Beam me up. Teleporting people around a room is helping to reveal how our sense of self is created. As we go about our lives, we experience our body as a physical entity with a specific location. To find out how the brain manages to do this, Arvid Guterstam at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, asked 15 volunteers to lie in a brain scanner while wearing a head-mounted display. The display was linked to a camera on a dummy body lying elsewhere in the room, which meant that the volunteers saw the room from its perspective. Stroking both the real and the fake body at the same time tricked the person's brain into the illusion of inhabiting the dummy's body and being at its location. The experiment was repeated in different parts of the room and brain activity analysed. One region of the brain, the posterior cingulate cortex, seemed to control both our sense of inhabiting our body and our sense of where we are in space.
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