This ghostly apparition that has as a "sense of presence" or FoP reported across cultures, especially in people under extreme conditions - by mountaineers to ruin survivors. FoP is also a common symptom of patients with certain neurological and psychological problems - for example, schizophrenic patients feel that they encounter on a daily basis. And now, researchers believe they know where the mysterious feeling comes.
Neuroscientists in Switzerland had any idea that comes from FoP damage or confusion in three areas of the brain. So they created a robot is capable, healthy people this unsettling feeling by mixed-up signals to the brain. Apparently the robot is so good at his job, two of the study participants were freaked out to end the experiment.
But first, to find these faulty brain regions, the researchers studied 12 patients with other neurological diseases epilepsy, stroke, migraine, and tumors originate. This study participants all feel FoP for seconds or minutes at a time, and the researchers were able to feel this in order to pursue damages in three areas of their brains: the temporoparietal, insular and frontoparietal cortex. These areas are important motion and spatial positioning for processing.
FoP is the result of confusion over which signals your body sends to when you move your brain. That would mean the "ghost" People feel really self.
Most importantly, the researchers noticed the patients all had a similar feeling during their experience with FoP. If the patient is standing, he or she had the feeling that the nearby "spirit" or "presence" was also. If the patient is sitting, the presence is was sit. Patients and their spirits the same posture and movements shared. Thus, the researchers were given an idea: Maybe FoP is the result of confusion over the source and the identity of the body sensorimotor signals - signals your body sends to when you move your brain. That would mean the spirits make people feel really self.
"The sense of presence is the misinterpretation of the signals in the brain," lead researcher Dr. Giulio Rognini, by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, says Popular Science. "Your own signals coming from the body, but they are not properly integrated by the brain. So instead of the movements properly due, they are assigned to another person wrong."
To test this idea, the researchers with the people created a robot that messed sensorimotor signals. With their eyes covered, otherwise healthy participants pressed against a lever in front of them passed the signals to a device poking behind them. Every time they pushed the lever, the robot behind them put them in the back. Essentially, it gave the participants the experience of feeling as if they achieve before them and touch in the back. You can get a video of someone with the robot below:
Then, in a second part of the experiment, the researchers added a delay in the clean and jerk. If the participant pressed the lever, the robot waited half a second or more, in order to push in the back. This confusion at the time gave people a very clear - and sometimes very strong - the feeling that someone else was behind them and pushed them. The participants also reported feeling as if her body drove back towards the present.
"If we perturb this system by robot simulation, a second representation of the body is formed; it's not like" I my body "or" "felt, but it is a presence of another feeling," says Rognini. "It is generated when the prediction of the consequences of movement and the act of follow this movement not match." This mismatch may also explain why healthy people experience FoP from time to time; it is only a matter of current sense of confusion in the brain.
Rognini notes that they hope to one day use their sensory confusion robot in a completely opposite way to help people with schizophrenia. "Instead of this conflict, we want to use this robot simulation to help this conflict schizophrenic patients to restore balance to remove. We could distinguish better to make use of another person."
