Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Scientists Achieve Mental Body-Swapping

Posted by kdawson on 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.

13 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. Quite a letdown... by CaptainPatent · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Quite a letdown... by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 5, Funny

      perhaps now that you have that insight you can "mentally swap" the disappointment I'm feeling.

      Hey, good news! You've succeeded!

      --
      This guy's the limit!
    2. Re:Quite a letdown... by brian0918 · · 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?

    3. Re:Quite a letdown... by ejdmoo · · 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.

    4. Re:Quite a letdown... by Cornflake917 · · 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.

      --
      Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
  2. Amazing waste of time and money by baggins2001 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  3. Malkovich by reginaldo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Malkovich? MALKOVICH!

    Do the test patients inexplicably end up at the New Jersey turnpike once the experiment has concluded?

  4. What the heck happened to meta-moderation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:What the heck happened to meta-moderation? by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Seconded, the old metamod system and user pages were fast, simple, and very effective. I used to meta-mod every day, now the metamods and user pages have become so bloated and unwieldy I've lost all motivation to participate despite having excellent karma. I'm considering letting my subscription expire and becoming a full-time lurker.

      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.

  5. Aperture Science by KumquatOfSolace · · Score: 5, Funny
    "It did not work when a non-humanoid object -- such as a chair or large block -- was used."

    No hope for test subjects who over-identify with Weighted Companion Cube.

  6. First Person Shooter by Reziac · · 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.

    --
    ~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
  7. Re:Ghost in the Shell by bigstrat2003 · · 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.

    --
    "16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
  8. Re:Dear Developers by TheSpoom · · 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.

    --
    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