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Tricking Your Brain
Neuroscience shows that our sense of self is not as fixed as it feels. The brain constantly builds this sense by combining information from our body and surroundings. What we see, what we feel, and what we touch all play a role in this process.
When these signals are carefully matched, the brain can be tricked into changing what it experiences as part of itself.
A well-known example of this is the rubber hand illusion. In this experiment, a person’s real hand is hidden from view. A realistic rubber hand is placed in front of them. Both hands are stroked at the same time, in exactly the same way.
Even though the person knows the rubber hand is fake, their brain starts to accept it as part of their body. When the rubber hand is suddenly hit with a hammer, people often show a reflexive response, as if their own body were under threat.
When Your Brain Forgets Reality
This experiment shows something important. The brain does not decide what belongs to the body based on knowledge alone. Instead, it relies heavily on matching signals from different senses.
When what you see and what you feel happen at the same time, the brain often trusts that combination more than what you know is true. This is how an object that is clearly not part of you can start to feel like it is.
From Hand to Face
Researchers wondered what would happen if this same principle were applied to something more central to identity than a hand: the face.
In so-called enfacement illusions, participants watch a face on a screen while their own face is touched in the same rhythm. Over time, some people begin to feel as if the face they see is, in some way, their own.
This suggests that even our sense of facial identity can be influenced by simple sensory cues. In other words, under the right conditions, you can temporarily experience someone else’s face as your own.
Illusions and Memory
More recent studies have taken this idea one step further. Instead of showing participants an unfamiliar face, researchers used images of the participants themselves, or rather, a younger version of them.
When touch and vision were synchronized, participants started to experience their younger face as connected to their current body. Interestingly, this not only changed perception. Some people were able to recall memories from their past in more detail and with greater clarity.
These findings suggest that remembering is not just about stored information in the brain. It may also depend on how we experience ourselves in the present moment. By subtly changing the sense of self, access to memories may change as well.
Something to Think About
This line of research is still in its early stages. But it shows promising ideas for helping people who struggle with traumatic memories.
What these studies make clear is that the brain is far more flexible than we often assume. Even something as personal as the face we call our own can, under the right conditions, become part of an illusion.
And that raises an intriguing question: how stable is the sense of self we think we know?
Credits
Author: Rick Arends
Buddy: Dirk-Jan Melssen
Translator: Rick Arends
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