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Scientists Achieve Mental Body-Swapping
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Dec 05, 2008 02:29 PM
from the put-yourself-in-my-place dept.
from the put-yourself-in-my-place dept.
SpaceAdmiral notes the news that scientists have succeeded in convincing experiment subjects that a mannequin's body is their own, and even feeling at home in the body of someone of the opposite sex. The effect could prove useful in virtual reality applications and in robot technology. Here's the paper on PLoS ONE.
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Ghost in the Shell (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ghost in the Shell (Score:5, Funny)
/cry
Please don't introduce thoughts like this into my brain when talking about hot female characters... I'll never be able to look at her the same way again!
Parent
Re:Ghost in the Shell (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry, your fapping is perfectly safe from your homophobic fears :)
I'm guessing you were joking, since I certainly have been joking about this, but I do feel the need to point something out seriously. Not being comfortable with someone you were attracted to turning out to be male isn't homophobia in the least. Homophobia is having negative reactions towards other people who are gay. Not being comfortable with gayness for yourself, though, is perfectly acceptable. Why choose such a negative-laced word?
Parent
Re:Ghost in the Shell (Score:5, Insightful)
but I would dispute the "perfectly acceptable" part of your point too... many people commit suicide every year because they are unable to accept their sexuality, many more are assaulted, raped or murdered by others who lash out because of their internalized homophobia. Call me a leftist nutter, but anything that gets thousands of people killed yearly is not something I would tag as "perfectly acceptable".
I won't call you a leftist nutter, but I will call you wrong. There are many things in our world which are "perfectly acceptable", but get people killed because people misuse them or react badly to them. I'm sure more than one person has committed suicide because of their unrequited love for someone, but that doesn't make being in love unacceptable, nor does it make non-reciprocity of love unacceptable. It just means that it's unfortunate that someone couldn't cope with something adequately, and made a bad choice about how to resolve the issue.
Parent
Re:Ghost in the Shell (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone who says it's deep or has any meaning is either delusional, or has never seen any sci-fi ever.
Sorry. Sci-Fi is not limited to ponderous, arrogant prattling by over-educated shut-ins. It also includes flash, style, and simple characterization.
GitS is as deep as anything in its media could possibly be. "A person who is not sure if she is a person but is becomes indisinguishable from another person who is not a person but wants to be."
Hard to think of a deeper plot. If you can point to one, go ahead.
Parent
Re:Ghost in the Shell (Score:5, Funny)
I do understand it.
The problem is that it makes no sense,
Lol.
Do you have that on a T-shirt?
You could make a fortune selling them if you got Paris Hilton to model one.
Parent
Quite a letdown... (Score:5, Interesting)
After reading the article they were just simultaneously poking people with sticks...
perhaps now that you have that insight you can "mentally swap" the disappointment I'm feeling.
Re:Quite a letdown... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, good news! You've succeeded!
Parent
Re:Quite a letdown... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, good news! You've succeeded!
I think we're on to something!
Tomorrow's headline:
Article misrepresenting "mental body swapping" leads to mental body swapping!
Parent
Re:Quite a letdown... (Score:5, Funny)
After reading the article they were just simultaneously poking people with sticks...
One experiment involved using the researchers themselves. Another experiment used mannequins found in the dumpster behind a department store. They also mention using chairs and blocks of wood as test equipment. Is it just me, or does it sound like scientific research in Sweden is ridiculously underfunded?
Parent
Re:Quite a letdown... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you've ever done an experiment like this (there are smaller scale versions), they are very weird. I can't imagine a full body experience.
Example:
The one I have done involves sitting behind someone, eyes closed, and having your nose stroked (by a third party) while you stroke someone else's nose in front of you. After a few seconds, your brain "clicks" and you feel like you have an incredibly long nose. This is because of the feedback loop where your brain feels something on your nose and your finger simultaneously, and your mental body image just changes instantly.
Parent
Re:Quite a letdown... (Score:5, Funny)
You just gave "Reach Around" a whole new meaning in my mental dictionary.
Thanks!
Parent
Re:Quite a letdown... (Score:5, Funny)
The one I have done involves sitting behind someone, eyes closed, and having your nose stroked (by a third party) while you stroke someone else's nose in front of you. After a few seconds, your brain "clicks" and you feel like you have an incredibly long nose.
Now I know what to do to feel like I have an incredibly long penis. But I'm not quite sure if it's worth it.
Parent
Amazing waste of time and money (Score:5, Funny)
So I'm gay, get over it.
Simulation (Score:4, Interesting)
First Person Shooter (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope, but it did occur to me that they've essentially reproduced the First Person Shooter -- what dedicated player hasn't "ducked" away from incoming fire, or tried to peer around the corner of the monitor when trying to see around a corner?? Same behaviour, really -- putting yourself in the place of your onscreen avatar's viewpoint to the point that you lose track of which body you actually inhabit, and react as if the avatar is real and YOU.
Parent
Not exactly like TV (Score:5, Interesting)
I just glanced through the study's report, and will read in detail later (it's rather long). There was an episode of The Prisoner [wikipedia.org] where a scientist had a gizmo with funny metal hats that transferred consciousness [wikipedia.org] to another person.
This is nothing like that.
There was another episode that was like that. In The Schizoid Man [wikipedia.org], as Wikipedia puts it, "Number Two replaces Number Six with a duplicate to weaken the real Six's sense of identity." Not exactly like this study, but closer.
In this real-world study, one of the tests was that the subject is stimulated exactly like the "double"; the subject's abdomen is tickled exactly like the other person's body. I suspect that hypnosis plays a part in it, even if the researchers weren't aware they were hypnotizing the subject.
You can hypnotize someone by (IIRC) having them lay on their backs with their eyes closed, and lightly touch their forehead. Ask "do you feel that?" Do this three or four times and without touching their forehead, if you ask if you did they will still say "yes".
"There are four lights!" -Captain Picard
Malkovich (Score:5, Insightful)
Do the test patients inexplicably end up at the New Jersey turnpike once the experiment has concluded?
Perspective swapping, not mind swapping. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an important distinction here - this is not mind copying, it's just perspective swapping. Mind copying would be if you were able to copy the bits of one mind in one bit of hardware (example: brain) to another bit of hardware (example: computer disk), then be able to have the mind run somewhere else. What we have here is perceptive swapping, where you just overlay a new perspective in place of a brain's inputs/outputs, giving the limited sensory perception of acting in another place to that brain's mind.
It's cool that we're making new ways for people to get new perspectives, but this ain't mind swapping by a long shot.
Ryan Fenton
Aperture Science (Score:5, Funny)
No hope for test subjects who over-identify with Weighted Companion Cube.
Over-reaching headline (Score:5, Funny)
"Scientist successfully places human brain in Ape"
"Safe and inexpensive teleportation now available"
really not very new... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have beside me a book entitled Phantoms in the Brain [amazon.co.uk] (VS Ramachandran, foreword Oliver Sachs) first published in 1998, which suggests you should "have your friend stroke identical locations on both your hand and the dummy hand synchronously while you look at the dummy. Within seconds you will experience the stroking sensations as arising from the dummy hand". It goes on to describe how you can also experience touch sensations as arising from tables and chairs.
Incidentally I'd recommend this book for anybody interested in perception; it's a readable introduction into the very strange perceptual phenomena that can be encountered by people with rare forms of brain damage, some of which give valuable insights into the way the mind works.
What the heck happened to meta-moderation? (Score:5, Insightful)
As reported [slashdot.org], there have been a lot of bad moderations recently. It seems this is due to CmdrTaco and chums turning meta-moderation into a weird Digg clone.
Please CmdrTaco, just bring the old meta-moderation system back. It worked, very well, by allowing people to vote on whether a moderation was fair. The new system simply asks the user to Agree/Disagree with a post (don't fool yourselves into thinking it will be used in any other way), ergo it cannot perform the job of meta-moderation.
Brought to you by the: Discussions About Slashdot Itself are not Off-Topic, Troll, Flamebait or Redundant Dept.
Parent
Re:What the heck happened to meta-moderation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please, head honchos of Slashdot, revert to the old style metamods and user pages or at least allow us the option to control what cruft is grafted to our user page. Slashdot would lose a lot of cred if it degenerated into digg.
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Re:Dear Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
I strongly get the feeling that the Slashdot and/or Slashcode developers are succumbing to feature creep, and adding things to the system just for the sake of adding them, even when the system works fine. This seems to have started after the CSS redesign.
Slashdot isn't perfect. However, it's a damn sight better than a lot of other discussion sites out there, especially the moderation system.
Please don't fuck with it when it's not broken. There are things in it that are obviously broken, such as the fact that Funny mods don't grant karma. However, fundamentally changing a system that previously worked fine is, well, stupid.
Someone in the development chain seems to have the notion that metamoderation was too hard. It wasn't. The reason for this is that the people doing metamod are already committed to making Slashdot better. They will deal with the compexities involved because due the system's limits on who can access mod / metamod, they're already used to them.
Making it "easier" by removing features simply doesn't make sense.
Parent