3 Foot Nose?
Forget the three foot nose. That’s nothing. Try an out of body experience.
Out-of-body experience recreated
Experts have found a way to trigger an out-of-body experience in volunteers.
Two teams used virtual reality goggles to con the brain into thinking the body was located elsewhere.
The visual illusion plus the feel of their real bodies being touched made volunteers sense that they had moved outside of their physical bodies.
…Their work suggests a disconnection between the brain circuits that process visual and touch sensory information may thus be responsible for some OBEs.
Through these goggles, the volunteers could see a camera view of their own back - a three-dimensional “virtual own body” that appeared to be standing in front of them.When the researchers stroked the back of the volunteer with a pen, the volunteer could see their virtual back being stroked either simultaneously or with a time lag.
The volunteers reported that the sensation seemed to be caused by the pen on their virtual back, rather than their real back, making them feel as if the virtual body was their own rather than a hologram.
Volunteers
Even when the camera was switched to film the back of a mannequin being stroked rather than their own back, the volunteers still reported feeling as if the virtual mannequin body was their own.
And when the researchers switched off the goggles, guided the volunteers back a few paces, and then asked them to walk back to where they had been standing, the volunteers overshot the target, returning nearer to the position of their “virtual self”.
Dr Henrik Ehrsson, who led the UCL research, used a similar set-up in his tests and found volunteers had a physiological response - increased skin sweating - when they felt their virtual self was being threatened - appearing to be hit with a hammer.
Dr Ehrsson said: “This experiment suggests that the first-person visual perspective is critically important for the in-body experience. In other words, we feel that our self is located where the eyes are.”
10 points to anyone who can tell me what Clark would say about this experiment.
