What's new
TerraForums Venus Flytrap, Nepenthes, Drosera and more talk

Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Pleased to meet me

e01774b0-4a50-4da8-adf0-cf5fe970b2a9.jpeg



Body-swap illusion tricks mind in new study

<!-- End Story Title --> <!-- Story subtitles --> Tuesday, December 2, 2008 9:26 AM EST
The Associated Press
By KARL RITTER Associated Press Writer

<!-- End Story subtitles --> <!-- Story Body --> <!--startclickprintinclude--> STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — Shaking hands with yourself is an amusing out-of-body experience. The illusion of having your stomach slashed with a kitchen knife, not so much.

Both sensations, however, felt real to most participants in a Swedish science project exploring how people can be tricked into the false perception of owning another body.

In a study presented Tuesday, neuroscientists at Stockholm's renowned Karolinska Institute show how they got volunteers wearing virtual reality goggles to experience the illusion of swapping bodies with a mannequin and a real person.

"We were interested in a classical question that philosophers and psychologists have discussed for centuries: why we feel that the self is in our bodies," project leader Henrik Ehrsson said. "To study this scientifically we've used tricks, perceptual illusions."

It sounded intriguing enough for me to try it, though entering the laboratory on Monday, I was having second thoughts.

The first props I saw were two kitchen knives, three naked dummies and a prosthetic hand sticking out from behind a curtain.

"You have the right to say stop at anytime if you feel uncomfortable," said Ehrsson's colleague, Valeria Petkova, as she rubbed my left hand with electrolytic gel and attached electrodes to the middle and index fingers.

She assured me I was not in any danger. Still, a nervous tingle rushed through my body as she placed the headset over my eyes.

In the first experiment, the goggles were hooked up to CCTV cameras fitted to the head of a male mannequin, staring down at its feet. Through the headset I saw a grainy image of the dummy's plastic torso. I tilted my head down to create the sensation I was looking down at my own body.

At that point, it didn't feel very real. But when Petkova simultaneously brushed markers against my belly and that of the mannequin, the effect started setting in. As my brain processed the visual and tactile signals, I had a growing impression that the mannequin's body was my own.

That was good fun, until the gleaming blade of a bread knife entered my field of vision. Petkova slid it across the dummy's stomach, sending shivers down my spine and a pulse of anxiety through the electrodes. My heightened stress level was illustrated by a spike in a computer diagram shown to me after the experiment.
"Approximately 70-80 percent of the people experience the illusion very strongly," Petkova said.
Apparently, I was one of them.

The second experiment was more benign. This time my headset was connected to cameras mounted on a round hat that Petkova was wearing. We faced each other, extended our right arms and shook hands.

Now that was weird: I was supposed to have the sensation of shaking hands with myself. The illusion wasn't perfect as I couldn't quite recognize Petkova's grip as my own, even though that's what the goggles meant to make me believe.

Perhaps the session was too short. The actual study, in which 87 volunteers participated, consisted of repeated sessions that gradually provided more accurate data. The results were published in PLoS One, the online journal of the Public Library of Science.

The principle finding was that under certain conditions a person can perceive another body as his or her own, even if it is of an opposite gender or an artificial body.

"These findings are of fundamental importance because they identify the perceptual processes that make us feel that we own our entire body," the study said.

Ehrsson said the study built on a previous experiment known as the "rubber hand illusion" in which participants were manipulated to experience a rubber hand as their own.

Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, said the Karolinska study was a "step up" from other research on the subject.

"This goes beyond other recent studies, where you've taken ownership of rubber hands and rubber legs," said Spence, who was not involved with the study.

His only concern was whether there might be any lasting effect on participants.

"The questions is what happens if you did it much longer? If you were in there for days and weeks. Would it be like something out of Total Recall?" Spence said, referring to the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger science fiction movie about a virtual vacation that turns into a nightmare.

Ehrsson suggested the findings could be applied in research on body image disorders by exploring how people become satisfied or dissatisfied with their bodies. Another possible application could be developing more advanced versions of computer games such as Second Life, he said.

"It could lead to the next generation of virtual reality applications in games, where people have the full-blown experience of being the avatar," Ehrsson said.
 
that would be FUN to try out! Thanks for the post swords.
 
haha! last I heard of this research, they were putting cameras 2 feet in front of the participants and relaying the image to a headset, and successfully disorienting the crap out of them.

Good stuff. We'll be in the matrix before we know it :D
 
If you read Jean Baudrillard's philosophy and go with his assertions, we've been trapped in the Matrix since at least the 80s! lol!

Check out Simulacra and Simulation (1981) and his other works from there on to the present (he died in 2007). Even if I don't agree fully with all of his conclusions it's some fun brain food anyway. The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact is from 2005 and encompasses the post 9/11 world and is my favorite work of his (outside Sim and Sim) My favor of this title is probably because of it's timeliness, though I do like most all his writing. He hated the parallels people drew from his ideas (simulated reality or "hyper-reality" as he called it) to the Matrix movie since he considered himself a "serious philosopher" and Movies just an example of our simulated world. So the Maxtrix film would be a matrix simulation within a matrix simulation.... But many of his ideas fit well with what the movie shows. I wouldn't be shocked to know the writers of Matrix were interested in attempting to explore his ideas in a visual format. I never saw the followup Matrix movies so I can't say what those were like in comparison to the first one.
 
Back
Top