Our personal space guides our
hands when we reach out, causes us to duck when objects hurtle towards us and
makes us acutely aware of the world around us. And now, for the first time,
scientists have found a way to help us feel it. Researchers at the Karolinska
Institute in Stockholm have tweaked a well-known experiment called the rubber
hand illusion for a study published in the journal Cognition. In the classic
version, participants are shown a fake rubber hand while their own hand is
hidden behind a screen. After a few minutes of simultaneous stroking of both
the real and fake hands, the person’s brain starts to believe that the fake
hand is actually their own.
In the new study, which involved
101 adults, scientists repeated the test but applied brushstrokes in mid-air
above the fake hand, rather than touching it. As in the classic experiment,
participants start to believe that the fake hand is their own. But in this
version, they also started to sense what feels like a force field between the
brush and the rubber hand. According to the study, the sensation continues as
far as 15 inches above the rubber hand, which indicates the size of what
scientists of our peripersonal space. The space around the body is processed
like a jello mold. Like a thick layer of space around the body, deforming and
moving as the limbs move.
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