← all facts
perception
Your brain can treat a fake hand as real.
In the rubber hand illusion, touch on a hidden hand causes a sensation in a visible fake hand.
Researchers place a participant's real hand out of sight while positioning a realistic fake hand in front of them. When both hands are stroked with a brush at the same time, the brain integrates the visual input from the fake hand with the physical feeling on the real one. This leads to a sense of body ownership over the synthetic object.
Our sense of self is a flexible construction updated by sensory inputs.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Botvinick and Cohen, 1998, Nature
- What the check found
- The 1998 paper in Nature by Botvinick and Cohen is the foundational study for this phenomenon, and the description accurately captures the mechanism and the result.
- Confidence
- Well replicated
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.