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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.
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...
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
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!
Malkovich? MALKOVICH!
Do the test patients inexplicably end up at the New Jersey turnpike once the experiment has concluded?
True, we are subject to psychological trickery. But the test are pretty conclusive, as I actually RTFA. If a human brain can perceive an artificial body as it's own in the psychological and physiological sense, it gives researchers a great deal of more research to do. This allows us to "place" a human brain inside an artificial body and still retain full abilities without major psychological damage. That's a serious trick to perform, as once we lose that ownership of the body, behavior can be significantly modified.
"The only constant in the universe is change." - Unknown author
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.
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.
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?
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.
Just keep eating the junk food.
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.
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.
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
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.