When Michiteru Kitazaki, a professor of engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan, recently posed this question in an email, he evoked an idea from Japanese culture known as tamashii, or the soul without a body.
In a paper published Tuesday in Scientific Reports, they showed that animating virtual hands and feet alone is enough to make people feel their sense of body drift toward an invisible avatar.
Their work fits into a corpus of research on illusory body ownership, which has challenged understandings of perception and contributed to therapies like treating pain for amputees who experience phantom limb.
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Rather than an example of illusory body ownership, she said, the drifting effect may be more related to out-of-body experiences, in which people simply feel their bodies “displaced in space.” She added that the researchers might have found effects from the threats had they measured physiological responses, like changes in skin conductance or brain activity.
Dr. Kitazaki replied that the exact difference between out-of-body experiences and illusory body ownership is an open question, but agreed that future research should include such measurements.
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/science/virtual-reality-body.html