Your Body Is All in Your Head

Aug. 26, 2008— -- While the old adage may say that "seeing is believing," new research shows that vision can lead the mind to do some unusual things -- like thinking a rubber hand is your own.

The rubber hand illusion was first developed in 1998 by Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen. Researchers put a subject's hand out of sight and placed a rubber hand in front of the subject. By stroking both the real and rubber hands at the same time, the researchers found they could get the subject to think that the rubber hand belonged to them.

Recently, researchers further probed just how much the brain can be tricked into thinking it is in control of a rubber hand rather than the limb it is actually connected to.

To do this, they placed a subject's hand out of sight and moved a rubber hand into the subject's line of sight as a replacement. By touching the subject's actual hand and the fake hand in a similar way, they were not only able to cause most subjects to believe the hand belonged to them, but they also found that the real hand would react to things done to the rubber one.

In this case, the scientists found that the body temperature of the actual hand would drop slightly in response to something done to the rubber one -- suggesting that the body had given up on the subject's actual hand.

"It's showing that the different senses are not hot lines from the skin to the brain, but there's a considerable intermingling of the senses," said V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Diego who was not involved in the study, which he described as "elegant."

"Using visual feedback, you can profoundly alter your perception of a body part, and that, in turn, alters other sensations that would ordinarily be found in that body part," he said.

In the latest study, scientists from Oxford University took the Botvinick-Cohen research a step further by measuring the temperature of subjects' hands after they felt that the rubber hand was theirs. They found that skin temperature dropped in the hidden, real hands, a change that did not take place in the rest of the body.

Lorimer Moseley, one of the paper's lead authors, said that the study shows that the effect of the rubber hand illusion is not limited to conscious thoughts alone.

"The way our body feels to us can actually influence the tissues of the body," he said.