Experiment to make other people feel their own

With two cameras and a rubber dummy, scientists can deceive the brain causing the person to do the wrong thing.

"By adjusting the sensors, we make a person lose all sensation in the body and feel the effects on another body ," said lead researcher Henrik Ehrsson.

Researcher Valeria Petkova works with the same sensation to the object and the dummy.

Neurologists at the Karolinska Institute of Medicine in Sweden add two cameras to the dummy's head. At the same time, they connected the cameras with two small screens attached to the volunteer's eyes which made him see what the dummy looked like. Thus, when the camera's eyeballs look directly at him, the volunteer being tested also has the feeling that he is looking at himself.

When the researcher uses two sticks simultaneously touching the volunteer's belly and dummy, he can see the stick touching the tummy of the dummy and feel (but not see) the stick touching his belly. myself. As a result, the volunteer will have a strong feeling that the dummy body is his body.

In another experiment, the camera was attached to the head of another person. When this person and the volunteer turned to each other and shook hands, the volunteer felt that the person wearing the new camera was him.

'The volunteer will see you shaking hands from the perspective of the other person, so feel that his body is different,' said Valeria Petkova, a member of the research team, associate professor Ehrsson. 'Feelings from other people will make the volunteer feel the body is not yours.'

The power of this illusion was confirmed when the volunteer intentionally clamped his hand as the photographer's hand held a knife, while the volunteer's hands were nothing. This hallucination also happens when two people experiment differently, even one man and one woman. However, it can not fool people into misrepresentation with an inanimate object like a chair or a big brick.

The experiments show the way in which the brain constructs its own image. Scientists involved in the project also claim that with the ability to control emotions, one can make another person believe that a new body is his, which is very useful in the realm of virtual reality and Robot manufacturing technology.