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Scientists Achieve Mental Body-Swapping
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.
Congratulations on your purchase of a brand new nigger! If handled properly, your apeman will give years of valuable, if reluctant, service.
INSTALLING YOUR NIGGER.
You should install your nigger differently according to whether you have purchased the field or house model. Field niggers work best in a serial configuration, i.e. chained together. Chain your nigger to another nigger immediately after unpacking it, and don't even think about taking that chain off, ever. Many niggers start singing as soon as you put a chain on them. This habit can usually be thrashed out of them if nipped in the bud. House niggers work best as standalone units, but should be hobbled or hamstrung to prevent attempts at escape. At this stage, your nigger can also be given a name. Most owners use the same names over and over, since niggers become confused by too much data. Rufus, Rastus, Remus, Toby, Carslisle, Carlton, Hey-You!-Yes-you!, Yeller, Blackstar, and Sambo are all effective names for your new buck nigger. If your nigger is a ho, it should be called Latrelle, L'Tanya, or Jemima. Some owners call their nigger hoes Latrine for a joke. Pearl, Blossom, and Ivory are also righteous names for nigger hoes. These names go straight over your nigger's head, by the way.
CONFIGURING YOUR NIGGER
Owing to a design error, your nigger comes equipped with a tongue and vocal chords. Most niggers can master only a few basic human phrases with this apparatus - "muh dick" being the most popular. However, others make barking, yelping, yapping noises and appear to be in some pain, so you should probably call a vet and have him remove your nigger's tongue. Once de-tongued your nigger will be a lot happier - at least, you won't hear it complaining anywhere near as much. Niggers have nothing interesting to say, anyway. Many owners also castrate their niggers for health reasons (yours, mine, and that of women, not the nigger's). This is strongly recommended, and frankly, it's a mystery why this is not done on the boat
HOUSING YOUR NIGGER.
Your nigger can be accommodated in cages with stout iron bars. Make sure, however, that the bars are wide enough to push pieces of nigger food through. The rule of thumb is, four niggers per square yard of cage. So a fifteen foot by thirty foot nigger cage can accommodate two hundred niggers. You can site a nigger cage anywhere, even on soft ground. Don't worry about your nigger fashioning makeshift shovels out of odd pieces of wood and digging an escape tunnel under the bars of the cage. Niggers never invented the shovel before and they're not about to now. In any case, your nigger is certainly too lazy to attempt escape. As long as the free food holds out, your nigger is living better than it did in Africa, so it will stay put. Buck niggers and hoe niggers can be safely accommodated in the same cage, as bucks never attempt sex with black hoes.
FEEDING YOUR NIGGER.
Your Nigger likes fried chicken, corn bread, and watermelon. You should therefore give it none of these things because its lazy ass almost certainly doesn't deserve it. Instead, feed it on porridge with salt, and creek water. Your nigger will supplement its diet with whatever it finds in the fields, other niggers, etc. Experienced nigger owners sometimes push watermelon slices through the bars of the nigger cage at the end of the day as a treat, but only if all niggers have worked well and nothing has been stolen that day. Mike of the Old Ranch Plantation reports that this last one is a killer, since all niggers steal something almost every single day of their lives. He reports he doesn't have to spend much on free watermelon for his niggers as a result. You should never allow your nigger meal breaks while at work, since if it stops work for more than ten minutes it will need to be retrained. You would be surprised how long it takes to teach a nigger to pick cotton. You really would. Coffee beans? Don't ask. You have no idea.
MAKING YOUR NIGGER WORK.
Niggers are very, very averse to work of any kind. The nigger's most
This experiment opens an interesting possibility in the field of full body replacements, so far a topic purely in the realm of sci-fi, anime and cyberpunk. At the same time, it makes me wonder even more if the Major's original organic body may in fact have been male, with little to no adaptation discomfort after the procedure...
I suppose out of body experiences are sort of like brain malfunctions. Perhaps fun if you experience one in the right state of mind (like really good weed). This might make an awesome VR game. Just 'a thought.'
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
Ok, I was absolutely pumped because the subject line of this story made it sound like they successfully transplanted a brain or something...
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.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
I mean, how many of us guys haven't already realized that we're just lesbians trapped in male bodies.
So I'm gay, get over it.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
Isn't this a repost?
Maybe my body double saw and I just think I saw it.
This crap is lame -- we are subject to psychological trickery. Go figure.
Does this make anybody else think of the "sim-stims" of Neuromancer?
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 where a scientist had a gizmo with funny metal hats that transferred consciousness to another person.
This is nothing like that.
There was another episode that was like that. In The Schizoid Man, 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
Free Martian Whores!
Talk about sensational headlines. The headline builds up considerable excitement then the very first line of the article squashes it completely.
I don't think it's a surprise that a person can be convinced to believe pretty much anything. I have a hard time believing how this research actually reveals any new insight.
I tend to feel at home inside the body of someone of the opposite sex.
Malkovich? MALKOVICH!
Do the test patients inexplicably end up at the New Jersey turnpike once the experiment has concluded?
As reported, 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.
Now that these scientists resolved the question of adaptability of the human psyche. Some must work on preserving the brain functionality over time and some other must work to develop the perfect cyborg container for it !!!!
Finally i will be Immortal !
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
No hope for test subjects who over-identify with Weighted Companion Cube.
Robert Heinlein would be so proud....
In the body of Natalie Portman. IYKWIM...
Imagine how this could be used for porn and adult entertainment. That's a bit creepy eh?
Don't you remember way back when, when you had to write papers? How the first paragraph is suppose to draw you in and give people a reason to keep reading it? Same thing here.. And it is more of a proof of concept. Can the mind accept another host instead of the body it is currently in or would it reject that body due to unfamiliar environs or even perhaps intrinsically know that the mannequin/other body is a fake? It seems the mind is pre-wired to accept this kind of situation. It is not a body-swap yet, but is just one step on a long road to body-swapping.
I posted this story to the discordian forum yesterday morning. One of the first things to be brought up was what a great advancement this will be for the teledildonics industry.
I guess that's what you get in a crowded room full of Popes. I'm glad most of us don't wear the hat all the time, that would be creepy.
The following is commentary on the OP story.
Quote from: LMNO on Today at 07:16:33 AM
I think that one of the most important aspects of Discordia (and the BIP[Black Iron Prison narrative]) is to constantly remind ourselves that we are always fooling ourselves as to what's "really out there". Always.
ALL THE TIME.
EVEN RIGHT NOW.
Quote from:Iptuous on Today at 07:23:08 AM
Fooling ourselves?
or, just limited in scope as to our perception of it?
Quote from: LMNO on Today at 07:24:24 AM
If it was just limited perception, we would see the gaps.
We make shit up to create a cohesive worldview.
Often, the shit we make up has nothing to do with anything.
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.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Utterly misleading title, wasted precious 4 minutes of my life. Thankyouverymuch.
The title of the paper is just: "Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping". It only remains to traverse the small gap from "illusion" to "fact" to render the title at Slashdot (and at the Washington Post) true.
In other news: a person was triggered to have the illusion of having been transported to Jupiter. Hence, the sentence "A man was trasported to Jupiter" should be considered -at least approximately- true.
The experiment might be of interest, I don't dispute that; but come on. Wake me up when the "swapped mind" is able to command the other body.
> even feeling at home in the body of someone of the opposite sex
:)
I normally feel very very at home *in* the body of someone of the opposite sex
I welcome myself as our new mannequin overlord!
Stay away from me with that stick...
-- "Oh. This guy again."
After reading this I felt a hard-on, but then realized, it was my labia moistening... Oh, wait...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
British hypnotist Derren Brown did this to a guy, making him deeply believe his body was that of a ventriloquist's dummy. Freaky.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd3dzTAALd8&feature=related
I like many people here was expecting to read an article describing some sort of elaborate brain scanning high technology. I, unlike most people posting so far, find it absolutely remarkable that the technology used to achieve this successful illusion was no more that sticks and cameras.
This arguably simple achievement gives great insight into, and offers new debatable material for the murky subject of the mind\body relationship - which in itself may boil down to an illusion no more simple or complex than what we have been shown here.
On April fools day they should run only stories that would exist in a comic book world. The ones we slashdotters keep waiting for...
"Scientist successfully places human brain in Ape"
"Safe and inexpensive teleportation now available"
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
I've corrected the subject line of this post to the Heinlein reference you were looking for (instead of just modding you down, which would have been rude).
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
and even feeling at home in the body of someone of the opposite sex.
After reading the article they were just simultaneously poking people with sticks...
Hmmm . . . I think there might be joke in there somewhere, but I seem to be a little slow tonight.
Or maybe I'm just not knowledgeable about the latest Fetish du Jour . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
even feeling at home in the body of someone of the opposite sex
Feel at home? I'd never move out!
Key word here is feel.
Yeah, yeah. The low road.
The day grows ever nearer that I may play with my very own set of boobies!
Quote from the article:
The researchers created the illusion of body-swapping by touching the stomach of both the mannequin and the volunteer with sticks
What would have been far more interesting is if they achieved the same sensation without poking the participant as well. But even then, that could be be achieved with hypnosis anyway (?)
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Nothing mythical, mysterious or mind blowing about it.
The humans in the test are simply percepting something they see done to another as done to themselves.
Its not even psychological - its neurological.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#The_development_of_empathy
That is also why "it did not work when a non-humanoid object -- such as a chair or large block -- was used."
You can't empathize with a block of wood.
Unless it is in a form of a Weighted Companion Cube.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
This was a triumph.
I'm making a note here, huge success.
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
Aperture Science.
We do what we must, because we can...
Why is this tagged with 'furries'?
Genius short story by James Tiptree Jr(who just had to be a male)
This is a Tiptree thread troll.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I've been achieving the same via PornoTube for quite some time now.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Prostitution just became an issue of how well the girl can mimic the actions of the pornography you're watching. Ugly prostitutes rejoiced.
Appropriately... fitting topic... "Hard Ware"
I prefer to make LOVE, not WAR. So... Butt, Real-Doll... hear, I cum...
Butt, an asside. (please refrain from "Hello Dolly"...)
Does that mean we can have mind-body/booty transformayshun into a man-akin? Now, peephole can sex-spear-e-ence same-sex relay-shuns with or without, within and with out feeling or feeling shunned.
Butt, also, if we can carry a dummy along, then when him/her-roids become un-bare-able, we can transfer our minds/sould (and hopefully our pain receptors, or perceptive/receptive pain receptors) and transfer our asses (minds) out of the body into the new receptacle.
What becomes of two who become one? Will they be singing Hall & Oates' "Did It In a Minute" (..."And if TWO become ONE, who is the ONE TWO beCOME?")
What if something leads to ... "loose screws..."?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
"First Person Suckee"
"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."
What on-line pr0n add-dicked hasn't looked or felt around under the desk at work while looking around the monitor?
Things will be interesting if kompooters and adult enter-stain-men-t venues merge. Will they be the new "Speakeasies" of our time?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
How many pr0n stars "become" their ... counterpart... but we never see because its in the outtakes...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The mind can easily be tricked.
Phantom limb syndrome is a common problem for amputees, where pain or discomfort is felt in the limb that no longer exists.
One of the treatments for phantom limb syndrome involves using a mirror to make reflect you existing limb in such a way that it looks like you have both limbs. The person then performs certain actions such that it appears that the limb is restored and operating. Though one of the limbs doesn't exist, your brain is still wired as if it can move the limb. Once you actually view the missing limb performing these actions, the pain goes away.
Seems to me that this experiment isn't much different than replacing a phantom limb with a mirror.
instantly started playing with thier boobs the second they were mind-melded to a female body?
I have beside me a book entitled Phantoms in the Brain (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.
Well... yes. If you were expecting a quick action fix.
GITS and Masamune Shirow's manga in general need to be watched/read with some concentration.
Add to that Mamoru Oshii's direction who almost always goes of to a deep end of the psychology pool and it may seem unnecessarily complicated.
As for trash..
Try reading some of Shirow's manga. He would really get into particulars with every single little thing in his universe.
That is, before he figured out he can live off the royalties and churning out a borderline hentai calendars and art-books here and there.
There are no "beam guns" in Shirow's manga.
If a piece of technology is used there is a neat description somewhere of how and why that particular piece of technology works and what are its underlying principles.
There is almost no issue without some added bits of text with additional explanation for such cases.
Original Ghost in the Shell manga is a great example. There are about 10 pages of "notes" at the end of the book.
A great example of visionary "future tech" he also featured can be found in Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor.
In a story printed in 1992 (Drive Slave) he drew microrobots that travel through bloodstream using flagella for propulsion.
Such robots are widely researched today.
On other hand...
I fear that you have no idea what Sci-Fi is. Or Science Fiction. Or that one is primarily read, and other mostly watched these days.
GITS SAC 1, 2 and the movies are great sci-fi.
GITS manga and movies are great Science Fiction.
If nothing else, Hollywood hacks like Wachowskis ripping it off is a good indicator of its value.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
...
no.
You should feel rather alone by now.
Dr. Henrik Ehrsson sure is basing his research career around this topic. And every time he publishes a paper basically saying the same thing as the last, the press jumps all over it as the realization of some sci-fi dream. check out the google news archive. I think the research is fine as far as it goes, but it seems very much in the neighborhood of simulator rides and dummy head recording.
"developed a strong belief that the mannequin's body was actually their own", says TFA. How is that determined/measured? Was there a test that showed people could not tell the two bodies apart? Without that information, TFA is meaningless to me who is not familiar with such experiments. Can this "belief" be described, or would I have to experience it myself?
Funny mods not granting karma isn't broken. +1 Funny, -1 Troll resulting in a net karma loss is broken.
That's ultimately what I meant, though I think the quickest fix is to grant karma to funny mods. I don't agree that funny comments are somehow less valuable than others.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
...Freaky Friday.
This seems like a direct extension from the article a while ago explaining how tools are perceived by the brain to be an extension of the body. In this case, the mannequin is the tool in question. This is interesting, but it doesn't strike me as a huge breakthrough.
My webcomic
Just look at the guy:
http://www.venturebroswiki.com/vbwiki/Phantom_Limb
Do you really think rubbing his tummy will me him go away?
What?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The same things have been done with mirrors, the subjects' hands and the experimenter assistant's hands. It's so simple and common that it's been used to demonstrate cognitive mapping in undergrad classes. I did so 10 years ago.
The only new item in TFA is use of video cameras placed at eye locations and equivalent ocular presentation. In TFA they manage to do the same as has been done before, except they use a lot more of very expensive equipment. Science marches on, though not necessarily forward.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
soul transplant
for ever-existent of ur own self?
hm....someone never dies?
how to define death? soul dead or body dead?
This is not new. This has been done by hypnosis and embedded commands for quite a while now
The Tao that can be named is not the Tao
This reminds me of Vilayanur Ramachandran's talk on TED: A journey to the center of your mind
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html
If you don't recall the talk, it's the one about the phantom limbs and how a simple trick helped people who had their arms amputated to stop the pain from the phantom limb.
HD Trailers
Well, doesn't this bring up some philosophical questions. We're getting awfully close to figuring out how to really fool the brain, aren't we? Even if the input is a little "off", the brain seems willing to adapt to the new "normal". That's the interesting thing - it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough. That trait, combined with technological improvements, will likely lead to some amazingly appalling applications and some horrific consequences within a couple of decades.
Destroy the head, body and appendages of a person, and then replace them with a complete other human.
This process is both simple and doable. Just look at Iraq. They took Saddam Hussein, destroyed him, then replaced him with another complete human being. Extraordinary. It has happened throughout history too - replaced Kennedy with LBJ, replaced John Smith with Tony Blair. There are endless possibilities. Really, why stop at replacement of just the body?
+1 Funny, -1 Overrated resulting in a net karma loss is broken.
Troll comments which happen to be funny are still trolls.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.