The visitor from an alternate universe

Making its way around the internet in the last few days we have the strange story of Lerina Garcia, a Spanish woman who is making an extraordinary claim; that she has side-slipped into our world from an alternate universe, where things are similar -- but not identical -- to this one.

This story, which could come straight from a script for Star Trek: The Next Generation, would be funny if it weren't for how serious Ms. Garcia sounds about it.  Here's how her plight was described on the site All About Occult:

Lerina Garcia, a then 41-year-old woman from Spain, well-educated, came up with a rather fascinating story.  According to her, as she woke up on an unspecified day in March 2008, her eyes fell upon her bed sheets.  Strangely, they weren't the ones she remembered going to sleep to.  Neither were her pyjamas. As she decided to ignore the minute peculiarities to go to her office, the same she had been working for since 20 years, she found that the department which she called hers didn't have her name on the plate.  First she thought she had got the wrong floor, but no, everything was the same, same floor, same department, except it wasn't hers.  Then she found out she had been working in a different department altogether, for director she didn't even recognize.  Scared, she left the office on sickness grounds.

Understandably.  But the strangeness didn't end there.  In Garcia's own words (translated, obviously, into English; this is verbatim from the site, and I'm aware that some of it seems a little oddly-phrased):

6 months ago I’m not with my partner of 7 years, we left and started a relationship with a guy in my neighborhood.  I know him well, I’ve been 4 months with him and know his name, address, where he works as a child you have and where he is studying. Well, now there is this guy.  It seems that existed before my ‘jump’ but now no trace, I hired a detective to look for it and there in this ‘flat’. 

I went to a psychiatrist and attribute it to stress, believed to be hallucinations, but I know not.  My ex-boyfriend is with me as usual, I’ve never left it seems, and Augustine (my boyfriend now) seems to never have existed here, it lives in the apartment where he lived nor find his son. I swear it’s real, I am very sane.

First of all, I can't imagine living through this.  The terror must be extreme.  From the report, it sounds like Ms. Garcia is entirely sincere (i.e., not a hoaxer), although it certainly can be hard to make that judgment simply from an article.  But going on the assumption that she isn't lying outright, what are our options for an explanation?

Well, it hardly needs saying that I'm not buying that she's a visitor from an alternate universe.  The ad hoc assumptions that would be necessary for us to believe that are simply too numerous.  So I think we can safely cancel the Red Alert Status, and send Geordi LaForge et al. back to their stations.

[image courtesy of artist Christian Schirm and the Wikimedia Commons]

What I think is most likely here is that Ms. Garcia is a victim of something akin to the Capgras delusion, about which I have written before (read my original post here).  While this isn't classic Capgras -- the most common manifestation of which is a sudden conviction that everyone has been replaced by perfect duplicates -- the similarities are apparent.  And she certainly has what is the most striking thing about Capgras and other delusional disorders, which is that while the sufferer is exhibiting symptoms of serious impairment, at the same time (s)he is absolutely convinced that (s)he is entirely sane.

One of the most terrifying things about such aberrations, I think.  At least for most other disorders, you know you're sick.  Here, you're convinced that you're seeing things correctly -- and therefore, it must be everyone else who is seeing things wrong.

So for all of the people who are citing Ms. Garcia's case as proof of alternate universes and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and so forth, I'm not finding it convincing.  It's much more likely that she had a minor stroke, perhaps in the limbic system or temporal lobe, which function together to allow for facial recognition and memory.  Rather than trumpet her case as proof of the paranormal, it might be better to see to it that she has a CT scan, and appropriate treatment for what is almost certainly a neurological disorder, not anything (literally) otherworldly.

My evil twin

One of the creepiest of psychological phenomena is the Capgras delusion.  Sometimes associated with schizophrenia, the Capgras delusion is the conviction that your friends and family have been replaced by perfect doubles.  It also occasionally occurs with acute prosopagnosia ("face blindness"), usually caused by a stroke that affects the limbic system.  In this case, the part of the brain that usually recognizes faces (the temporal lobe) is functioning normally, but the part of the brain that associates faces with emotions (the limbic system) is not, so you have the impression of seeing someone whom you recognize... but they don't "feel right."

This idea has been riffed upon in a number of works of fiction, most famously The Body Snatchers, the Jack Finney novel which was the basis of the movie(s) The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  I still remember what for me was the most shudder-inducing moment in the book.  The town doctor is seeing a patient for something minor, and she (the patient) remarks that her cousin Wilma is acting oddly, that Wilma thinks that "Uncle Ira isn't Uncle Ira any more."  The doctor decides to talk to Wilma about it:

Wilma sat staring at me, eyes intense.  "I've been waiting for today," she whispered.  "Waiting till he'd get a haircut, and he finally did."  Again she leaned toward me, eyes big, her voice a hissing whisper.  "There's a little scar on the back of Ira's neck, he had a boil there once, and your father lanced it.  You can't see the scar," she whispered, "when he needs a haircut.  But when his neck is shaved, you can.  Well, today -- I've been waiting for this! -- today, he got a haircut..."

 I sat forward, suddenly excited.  "And the scar's gone? You mean..."

 "No!" she said, almost indignantly, eyes flashing.  "It's there -- the scar -- exactly like Uncle Ira's!"

And you sense, of course, that however foolish it sounds, Wilma's right; her uncle actually isn't himself any more.  That someone could be replaced, down to the detail of a tiny scar -- well, it gave me what the Scots call "the cauld grue."  And later, when Wilma sees the doctor again, and laughingly tells him that she'd been acting so silly, of course Uncle Ira is the real Uncle Ira, I shivered even harder.  Because that meant that they had gotten her, too.

The concept is also reflected in the legend of the doppelgänger, or "double walker," an individual out there lurking in the shadows who looks exactly like you.  It's interesting how many cultures have a myth based upon this concept.  The vardøger of Norse myth, the etiäinen in Finland, the ka of the Ancient Egyptians -- all were physical copies of your body, down to the last freckle, and if you happened to run into it, it could result in anything from bad luck to replacement to death.  Even in the changeling myths of Ireland we see this concept; that the Elves could replace a normal human infant with an Elvish copy.  The changeling, they said, would grow up wild and uncontrollable, and would have violent reactions in certain situations (especially in church during the sacraments).  I've often wondered if this last story, however, was invented to explain chronically unruly children.  "He certainly can't be my real son, any son of mine wouldn't act this way.  I know... it was those damned Elves!"

It's also interesting to note that a number of famous people, including Goethe, John Donne, Percy Shelley, and Abraham Lincoln, all reported that they'd seen doppelgängers at some time during their lives (Donne's vision was of his wife, who was bedridden at the time). 

So, what could cause such a pervasive myth?  Once again, what we're probably looking at is a brain-wiring issue.  A paper in Nature, published in 2006, described how a sensation of being in the presence of your double could be induced by electrical stimulation of the left temporal-parietal junction.  This was discovered quite by accident -- the patient in question was receiving the procedure as a treatment for epilepsy (she was otherwise mentally completely normal).  While the stimulation was being applied, she had the sudden, and unpleasant, sensation of having a duplicate of herself immediately behind her.  As soon as the stimulation was ceased, the sensation vanished.

Our sense of identity is so wrapped up not only in our knowledge of our own minds and bodies, but in our feeling of uniqueness, that it is profoundly unsettling to consider even in a fictional setting that there might be someone who was our exact duplicate.  That such a duplicate could replace us, and fool even our friends and family, is one of the creepiest ideas I know of.  Our recognition of people we know is based on a mental network of knowledge, impressions, and emotional responses, both conscious and subconscious -- and when any bit of that network isn't working, it can result in one of the most disturbing and frightening delusions known to medical science.