INDEX
Creativity and Reality Emerge from an External Source Beyond Mind and Body
I’d like to ask Deto and Katsuura first: How did you come across Professor Gunji’s works?
Deto: At first, I think I came across a review of Yatte Kuru somewhere. It seemed like an interesting book, so I picked it up, but within ten pages, I thought, “This might be something extraordinary.” Before I even finished reading it, I recommended it to the rest of the band. I felt that it articulated things we had been thinking about in a very clear way.
Katsuura: I read it shortly after, and I felt exactly the same way as Deto. I started to think that the strange sensations I had experienced before might have been related to the “coming” experience described in the book.
What kind of experience was that?
Katsuura: I remember when I went to see Lee Perry’s concert years ago. At first, I thought it was nice music, but then suddenly a massive wave surged from the stage. It wasn’t a metaphor; it was a real “wave” unlike anything I had ever experienced before. It felt like something deep within me, neither my mind nor my body, was suddenly grabbed and I was floating in the sea, riding that wave.
So you felt a “wave” that was not just a cliché, but had a physical reality?
Katsuura: Exactly. It was an experience that went beyond just finding the music interesting; I thought, “This must be what true ‘groove’ feels like.” If I were to describe it simply, I’d say it was a hypnotic state, but for me, it was a profound event that made me realize there’s a whole other world beyond what I had previously understood rationally.
Ideto: You shared that experience with a look of astonishment back then, right?
Katsuura: I’ve been working as a psychiatrist alongside my band for some time now. A few years after that experience, while talking with a patient who had an eating disorder, I suddenly realized that I could listen to various patients’ stories with a sense of reality that I hadn’t felt before. When that patient said, “I eat to fill the void inside me,” it struck me. I thought that maybe that “void” was the same place where I had felt the “wave.”
To borrow a phrase from Gunjii, my experience of touching the limits of my previously “artificial intelligence”-like way of living made me aware of an external reality I hadn’t anticipated before.
Gunji:
That’s a very interesting episode. While the mechanisms behind eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia are still not fully understood, one hypothesis proposes the following:
Humans see their own reflection through mirrors, which gives them a first-person perspective of their face and body. However, they also construct a third-person body image by viewing their profile through double mirrors or by looking at photos taken from behind—essentially layering fragments of their image.
When the link between these first-person and third-person images is disrupted, individuals may look at their first-person reflection after dieting and losing weight, but if their third-person image remains unchanged, they might feel compelled to lose even more weight without being able to control that urge.
Expanding on this hypothesis, I believe it could also effectively explain the out-of-body experiences reported by epilepsy patients during seizures. In such cases, there might be a runaway first-person image observed from a specific coordinate, and to keep that image unified, a perspective of viewing oneself from above may arise.
Katsuura: I see.
Gunji: On the other hand, there are experiments in the field of neuroscience known as out-of-body experiments. These are quite simple: a person’s back is filmed from behind with a camera, and the subject watches this footage through a head-mounted display. In this situation, when someone touches the person’s back, they may feel as if their body is leaving their physical form.
However, when I attempted to recreate this in the lab, I found that it lacked a sense of reality. I wondered if there might be a fundamental difference between the image presented through these logical procedures and the actual experience of out-of-body sensations. In other words, the reality referred to here might also be something that comes entirely from an external source.
Katsuura: That is very interesting.
