Imagine you are sitting on a chair and looking down. You see your body, from your arms to your lap, then your legs. But it’s not your body, it’s a virtual body created by Mel Slater, a virtual environment professor at the University of Barcelona inside his lab.

As you move, the virtual body you see through the virtual reality glasses (VR) will move accordingly. There is a big mirror on the opposite side and if you wave your hand, it will reflect your image. Then a blue bouncing ball appears and hits your wrist and ankle. You can feel their effects on your body. But you don’t know which body it is? The boundary between real and virtual gradually faded, between the person wearing VR glasses and the person in the digital environment.

It turns out, it doesn’t take long for your consciousness to abandon your physical body and move to live in another body. It is called “illusion of full body possession” and Slater says that the ownership of a virtual body is quite strong and that the process also happens quickly.

Not only is it a game or trick, it has a meaning beyond that. Slater discovered that what happens to a person’s virtual body can have an effect on their real life later. When white people live in a black body, their racist views are unconsciously reduced. When placing adults into the virtual body of a four-year-old child, they later identify themselves more childishly and think the world around them looks wider. When putting men into women’s bodies, they tend to become their own psychotherapists.

But what happens if you start getting out of the virtual body? Imagine you suddenly saw yourself leaving your body, hovering somewhere on the ceiling and looking down at yourself. Slater used this test to find answers to a new question: Can VR reduce the fear of death?

Some scientific studies and reports have recorded that after a near-death experience (NDE), they can get a new perspective on life as more charity, caring for others. more and less afraid of death.

NDEs are still controversial in the medical community, because no one is sure what happens in a person’s brain when this situation occurs. However, whether they are products of the brain or a real experience, people always report that they have quite similar feelings. For example, they see the bright light, the tunnel, the dead family members and the most extensive out-of-body experience (OBE), the condition where they float above the body and look down from above. This is also part of the near-death experience that Slater wants to capture with VR technology and hopefully with it, the fear of death will diminish.

So how to simulate an OBE, which almost doesn’t have to try dying? Studies on rubber hands have shown us that this idea is not as difficult as you think. In many experiments, researchers have shown that if you place a rubber hand near your body and hide your real hand from view, your brain may be fooled into thinking that a rubber hand is a table real hand. It is usually done by touching or stroking your real hand and touching the rubber hand in the same way, at the same time. Similar studies have shown that if someone threatens a rubber hand such as using a knife or hammer to stab, hit the brain, anxiety and anxiety increase with the severity of the brain. threat.

Olaf Blanke, director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the university research institute in Lausanne, Switzerland and professor of neurology at the University Hospital of Geneva, said you can create “virtual the sense of possessing the whole body “as well as the experience of escaping the body through virtual reality technology.

Hyeongdong Park, a graduate student at Blanke’s lab, said OBE tests can provide insight into the interaction between the brain and body, as well as how it affects self-consciousness. our senses. Since then, they have used OBE to try to influence pain awareness, to be able to treat chronic pain. Finally, OBE can help us learn more about neurological mechanisms for self-identification, self-positioning and views from a first perspective.

These are the basic characteristics of the mind and there are examples of what will happen when this brain machine malfunctions. In 1942, neuroscientist Josef Gerstmann witnessed two patients suffering from the right temporal cortex lesion and lost ownership of the left arm and hand, a condition called somatoparaphrenia. Although their arms and hands are connected to the body, they just don’t think it is theirs. In some people, this may manifest in the opposite direction: They will claim ownership with the hands or feet of others.

Similar neurological problems can lead to what is called an “autoscopic” phenomenon, in which a person cannot see their body, their position or remember their identity correctly. Those who have the phenomenon of “heautoscopy” say they see a second copy of the body somewhere else, even having intimate experiences with the body. Of course, scientists have not discovered what brain abnormalities can lead to these conditions.

“Adults often have the experience of a real ego, residing in the body and another ego related to experience and thinking,” Blanke wrote. “This self-conscious aspect is often considered one of the most astounding features of the human mind.”

The human brain may be fooled in rubber hand testing.

In his recent study, Slater tested two OBE versions using virtual reality, based on Blanke’s works and another similar OBE research design published 10 years ago. He sets up for both scenarios to be the same: You are in a virtual body, this body simulates your movement and when the bouncing balls appear, you can feel them touching you. through the use of stimulation on the real body). Once you achieve the illusion of possessing the body and feeling like your virtual body is yours, the scenario will take you out and start floating on the ceiling.

In the first test version, Slater will keep the balls bouncing near the ground with the body. You can still feel them touching and if you move your arms, the virtual body’s arms still imitate you. But at this point your visual perspective is from above, at the ceiling. This creates a kind of confusion, or a strange feeling, when mind in two places at once, according to Slater. The minds of test participants will appear to think they are on the ceiling, but somehow they are still related to the body below. It leads to this kind of feeling: I am at the same time in two places.

In the second version, Slater moved the balls up high, allowing them to stay at the same position with overhead. You can feel them closer to the ceiling than below. When moving your limbs, the virtual body below does nothing and you are completely separate from it. According to Slater, this can create a feeling that you have completely separated from the body below.

In the 16 healthy people who participated in the experiment, he found that exposure to the second scenario led to reports that they had reduced their fear of death, while the first scenario did not. He thought that OBE could lead to a psychological change related to death, but only when there is complete separation from the body, not a part.

“What we think is happening is that somehow your brain is learning that it can separate consciousness from the body,” he said. “It is my body, I have escaped from it and I still have full consciousness. Therefore, by default, consciousness can be separated from the body. And if consciousness can be separated from the body, there may be life outside the body. ”

Slater’s work inspired others, not just in the scientific community. For example, Dutch medical device designer Frank Kolkman.

In Kolkman’s established idea, you will stand in front of a robot head mounted on a moving trolley. This head has a camera in the eye socket and when you wear VR glasses, you will see what the robot head sees, which is yourself from behind. Through the speaker in the robot ear, you hear the noise from the position of the robot head and not yours. When you move your head, the robot head moves accordingly. When the robot head starts moving slowly on the path out of your body, you feel that you are going with it.

“Most people at that time had a very close relationship with robots,” Kolkman said. “They feel as if they are in the position of robots instead of their bodies.”

When you leave your real body, you can continue to look around from a robot perspective. The awakening perspective is quite rude, is a mirror. When you turn your face to the mirror, only the white robot’s face coldly looks back, and this is the way Kolkman said will bring extremes to the body.

After that, the head will slowly move towards your body, a kind of rewind. During this period, everyone experienced the feeling of being drifting. “They can be in robots or inside their bodies or somewhere in between. It is a rather strange feeling, ”he said.

More than 2,000 people have tried the Kolkman machine, at events such as exhibitions and technology fairs. He said almost all of them described some of the experiences outside the body. As for the reduction in anxiety about death, that’s what he hopes to continue to be able to explore in collaboration with researchers.

“I hope that machines like this, or this way of thinking, can change the minds of some people at the end of their life. Perhaps if we can take a little bit of fear and then replace it with acceptance, that means people will make different decisions. They can choose to resist treatment, which can give them an extra month of survival, but will pay for both the quality of life and the economy, ”he said.

But can these experiences really be applied to end-stage patient care? According to Craig Blinderman, director of the Adult Health Service at Columbia University Medical Center, he does not think anyone who is suffering from a serious illness or is about to die has a desire to take part in such trials. .

Slater has a similar opinion. “I don’t think this will be useful for seriously ill patients. I guess it will be more suitable for healthy people who are in a state of anxiety about death, ”he said.

Blinderman said the worries about death were systematically recorded in patients with critical diseases. But his experience shows that a significant number of patients with cancer will experience physical weakness, most commonly within three months after being diagnosed with the condition. He also said that the most common reasons given for the use of “fallen death” are existential reasons, such as fear of the future, fear of becoming a burden on others, losing autonomy.

But he also thinks that this VR experience can be a mistake because if it works, it can promote or create systems of trust that never existed before. What if everyone had the belief that having a life after death, or that their body was the only thing that died. Instead, he suggests that people should pay attention or speak out of what happens in their bodies instead of turning their backs on it.

At the same time, he agreed with the use of psilocybin, a psychedelic compound from “magic” fungi, as a more promising non-traditional treatment option. Anthony Bossis, a clinical psychiatrist at NYU Langone Health, an academic medical center affiliated with New York University, recently published a study to control placebo and its effects. It is in a safe, controlled environment for terminal cancer patients.

Bossis thinks that everyone thinks about death and fear of death, even when we are young and healthy. “We are very hard to say and make people not afraid of it,” he said. “For some people, it affects them more than others. If you are a human being, you cannot think about how you will die. ” In addition, medical culture as well as society make it difficult to talk about death. That’s why you need to find better ways to talk about it.

Bossis said that in his research, psilocybin triggered a mysterious experience for patients, leading to their behavior and attitudes with a great change in death and life. Their anxiety around death has decreased significantly, he said.

In the aforementioned mystical experiences, participants indicated that they had a sense of unity with every creature, transcendental feeling, sense of meaning, spiritual feeling. “The feeling of superiority, it is especially important,” Bossis said. “In our study, some people understand that we are not just these bodies, not just cancer, but also something more sustainable.”

But are these things very different from what Sater has tried to achieve in his virtual reality settings? Bossis believes that the ultimate goal is the same, although the method and method of implementation need to be studied further.

“Perhaps we can create transcendence with this technology,” Bossis said.

However, some people think that this is just an exit to leave reality, or just a method to fool the brain. But whether it is right or wrong, this is still a wonderful kind of illusion experience that people can access in a short time.

Refer to The Vice