Could Visual Reorientation Illusions be 4D Related?

[Hugh]

Hi, I'm new to the forum, and have an interest in Visual Reorientation Illusions (VRIs).

 

A VRI is an instant flip of one's orientational bearing sense, either 90 or 180 degrees.

 

It feels as if one's whole world is rotated around in an instant.

 

One may have experienced being "turned around" in their bearings, and had North, South, East and West exchange their subjective directions.

 

You may have come up from a subway and started heading what you thought was North, only to realize that it was actually South.

 

You realize that you got turned around when you see some buildings, but from a different direction than your "normal" view of them.

 

Everything suddenly flips around back to "normal", and you think to yourself "Okay, now I know where I am!"

 

What has always fascinated me about this though, is the whole process of seeing the same things but from different directions.

 

Having experienced VRIs since childhood, I experimented with the phenomenon and learned how to cognitively initiate the 90 or 180 degree flip at will.

 

To me, there are four different viewpoints available to flip to of any space that I am in.

 

This has lead me to think that there is a possibility that the space around us, and the matter that we are made of has this "extra dimension" to it.

 

When one does the VRI, you enter into what seems like a "parallel world" or "new dimension" of the same world, because everything is still the exact same relative to the parts within it, but relative to where things were it's rotated around 90 or 180 degrees.

 

You may have experienced a VRI "within" a television screen while you are watching a sports event.

 

Let's say you are watching a game that's being played at a stadium that you've previously been to.

 

As you look at the screen, your bearing sense of the picture may be that you see the stadium as being relatively right in front of you, but then you realize that if you would actually be at the stadium, that it would be flipped around 180 degrees from where you thought it was, relatively speaking.

 

What happens is that the whole image gets "flipped around" in an instant, so that your bearing sense is aligned back to it's "normal" view.

 

Here's a view of a field:

 

 

Here's a view of the 4 different viewpoints of the field, that may be accessed with VRIs. Each involves either a 90 or 180 degree flip in orientation, relative to the others.

 

 

One can look at the view of the field and picture oneself in the opposite corner looking back at where one was and the whole field may do a 180 degree VRI for you.

 

What is interesting is that the same VRIs can be experienced "all around you" so that you sense that the whole world has done the flip.

 

The VRI is similar to the necker cube illusion.

 

 

One can see the red dot either inside or outside the box, and an instant flip occurs to make this happen in our perception.

 

Just as our knowledge of 3D allows us to flip a 2D image of a necker cube to a different apparent 3D orientation, is it possible that the existence of 4D space allows us to flip our 3D viewpoint to a different orientation within that space?

 

I found this page from Alex Bogomolny who talked about a tesseract 4D cube here:

 

http://www.maa.org/editorial/knot/tesseract.html

 

Here are some interesting quotes from that page:

 

"In 4D, a shape can be rotated around a plane."

 

"It must be understood that in 4D a 3-dimensional cube has neither inside nor outside. All points of a cube are as much exposed in 4D as are the points of a square in 3D."

 

"Vacuously, in a square there is only 1 square that contains a given edge. In a cube, every edge is shared by 2 squares. In a tesseract, 3 squares meet at every edge. Taken pairwise, squares through the same edge define three cubes. Detecting the three cubes seems akin to shifting a view point when observing the Necker cube."

 

"I found this observation useful when playing with the applet below. What is it about? Travelling in 4D may have a milder effect on a 3D body than turning it inside out. It may only change its orientation."

 

(my highlighting and underlining).

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String theory suggests that there are higher dimensions to everything.

 

If there are actual higher dimensions of space, then what we are made up of and what we are looking at has those higher dimensions as well.

 

What would our experience of them be?

 

Possibly it would involve the ability to view our surroundings from more directions than we would think possible in only our perceived 3D space.

 

We would have all these extra angles to every part of us and so would the universe around us.

 

We wouldn't have to rearrange the fabric of space around us to see it from different angles, just view it from that other direction.

 

Interestingly enough, in 4D, there are shared 2D planes along the edges of the 4D cube, just as there are shared 1D lines along the edges of a 3D cube.

 

Here's a diagram I came up with that shows how the same 2D plane of vision can be seen from two different axes in 4D:

 

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NASA has studied VRIs because up in space, astronauts experience them frequently.

 

Here on Earth, gravity gives our perception a strong up/down bearing, so VRIs usually only happen along the vertical axis, so our sense of North/South/East and West gets flipped around.

 

Up in space, with no gravity, VRI flips can happen along any of the 3 perceived axes. An astronaut may see someone float by "upside down" and they might get a VRI that makes them think that they are the one that is "upside down" instead.

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Whether or not VRIs may be related to the existence of higher spatial dimensions is something that I would like to discuss.

 

Any thoughts?

[Guest joetraff]

Quite informative post indeed.

You gave some food for thought.

[PhDwannabe]

Hugh:

 

As you might be familiar with, your visual system is engaged in all kinds of trickery to create a smooth and usable cognitive experience of vision for you. I actually just got done commenting on another post in this same section in which I noted the old physiological psychology yarn:

 

the retinal image arrives in the cortex "upside-down, full of holes, and standing still."

 

Retinal information is reorganized and jumbled around in so many ways, it's difficult to cover it all even in survey in a several-week unit of a physiological psychology course. I won't try to spit it all out here, just emphasize that this sort of thing is (relatively) normal now and then, and doesn't have anything to do with extra spatial dimensions--rather, it's a property of our extremely complex visual system. There are clusters of neurons up there that are almost hilariously specific. Lesions, for instance, in certain parts of the section called area V5 can knock out your sensitivity to motion, leaving you with akinotopsia, the rather unfortunate inability to see anything that's moving. Experience also seems to be needed to develop (and thus, can also sometimes interfere with as well) certain finely-grained functions. The classic examples of this are Blakemore and Cooper's very unlucky kittens, who were raised in environments consisting of entirely vertical or horizontal lines. They ended up essentially unable to perceive the opposite orientation, or track objects along the experienced orientation (here's a link to the article's citation, but you can Google plenty of fun summaries of it.)

 

The neuropsychological devices used to fiddle with the orientation of retinal images are probably well-known to you already. I noticed that somebody on the other internet forum you posted this question on wisely brought up Stratton's upside-down eyeglasses experiments. This study instituted a line of research which described much of this neuropsychological functionality.

 

To hit the point all over again: the shifting experiences you describe can be induced, or can happen randomly. They're part of the way the visual system works--and occasionally doesn't work optimally. It's a simple and parsimonious explanation that we don't need any extra spatial dimensions for. If it happens to you more often than others, you may have some idiopathic quirk of the visual cortex. Although this phenomenon was originally noticed in epilepsy, the brain may also be susceptible to the "kindling" of just about anything--one neurological experience tends to make it easier for another to happen--we seem to find it now with things like seizures, psychotic breaks, depressive episodes. It's a stab in the dark, but I offer that--who knows?--it could also be implicated here.

 

Finally, although I'm not a physician--and couldn't dispense medical advice over here even if I was--I might say to use some caution here. If you are having experiences like these very often, or their frequency or intensity increases, or you experience other neurological symptoms like any kind of migraine, migraine aura, tingling, numbness, other problems with vision or other senses, tinnitus, dizziness, motor disturbances, stuff like that, it probably wouldn't hurt to see a general practitioner or a neurologist.