Dis(em)body

Our experiments reveal that healthy volunteers can indeed experience other people's bodies, as well as artificial bodies, as being their own. 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. The existence of this illusion (and the identification of the factors triggering it) represents a major advance because it informs us about the processes that make us feel that we own our body in its entirety.

The findings in If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping by Valeria I. Petkova, H. Henrik Ehrsson are remarkable and, not surprisingly, have been widely reported.

Consider them, perhaps, in relation to a more general phenomena: on the down side, a human capacity to mistake our place in life as a whole; on the upside, a capacity for sympathy.


P.S. Only an object that looks like a human body can be 'owned', write Petkova and Ehrsson, but their control was a rectangular object, a green box the same size as a mannequin. What if they used the forms of other animals?

P.S. 9 Dec. Related - Primal, Acute and Easily Duped: Our Sense of Touch

Image: Vishvarupa

Virtually

The ecological niche that human beings occupy depends on virtual reality as directly and absolutely as the ecological niche that koala bears occupy depends on eucalyptus leaves.

-- from The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

At sea

As intelligent creatures go, cephalopods are perhaps the most "other" that we know; think of them as a dress rehearsal for the far-off day when we might encounter intelligent aliens. Cephalopod researchers love to share the latest stories about clever octopuses or emotional cuttlefish—stories that often involve daredevil escapes from aquarium tanks. In [a video made by Roger Hanlon], an octopus on a coral reef crosses a dangerous open stretch between coral heads. The animal assumes the posture, pattern, and coloration of a coral head, then stands on its tippy toes and slowly moves across open ground. The only things moving are the tips of the arms; the rest of the animal appears stationary. But here is the clever part: In shallow water at midday on a sunny, choppy day, intense shadows and light sweep across everything. Not only does the "moving rock" mimic them, it is careful to not exceed the speed of these light effects. It is fully aware of its appearance under changing conditions.

-- Jaron Lanier (April 2006), who in this exchange, says "we are swimming in a sea of mystery".

Image: Octopus vulgaris