Body Swap Illusion Can Make You Believe You’re A Robot (Or A Chick)
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 4 of December , 2008 at 4:57 am
Swedish neuroscientists have figured out experimentally that a simple stereo camera setup and some careful touching can get about 70 or 80 percent of people to feel like they exist in a different body. It’s a straightforward experiment: two cameras are positioned to give a subject a view of a mannequin’s torso, from the mannequin’s perspective. The images are sent to VR goggles worn by the subject. If the subject and the mannequin are both touched on the torso, the subject begins to associate the touch they are feeling on their body with the image they are seeing on the mannequin’s body, and eventually, most subjects are able to associate themselves completely with the artificial body. When researchers suddenly brought out a knife and pretended to stab the mannequin, subjects instinctively reacted like they were about to get stabbed themselves. The instinctive part is key: people weren’t just pretending, their brains were to some extent fooled into believing that the other body was theirs.
“The principle finding was that under certain conditions, a person can perceive another body as his or her own, even if it is an opposite gender, or an artificial body. This effect is so robust that, while experiencing being in another person’s body, a participant can face his or her biological body and shake hands with it without breaking the illusion.”
Artificial body? Opposite gender? Okay, just two questions: where do I sign up, and can I choose my own artificial body? National Geographic has a video, if you want to see how the setup works.
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Category: Cybernetics, Novelty, Research
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