Sci/Tech How to Leave Your Body

[The Helper]

Leave your body and shake hands with yourself, gain an extra limb or change into a robot for a while. Swedish neuroscientist Henrik Ehrsson has demonstrated that the brain's image of the body is negotiable. Applications stretch from touch-sensitive prostheses to robotics and virtual worlds.

Ask a child if their hands belong to them and they will answer, "Of course!" But how does the brain actually identify its own body? And why do we experience our centre of awareness as located inside a physical body?

In a series of studies, neuroscientist Henrik Ehrsson of the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet has shown that the brain's perception of its own body can alter remarkably. Through the coordinated manipulation of the different senses, subjects can be made to feel that their body suddenly includes artificial objects or that they have departed their body entirely to enter another. His experiments have been published in Science and other leading scientific periodicals and journals, and have garnered considered international attention.

"By clarifying how the normal brain produces a sense of ownership of the body, we can learn to project ownership onto artificial bodies and simulated virtual ones, and even make two people have the experience of swapping bodies with one another," says Dr Ehrsson.

Read the whole article here.

 

[sqrage]

Cool, this was in that documentary I posted in the video section here.

 

[Sim]

Yea, this is very neat.

I would definitely like to try this at least once.

 

[Samael88]

Considering the fact that the human body is just a really advanced robot this is not surprising in the least.
If a rat brain can fly a space simulator then we got to be able to do more things you know^^
He is basically talking about hacking the central nervous system and hooking up things to it, I have half a mind set on calling this dude and giving him some help.

 

[Dinowc]

I'm scared where could this lead us to

this means we could swap our minds with robots and live forever like that, making us immortal and stronger

and what about memories? do we still have our own memories or gain the memories of the new body?
what if we swap with animals? I would love to become a bird or a cheetah for few hours and I would love to know what my dog is trying to tell me (actually I don't have a dog, it's just an example xd)

 

[tom_mai78101]

I wanted to swap bodies with opposite gender, and wanted to know how it feels like to be a man, a woman, or an animal temporarily.

In fact, the world of Pokémon is what I wanted myself to believe in, to believe that I exist in that world.

Scientific analysis for the win!

 

[Dinowc]

...wanted to know how it feels like to be a man, a woman...

you realize how gay that sounds? xD

 

[Samael88]

This is not the same thing as the matrix, but I for one know that it is possible to hook someone up to something like the matrix, it would be dangerous like hell but it would be possible.

In fact, the world of Pokémon is what I wanted myself to believe in, to believe that I exist in that world.

I honestly second this It would be awesome to be in such a world for a while

 

[xPass]

Oh just imagine an evil guy swapping himself with a unconscious captive and uses the body to rob, kill, etc.

Scary...

 

[YourFace]

To leave your body, you meditate and imagine yourself moving around

 

[Nenad]

As far as i understood from the article, you can not control the other body but merely have the sensory inputs of it. Hence, you will gain nothing but feel what the other person feels. It's not really any mind control or any crap like that and i doubt it could be used normally (no mention of equipment in the article).

One thing that's kinda scary is: We may be able to experience what death is like before we die, if we actually feel another being while they die. Would we die as well then? X<

 

[Varine]

They've had theories about this for a while. There's an estimate that by the time it is possible to do this successfully, which is unfortunately I believe about twenty years after I will likely die, thus ruining my plan for immortality.

However this this is sounds more like they're just confusing the brain. Which is significantly less cool than what I want to do. But it could be useful to me because it sounds somewhat like an Inception kinda thing if you can put people into a state of confusion and manipulate what they perceive as real around them.

 

[sqrage]

http://www.thehelper.net/forums/showthread.php/161656-The-Secret-You-What-is-consciousness

There's the thread that covers this. The part with Henrik Ehrsson at the beginning of part 4.

 

[FireCat]

What if, we can't take our bodies back?

WB Varine. lol

 

[Varine]

Thanks FireCat.

And I'd imagine what they're doing is affecting the electrical waves flowing through you. Which if they are then they could have issues with that. It doesn't go into much detail on how they do it. I wonder if the test subjects understand what they're doing to them?

 

[Jedimindtrixxx]

Wait i don't get it, is it making you leave your body for something else, or is making something feel as if it is part of you?

and can you make it that you don't own ANY part of any body, being just a floating little mind?
this actually reminds me of an ep. of a show i watched where a chick tried to escape the devil by putting herself into a robot, except in the end she only slightly suceeded and was unable to move and the devil hid her body underground forever.


and yes wb varine

 

[Varine]

I think it's just making you feel different. They could theoretically replicate the waves of someone else's mind, if I'm right in guessing how they do it, and put those into someone else. If they did it with the optical senses they could make you see from someone else's point of view while leaving the rest of your functional under your control. They aren't taking the consciousness of someone and putting it in someone else. But, for VR, if you could intercept those brain waves and use them as input of a virtual world. It only took sixty years after the Wright Brothers flew their plane to send someone into space. I'd imagine this will, if as successful as they say it is, progress pretty rapidly over the next few years.

 

[sqrage]

All it is is putting a helmet on you which has 2 television screens which each of your eyes view separately. Then there are 2 cameras which can be attached to the helmet of another person and you see things from their perspective. You guys are thinking way too hard about this.

>> They could theoretically replicate the waves of someone else's mind, if I'm right in guessing how they do it, and put those into someone else.

We can't do anything even close to that with todays technology. "Brain waves" are simply measures of brain activity, they have no correlation to actually thoughts and perceptions.

 

[Varine]

... well WTF I could do that when I was like twelve. I'm thinking about it in a real way, this is what I do. Well I technically do math, but I research other stuff. And by brain waves I meant measurable activity, i.e. an actual breakthrough.

 

[SH4D0WS1N]

... well WTF I could do that when I was like twelve. I'm thinking about it in a real way, this is what I do. Well I technically do math, but I research other stuff. And by brain waves I meant measurable activity, i.e. an actual breakthrough.

I didn't actually read the article, but the people saying that it would be cool to enter someone's body and the people who saying this is electrical waves and shit.
I believe that this has nothing to do with science except for the psychological part. You aren't forcing the brain to do something, you're tricking it to. I read a cool trick where you hide your arm and have a fake one showing. Someone then touches both of them at the same place at the same time. Eventually you will start to feel the fake one being touched without the real one being touched. The trick also involves stabbing the fake one with a knife for shits n giggles, but that just proves the point.