As strange as it sounds, that is precisely what they have achieved at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (Switzerland). Basically what this research team has achieved is to reproduce in the laboratory the sensation of a “strange presence” around us . To do this, they created a robot that sent untimely signals to the brain, creating the feeling that there was someone else around.
As explained in the scientific news agency SINC, the researchers carried out a dissonance experiment with a group of blindfolded volunteers. In it, a robot reproduced the movements of its hands first in real time and later with a time delay between the participant’s movements and the robot’s touch. Under these asynchronous conditions, which distorted temporal and spatial perception, the researchers were able to recreate the ghostly illusion.
In this way, the team of Olaf Blanke and his colleagues have verified that this type of illusory sensations is actually the result of an alteration of the sensorimotor brain signals involved in the generation of self-awareness through the integration of information from our movements and the position of our body in space.
” Our experiment has succeeded in reproducing the sensation of a strange presence induced in the laboratory for the first time . This shows that it can occur under normal conditions, simply through conflicting sensory-motor signals,” explained Blanke.
At the brain level the explanation of this phenomenon is embedded in the self-perception of ourselves. Under normal conditions our brain is able to build a unified self-perception of ourselves from these representations. However, when the system malfunctions due to a disease (or in this case by a robot) a second representation of one’s own body can sometimes be created that is no longer perceived as an ‘I’, but as an ‘other’.
The study, published in the specialized journal Current Biology, will allow us to learn more about the mechanisms used by the brain in certain situations. It also opens a door to the analysis of schizophrenia, a mental illness suffered by some 400,000 Spaniards.
