Mimi has been flooding our facebook with visual illusions for some time now. It's time to redmind ourselves that vision is not the only sense we have and certainly not the only one that can get fooled.
Let's start with some basics; if you have never heard of the Rubber Hand Illusion (or worse, you have, but you never got around to check it out), you know nothing Jon Snow and you should at least watch this video. Now.
moar sciency here: Botvinick, Matthew, and Jonathan Cohen. "Rubber hands' feel'touch that eyes see." Nature 391.6669 (1998): 756-756. (very readable and informative)
This illusion is closely related to the Mirror Box illusion, which you may know from the TV show House. Mirror box has been succesfully used to treat chronic pain in phantom limbs by generating a illusory visal perception of the missing limb. It's all (and more) very well explained in this TED talk by its inventor Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, a famous neuroscientist also known for his works on mirror neurons:
In the local news, bright young scientists from our very own LEVYNA are currently doing research on the effect of meditation on body scheme using a modified version of rubber hand experiment. Stay tuned for the results!
