October 28, 2006
Where am I?
Radio Lab had a great hour production called Where Am I?, all about how mind and body collaborate to determine where you and all your assorted parts are in space and how that can sometimes get out of whack. Audio is available for streaming and download, and well worth the listen.
It reminds me of the "That's my hand!" illusion, where you can give someone the uncanny feeling that an obviously-plastic severed rubber hand is actually their own by simply hiding their real hand from view and then simultaneously touching each hand in the same spot at the same time. After about 20 seconds of such touching the illusion kicks in, and is a wonderfully eerie feeling. They have a station for trying this out at the SF Exploratorium, but my first introduction to it was from reading a recent study where scientists induced the illusion while the subject was being scanned by an MRI. What they found was that the illusion corresponds with activity in the premotor cortex, a part of the brain that receives input both visual and touch information, implying that we build our idea of where different parts of our body is in space by correlating our own sense of touch with what we can detect with our other senses. (They also have a more recent study showing that it's not just vision combined with touch — you can get the same effect bindfolded by making the subject think she's touching her left hand with her right when actually she's touching the rubber hand.)
Posted by bug to Mind and Brain at October 28, 2006 4:27 PMThat program was excellent.
One of my standing throwaway lines is 'I only believe in my left hand when my right hand is touching it, because then both of them are telling me about each other.' It is truly impressive what you can accomplish by taking advantage of this fact when talking to someone about their perception of the physical world.
There was also an article a week ago about studies about ethical dilemmas and the physiology of moral decision-making. Fascinating stuff, I'm going to write a longer piece on LJ, but the short form is that your brain really is holding a real-time vote on such matters, and this bit of physiology seems to be found in all of the higher primates.
Posted by: RichardT at October 30, 2006 6:01 PMJust had to try this, so went into my local joke shop & asked, as you do: "have you got any severed hands?".
"Sorry, right out of severed hands. We've just had a rush on them" was the reply.
Halloween has a lot to answer for....
Posted by: Baz at November 5, 2006 2:48 PMInteresting. Sometimes mind plays such tricks on us that they are frightening) and we will parts of body sometimes differently, let alone the places))
Posted by: ilandron at July 24, 2007 12:35 AM