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Hack 63. Keep Hold of Yourself

How do we keep the sensations on our skin up to date as we move our bodies around in space?

When an insect lands on your skin, receptors in that area of skin fire and a signal travels up to your brain. The identity of the receptor indicates which part of your skin has been touched. But how do you know exactly where that bit of your body is so you can swat the fly? As we move our bodies around in space we have to remap and take account of our changes in posture to understand the sensations arriving at our skin; very different movements are required to scratch your knee depending on whether you're sitting down or standing up. This might seem like a trivial problem, but it is more complex than it seems at first. We have to integrate information from our joints and muscles about the current position of our bodyproprioceptive informationas well as touch and vision, for example, to gauge that the sight of a fly landing and the sensation of it contacting your finger are coming from the same place.

In Action

Try closing your eyes and feeling an object on a table in front of you with the fingers of both hands. Now, cross your hands and return your fingers to the object. Despite swapping the point of contact between your two hands, you do not feel that the object has flipped around. The next two illusions attempt to make this remapping fail.

First, try crossing your index finger and middle finger and run the gap between them along the ridge and around the tip of your nose (make sure you do this quite slowly). You will probably feel as if you have two noses. This is because your brain has failed to take account of the fact that you have crossed your fingers. Notice that you are unable to overcome this illusion even if you consciously try to do so. This is sometimes called Aristotle's Illusion, as he was apparently the first person to record it.

Now, try out the crossed hands illusion. You'll need a friend to help. Cross your hands over in front of your chest, at arm's length. Then turn your palms inward, so your thumbs point downward and clasp your hands together, so your fingers are interleaved. Next, rotate your hands up toward your chest, until your thumbs are pointing away from you, as shown in Figure 6-1. Now, if a friend points to one of your fingers and asks you to move it, you will probably fail to move the correct finger and instead move the same finger but on the opposite hand. Again, you have failed to take account of your unusual posture; you assume that the finger you see corresponds to the finger that would be in that position if you had simply clasped your hands, without crossing them over. You may find that you are able to overcome the illusion if your friend indicates which finger he wants you to move by touching it. This can help you to remap and take your posture into account.


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 652


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Hack 55. Confuse Color Identification with Mixed Signals | Figure 6-1. Tom tries out the crossed hands illusion
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