This post is also available in Dutch.
Us vs. Them
Look at the daily news and the world is increasingly divided. There seems to be a general inability and unwillingness to listen to and understand one another. While we as humans are highly compassionate and altruistic, this usually applies to people similar to us. We distinguish between us and them: those we identify with and those who appear different. The latter may feel more distant or harder to understand.
The path to a future where we share mutual empathy is difficult when we are locked into our own perspective. But what if our sense of self is not as rigid as we assume? What if, with a few simple tricks, we can literally step into another’s shoes?
Creating body ownership
We first need to understand: How does the brain conclude that our body belongs to us? The brain does this through multisensory integration. We constantly receive information from all our senses, like from your eyes, ears, and proprioceptive information (sensing where your body is in space, e.g., through feedback from your muscles). Our brain creates one unitary experience, by tying this information together.
For this to work, the information needs to be coherent. For example, as you are reading this article, you get proprioceptive feedback on where your right hand is resting – maybe on your keyboard, or your lap. When you now turn to look at your hand, the visual feedback you get is coherent with that sensation. Your eyes indeed perceive your hand at the location you sensed it at. Hence, your brain concludes: This must be my hand.
Manipulating body ownership
If our brain creates body ownership through multisensory integration, this means we can disrupt body ownership by messing with the senses. This is where the body-swap illusion comes in.
In this experiment, the participant wears a virtual reality (VR) headset. They face a mannequin, who wears a helmet with two attached cameras. Both are positioned in a way that they ‘look down’ at their own bodies. The participant’s headset shows the camera’s feed. This means: The participant sees the mannequin’s body instead of their own. An experimenter then strokes both the mannequin’s and the participant’s chests at the same time. Consequently, the participant sees the mannequin being touched while feeling touch on their own chest. Their brain combines these signals and concludes: This must be my body. As a result, the participant feels as though the mannequin’s body is theirs.
Picture credit: Petkova & Ehrsson (2008)
Literally stepping into another person’s shoes
Rémi Thériault and colleagues extend the body-swap illusion to another real person. In their methodology, a participant and a Black confederate each wear a VR headset with a camera at eye level. The video feed is swapped, so each person sees ‘through the other’s eyes’. They now start making synchronised movements. The participant, looking at their hands or in a mirror, sees the confederate’s hands or reflection instead of their own. It feels as though they swapped bodies with the confederate.
Picture credit: Thériault et al. (2021)
Researchers have done these sorts of experiments using all kinds of bodies. Participants experience being in the body of a different gender, race, or age. One thing that has become clear across all these experiments is one thing: Going through the body-swap, participants report feeling extreme closeness to the person they are embodying. And as a result, they show lasting decreases in prejudice, both explicit and implicit, and higher empathy.
Stepping out of one’s own perspective
What can we learn from this? That the feeling of self and the body are not as inherently intertwined as one might think. Our brain flexibly adapts and tries its best to make a coherent story out of the information it receives. This is how we experience our body as our own.
Our perspective on things is incredibly limited. It is important to try and see things from another’s point of view from time to time, to really listen and try to understand them – with or without a VR headset. Even when undergoing the body-swap, at the end you will always be you and never be them. But it is important to realise that you could be.
Picture credit: Anna Shvets on Pexels
Author: Charlotte Sachs
Buddy: Xuanwei Li
Editor: Amir Homayun
Translator: Natalie Nielsen
Editor translation: Wieger Scheurer
