DJ Toxin

Swedish neuroscientists this Tuesday managed to fool people into thinking they had exchanged bodies with another person – or even exchanged bodies with a manikin.

The teams scientists fixed cameras to the mannequins heads and connected them to two small screens placed in front of the volunteers eyes.

When the volunteers would look down, they would see the body of a mannequin where they expected to see their own.

The team then created the body-swapping illusion by touching the stomach of the mannequin with a stick while creating a similar sensation in the volunteers stomach.

“This shows how easy it is to change the brain’s perception of the physical self. By manipulating sensory impressions, it’s possible to fool the self not only out of its body but into other bodies, too,” the teams leader Henrik Ehrsson, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said in a press release.

You can read the full paper at PLoS ONE