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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next >> The result, according to the participants, was the sensation of sitting behind their physical body and looking at it from that six-foot distance.
"This was a bizarre, fascinating experience for the participants -- it felt absolutely real for them and was not scary," the author the study, Dr. Henrik Ehrsson of the University College London's Institute of Neurology, said in a prepared statement.
Ehrsson even used a hammer to create the illusion that the distant, illusory body was going to be hit. When that happened, sensors on the volunteers' skin showed increased sweating, indicating that they felt the threat was real.
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Another team, this time led by Olaf Blanke of the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, in Switzerland, tried a slightly different experiment. In this case, the participants watched one of three 3-D holographic projections: of their own body, the body of a dummy, or a square block placed directly in front of them.
In each instance, the image's "back" was stroked with a brush, sometimes in sync with a brush being stroked on the volunteer's own back. Immediately afterwards, the person was blindfolded and backed up, then told to return to where he believed he had been standing before.
If the participants had viewed either the dummy body or the block, they invariably returned to the correct spot, suggesting that they had not lost the notion of their actual body's position. However, participants who had viewed the 3-D likeness of themselves typically overshot the mark and advanced to where the illusory duplicate had been.
One expert called the findings "intriguing."
"You are feeling this touch as if you are watching it -- like you are somewhere else," said Paul Sanberg, director of the Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair at the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa.
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