamic nature of the function of the modules of the brain. So, for example, you have, in terms of the rubber hand illusion, it shows that, for example, we have a structure called the TPJ right here, temporal parietal junction is the fancy name for that.
That structure is important for taking all the sensory modalities, touch, hearing, feeling, right? So, smelling and sort of unifying that into a whole. That's a cortical area? It's a cortical area. Where is it located? It's called a TPJ. So, it's temporoparietal junction. So, it's kind of strategically located between the different sort of areas. occipital somatosensory region and the temporal.
It does, exactly. It's like a crossroad, so to speak, right?
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