In a strange neuroscience experiment, researchers determined that an individual wearing virtual reality goggles showing video streaming from another person's body can have the sensation that the other body is his or her own. The results of the experiments, conducted at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, were published in the journal Public Library of Science ONE. From the abstract:
The concept of an individual swapping his or her body with that of another person has captured the imagination of writers and artists for decades. Although this topic has not been the subject of investigation in science, it exemplifies the fundamental question of why we have an ongoing experience of being located inside our bodies. Here we report a perceptual illusion of body-swapping that addresses directly this issue. Manipulation of the visual perspective, in combination with the receipt of correlated multisensory information from the body was sufficient to trigger the illusion that another person's body or an artificial body was one's own. This effect was so strong that people could experience being in another person's body when facing their own body and shaking hands with it. Our results are of fundamental importance because they identify the perceptual processes that produce the feeling of ownership of one's body.
"
If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping"
(PLoS ONE), "
How To Use Neuroscience to Become Your Avatar"
(Wired)
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It's an instance of the ego-construct being tightly tied to the perceptual model fed by the senses.
I wish to replicate this experiment. Repeatedly. Personally.
And after you die your soul knows that it is still you by...?
Forget body switching. Let's figure out some way to swap bank accounts with people.
Love to do this with my wife...:)...or would that be just me and me?
you mean men will finally be able to satisfy women?
"I think I am somebody else, therefore I am," - René Descartes
I guess, as a knee-jerk response to the article, this DOES make sense for anyone who plays video games. And you can make a fairly simple leap of logic.
If you were wearing blinders that only let you see out of a camera, and that camera was put on someone else's head...if you swung a board at them, *you'd* instinctively duck, even though you aren't personally in any danger. As I commented, this is obvious to any video gamer - everyone has done just that at *least* once during playing.
And it seems fairly straightforward that if this person wearing the camera were to look at the actual you (wearing your goggle), and you could see via their camera a board coming at your head (that you can't see yourself, due to the blinders), you'd probably not instinctively duck. Logic would allow you to do so, likely - but after a delay, I don't think it would be as instinctive.
The study seems to expand on that idea.
I did this back in the 70's without technology, using the local herb...
Neuromancer style POV jacking in is coming.
I was just watching Brainstorm (1983 movie with Christopher Walken) a few days ago, which explores the darker territories one could explore with this (and goes a lot further technology wise as well). Intriguing stuff.
This could be the makings of a great party!
Invite 40 people, designate 20 as watchers, 20 as hosts.
Have the hosts wear a pair of tactical headmount cameras (one for each eye) similar to http://www.gizmag.com/head-mounted-camera-for-recording-special-moments/9174/ and a wireless transmitter backpack or belt.
The watchers wear binocular HMDs with a mic.
The watchers and hosts will be in separate locations and every 5 minutes the watcher/host pairs are randomly shuffled. Playing with who can hear the watchers over their mic can be a lot of fun too. Would require a bit of hardware to handle the transmissions and feeds but wow oh wow would it be a fun time!
Just, do not invite Ralph Fiennes to the party
My first reaction to this was that they could have saved time by talking to video puppeteers. This is a common sensation particularly when using VR goggles as one's monitor.
It's similar to what DDERIDEX talks about with video games, I think.
You can acheive the same effect on a smaller scale really easily. Instead of your whole body, just replace your hand: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=PsT-KZpkgrw
New Scientist posted a better video than that but I can't find it right now... basically, hide one of your hands from view and put a fake hand in view above / next to it. Then watch the fake hand as a friend simultaneously strokes the back of your hand ond the fake. Within a couple of minutes you'll start to feel that the fake hand is your own and be surprised that you can't move it. The hand doesn't need to look realistic - a cheap one from a joke shop or even a stuffed glove should work ok.
Some people can take this further - I have a friend whom I can make feel that a tabletop is part of their body using the same technique!
I know it looks stupid but, seriously, try it. Entertainingly weird and makes for a great party trick.
Great. A long while ago we did an experiment with very similar setup and goals. Meet Teleperception by Yuri, anno 1998:
The web site:
http://yuri.at/teleperception/
A picture of the gear (tinker - tinker!):
http://yuri.at/teleperception/daten/bild1.jpg
A report of a session:
http://www.timesup.org/CTL/backlog3a.html
(I'm not claiming that our approach was as professional as Karolinska Institute's :)
Didn't the wonderfully idiosyncratic science writer Grant Fjermedal write about this effect in his 1986 book The Tomorrow Makers? Only he was interacting with robots instead of other people.
I think it was in his chapter on Hans Moravec: he suddenly realized he was having an out-of-body experience, and looking down on himself from above (where the eyepiece video cameras were).
Spooked him.
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSB33509820071121
didn't realize it was quite THAT old
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O87-invertingspectacles.html
Takuan, thanks for the links.
There are lots of interesting neurological effects like this, and they've been written about popularly for quite some time. I am not getting what is new about this particular effect.
Is there a neurologist on board?
There was a similar art installation in Seattle in the Magnuson Park hangars about 5 years ago. You walked into a room and were silently handed a rubber suit that you got into. The suit was then inflated, and a headpiece with a little viewer was put on you. You were placed with others in similar suits in a room, but you did not know others were there at first, because your viewer was attached to cameras, and the source of your image alternated between coming from your own head, coming from someone else's head, and coming from a fixed location in the room. The inflated suit made the out of body/is that my body effect even more pronounced. I remember feeling discombobulated, but of course it was interesting. Once, someone else in a suit reached out and squeezed my hand, which was really sweet.
O, I nearly forgot: then there was this brilliant installation by Japanese artists that I saw at a 1998 Ars Electronica Festival:
2 people where each given video goggles and head mounted cameras. Each person would see in them what the other person's camera was filming. (A curious detail was a little backpack with batteries and transmitters in them and little feather wings on them.)
I can't remember neither the Artist's nor the installation's name, does anybody else know of them here?
The effect was fantastic and really blurred my notion what's "me" and "the other" - much more so than the experiments we conducted ourselves with only a one-directional transmission (see comment above).
There was a Radio Lab show that discusses a similar phenomenon, G-Loc. This is obviously different than switching perceptions with another body, but the concepts are core to understanding how perception works physiologically.:
"'I was there. But I, like, wasn't there. I was floating. I was looking at myself from outside of myself.'
If it hasn't happened to you, it's likely happened to somebody you know. And whether or not you believe it, about one in ten people report having had one. "Out of body" experience, it's a dirty word in many circles. Which is perhaps why pilots call it "G-LOC" (gravity-induced loss of consciousness, pronounced "G-lock" not "glok"). Turns out this kind of experience (call it what you want) occurs quite frequently among fighter pilots.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/05/05/segments/59026
-tgb
Thanks for switching bodies with me, lady! I'll be in my bunk.
Better yet, save a few hundred bucks on cameras and head-mounted TVs: just walk up to a big mirror and "shake your own hand".