With a title like that I’d better use some science to back things up, eh? So what’s this all about then? Short answer, it’s finding out the parameters and boundaries for how “you” a digital “you” can be when working with virtual reality. The rest of this article is the long answer with the sciency stuff.
Background
Proprioception is the psychology term for the sense of self and habitation of the body, how one “owns” and identifies oneself in a physical way. The brain is a wonderfully adaptive organ, and pulling off truly astounding feats in assembling an apparently contiguous reality from its disparate sensory inputs, but it also takes some significant shortcuts in doing so (mostly in the name of efficiency for speed and energy management, since the brain is also the most metabolically expensive matter in the body). This is why optical illusions work – they exploit some of those shortcuts by interfering with the assumptions on which they’re based, inserting errors or otherwise tripping them up. Con men and magicians have been doing this forever, not just to the visual system but the whole collection, and eventually the sciences became formally involved in their own right: specialized regions of the brain were studied frequently through their malfunction or maladaptation, observing how disease or injury (naturally occurring, though there may have been a mad scientist or two along the way; lobotomies came from somewhere…) correlated with behavior. Fortunately more modern techniques allow for neurological exploration without having to crack the skull open all the time. (more…)
