This is an interesting experiment. Participants looked at two small screens attached to their eyes. The screens showed what two cameras attached to a dummy's eyes was seeing. When participants were asked to look down at their own body, the cameras looked down at the dummy's body. When the researchers rubbed the dummy's belly and the participants belly at the same time and the participants could see the dummy's belly being rubbed, they experienced it as them being the dummy. It even went so far as when the researchers threatened the dummy with a knife, the participants felt threatened, as measured by an increase of their skin conductance.
This experiment suggest that the brain constructs the sense of a physical self and it may also help in the understanding of delusions of your physical self (such as anorexia) or out-of-body experiences that may just be illusory. Or are they? Because if our sense of our physical self is a construct, is there a physical self "for real"? Maybe Buddha was right, that the self is an illusion. Body swap research shows that self is a trick of the mind
2 Comments
Book
12/2/2011 12:51:22 am
I really like this study. I think it suggests that there is a mental representation of the world, and we see the world according to our representation, not exactly what the world really is like. An evidence for this is that when we move our eyes to perceive the world, the motion of eyeballs are jerky (saccades), yet we see the world in fluidity. Also, it seems like we have a good sense of perception of everything within our periphery at a given time, but the actual focus of our eyes is only from an aperture of roughly the size of our thumbnail at arm's length. I don't know if all this are directly related to this study but I thought it was interesting and somewhat relevant.
Reply
Mr Hansson
12/3/2011 06:05:44 pm
Book, I think what you write is relevant. I agree that our mental representation of the world cannot be what the world actually is. Let us hope that our mental representations at least are "functional".
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorThis is my class blog for IB Psychology. Here I will publish reflections on psychology, reviews of psychology books, recommended links, lecture notes, and information on psychology topics that are not covered by the syllabus. You are free to add comments or ask me questions. Archives
August 2015
Categories
All
|