If you plan to read this column, I suggest you take a good look at your body. Aside from our common frustrations that despite the many hours in the gym, we will never really get to look like those people in Vogue magazine, are you really sure that the body you see is yours? Do we really always know which body is ours and which belongs to others? Is it possible that your brain can trick you into thinking that you own a body different from what you have now?
Apparently, even your own brain which is part of your body can be quite disloyal and could trick you into thinking you are in another body. I think this is the neuro-scientific principle that the film Avatar exploited to break box office records. In science, cases and experiments have shown that when a person is shown a rubber hand, while his real hand is hidden, and then that rubber hand is touched at the same time as the hidden hand, the person would look at the rubber hand as his own. The cases in V.S. Ramachandran’s book “Phantoms in the Brain” was the book that made me quite suspicious of the loyalty of my own brain to my body. But my own struggle aside, there is another mystery that a current study has unravelled: If this has been demonstrated for a hand, could it be tried for the whole body as it was in the fictional world of Avatar?
This experiment on body ownership which fascinated me this week was from the journal PLoS One published last May 12. It amused me also because they had an all-male cast as the subjects and these men had to be in the virtual body of a woman.
The study is entitled “First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality” by Mel Slater, Bernhard Spanlang, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Olaf Blanke.
They had 24 men who each had to don a virtual reality gear and enter a virtual scene. They tested the subjects by applying three factors to see which of these or a combination of these would affect the sense of self of the participants. The three factors involved perspective, movement, and touch. Perspective meant the subject donned a virtual reality gear which offered two views: one is when he looked down, would offer a view that he is wearing the same outfit as one of the women in the virtual scene (first person) while the other, the subject would view himself located to the side of the virtual woman (third person). Movement entailed that they move the head of the same virtual woman, in synch or not, with the subject. Lastly, “touch” involved rubbing the subject, again in synch or not, with one of the women on the scene rubbing the shoulder of the second woman on the scene. “Touching” also involved a virtual slap by the virtual woman. The study measured the degree to which the heart rates of the participants slowed down which is a measure of the stress they felt when they experience being virtually slapped.
After the experiment, the men were each asked to respond to a questionnaire which gauged the extent of “body ownership” they experienced. The findings are clear. Based on the responses to the questionnaire and the heart rates, those who experienced the “first person” perspective, well as those who were touched in synch with the rub or slap by the virtual woman, were the ones who had actually transformed their sense of self into that woman on the scene. In sum, the men who experienced these factors “transformed” into the virtual woman. But like any good thing, it did not last very long. The effect only remained for as long as the experiment lasted.
So why do this when we already had Avatar the movie? In an article on the same study by The Guardian’s science writer Ian Sample last May 12, he quoted Mel Slater, one of the researchers, as saying that if this illusion can happen, that we can think we belong to different bodies, then we might also change in the way we think and behave.
So if they can perfect this technology, then would we really hear the end sighs that go “You don’t know what it’s like to be in my shoes”? Whether among friends, lovers, parents and children, boss and employee, we all have either voiced this out or at least felt this way. Empathy is a rare emotional mineral.
But this experiment is not a test on empathy. Empathy is what could happen AFTER you have experienced, even for a while, what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes. So the question remains, how do we make that understanding last? For that, I am not sure computer technology could help us as readily. We may just have to count on our basic humanity.
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