yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Is That My Real Hand? | Breakthrough


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Well, there's a lot of interest in the robotics community. How can we extend the human body, not only with advanced prosthetic limbs for amps, but maybe for exoskeletons? And then, of course, the question is at what point do these external devices become part of your own body representation?

At one point, do you start to feel that this is really me? Sitting in the lab with Henrik and Andreas, one of Henrik's postdocs, I'm about to be put through the rubber hand experiment. "Put your arm here onto the table and inside this little box here. Okay, cover your right side here now."

"Okay, so what I would do now is I will touch your index finger with the brush here, and please look to the index finger of the hand here." Okay, with my hand hidden from view, Andrea starts to stroke my index finger and the index finger of the rubber hand in almost perfect synchrony.

What you experience, I think, is genuinely beginning to become hard to tell whether—yeah, I mean, it's beginning to feel like—yeah, yeah, I'm buying it, that you're rubbing, that you're swiping. That part of my brain is telling me that it's not possible that that's happening, you know? And then when you're not touching it, I go, "No, not happening." Then you touch it, and I'm like, "Yeah, I'm feeling it there." It's totally—now, just, there’s no question that that's my hand, that that's what you're touching.

All that's the—that's the first experiment. That's crazy! That's super crazy! When they connect my finger with the rubber hand's finger and introduce movement to the experiment—well, now the illusion gets totally surreal. "Oh my God, that's my—that's crazy! That's really weird! Oh man, that's nuts!"

There was a real moment where it suddenly switched. I was like, "Now this isn't working," and then suddenly, now it's just—again, the more I'm doing it. But that's the thing, now I'm not doing anything—now you do! That's crazy! I'm doing this—that's crazy! And it only gets more so as it goes on.

"You have a new hand, artificial hand—that's amazing! Can touch it wow!" If they can add a rubber hand to my body that easily, I can only imagine what they could do with a little more effort in planning.

More Articles

View All
How to Launch a Nuclear Missile
During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union had to build underground silos to house nuclear missiles that could be launched at a few minutes notice. Now, one of the technical challenges they had to overcome that you might not think of is acoustics. L…
Khanmigo chat history demo | Introducing Khanmigo | Khanmigo for students | Khan Academy
Hey everybody, it’s Dan from the Con Academy team, and today I’ll be showing you all a brief introduction to our chat history feature. So, what is chat history? Well, if you’ve ever been using Kigo, and for whatever reason, maybe you’ve navigated to anot…
Example of under coverage introducing bias | Study design | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
A senator wanted to know about how people in her state felt about internet privacy issues. She conducted a poll by calling 100 people whose names were randomly sampled from the phone book. Note that mobile phones and unlisted numbers are not in phone book…
Expectation vs Reality: How to be a YouTuber For Beginners (2019)
What’s up you guys? It’s Graham here, so let’s talk for a minute, figuratively speaking, of course, because we actually have to make this video over 10 minutes long to be able to place mid-roll ads in the video about what it’s like to be a YouTuber. Is it…
Rockets 101 | National Geographic
[Narrator] The ground begins to tremble. [Announcer] Three. [Narrator] Massive engines roar to life. [Announcer] Two. [Narrator] Billowing clouds of exhaust. [Announcer] One. [Narrator] And then a blinding pillar of fire. [Announcer] Liftoff…
Presidential signing statements | US government and civics | Khan Academy
What we’re going to do in this video is talk about presidential signing statements. These are statements that presidents issue when they are signing a bill into law. They don’t always do this; in fact, it was quite infrequent for a very long time. The fir…