Most of the time, our brains are very good at blending together input from all our senses into a seamless, unified conscious experience of “my body.” When this process of integrating different sensory ...

At last, out of body experiences (OBEs) are starting to make sense. They are disturbances – whether deliberate or accidental – of our body schema. This is the brain’s continuously updated model of our ...

We have minds and we have bodies and never the twain shall meet. At least that’s how it feels. In 1641, Rene Descartes published his world changing Meditations on First Philosophy declaring the ...

STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- Shaking hands with yourself is an amusing out-of-body experience. The illusion of having your stomach slashed with a kitchen knife, not so much. Both sensations, however, felt ...

This illustration shows our experimental setup where participants viewed a virtual body through VR goggles and received touch on their back. The experiment revealed that different interpretations of ...

New research has discovered that briefly altering how we perceive our own body can help unlock autobiographical memories – potentially even those from the early stages of childhood. Published in the ...

The concept of an individual swapping his or her body with that of another person has captured the imagination of writers and artists for decades. Manipulation of the visual perspective, in ...

A study found that when people were told to imagine their virtual bodies in pain, their brains resisted the illusion of ownership. Their findings could provide insights into why some people may ...