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!
Showing posts with label embodied cognition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label embodied cognition. Show all posts
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Friday, May 25, 2012
You are not (ONLY) your brain
After reading first book by Alva Noe- Out of our heads- I was quite astounded how revolutionary his ideas were. Alva is in favor of embodied cognition, believing that the relationship between mind and body is not single-directional. It posits that body can affect mind in various ways and it is an essential mediator of the final results of our cognition.
In this vein, Proffitt' s lab demonstrated that even a very low perception, such as judging of steepness of hill is dependent on tuning of our body. Participants who were fatigued, in a bad shape or burdened by a heavy backpack judged the hill as much steeper than those who were not. Furthermore, judging a hill when viewed from a side (thus the steepness is quite evident) is very imprecise and overestimated when done verbally, however, motor estimations of the angle are quite accurate.
In this vein, Proffitt' s lab demonstrated that even a very low perception, such as judging of steepness of hill is dependent on tuning of our body. Participants who were fatigued, in a bad shape or burdened by a heavy backpack judged the hill as much steeper than those who were not. Furthermore, judging a hill when viewed from a side (thus the steepness is quite evident) is very imprecise and overestimated when done verbally, however, motor estimations of the angle are quite accurate.
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