“We built a robot which allows us to distort this signal, which makes it hard - or impossible actually - our robot makes it impossible for our healthy subjects now to predict those signals. However, when the scientists introduced a temporal delay of just a few milliseconds, the distorting of temporal and spatial perception induced the ‘ghostly’ feeling. When conducted in real time, the participant’s brain could adapt and recognize it as their own movement because of the synchronized movement. Behind them, the robotic device reproduced their movements and touched them on the back. The scientists then conducted an experiment to ‘trigger’ a similar neurological sensation in healthy subjects.īlindfolded and wearing ear-plugs, test subjects performed movements with their hand attached to a robotic device. These brain regions together contribute to multi sensory signal processing, important for the perception of one’s own body. MRI scans revealed abnormalities with three brain regions involved in self-awareness, movement and the sense of position in space. However, if this is not fully integrated because I’m doing it or if I cannot correctly predict because somebody else were to touch me in those cases of uncertainty, very often in those cases of double touch, the response is that you feel ticklish or tickled by somebody else,” said Blanke who is leading the research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL).īlanke’s team began by analyzing the brains of 12 patients with neurological disorders who have reported having such a secondary representation of their body, in other words a ghost sensation. “Most of the research predicts that we cannot tickle ourselves because our brain precisely predicts of one hand, of my hand, touching my body or touching one or another position. Under normal circumstances the brain is able to form a unified self-perception, but lead researcher Olaf Blanke explained that when this malfunctions the brain creates a second representation of its body.
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