From Box Files to the British Science Festival: Part Four

I’ve been reminded (several times) that I haven’t updated this for a while, so here, at last, is Part 4 of Box Files to British Science Festival.

Part 4:

Mark 3 fell down like a three year old child’s tower of bricks and we realised that my incompetence with a saw was no match for years of experience with slow-grown Swedish pine. The trip to IKEA bought us Mark 4, which consisted of a bookcase frame that we hoped wouldn’t fall down quite so easily as my previous efforts. We also replaced the projector hanging from the ceiling with a large 28 inch imac computer, which was a bit of a nightmare to begin with because it meant that anything we tried to do on the screen was upside down and back to front (due to having to view everything in the mirror). At the same time, the School of Psychology very kindly took a punt on me and gave me enough money to buy a proper camera, one that could take images at 60 frames a second and feed them straight into the computer. This, coupled with a software upgrade, finally allowed me to do what I’d dreamt of all along: take live video feed of the real hand, present it in the same place as the real hand, and then add left or rightward shifts to its visual location. The IKEA bookshelf was starting to get a bit wobbly by this time, due both to the weight of the imac computer and me banging my head against it in frustration at having to work upside down. So, when I saw an old workshop cabinet about to be skipped, I took it along to one of the techies and asked him to modify it for me. This he did with the aid of a size 10 boot that he used simply to kick the back off. ‘There you go’, he said, ‘That should do it.’ And it did. Mark 5 was born: the first proper prototype MIRAGE which still lives under a desk in the lab as a safe place to crawl in an earthquake. I have a soft sport for Mark 5: not only was it indestructible, but it also triggered the realisation that I’d been making the wrong thing all along.

Next time:

Next time: MIRAGE, Multisensory illusions, Manchester, Mark 6 and the Media.

Written by Dr. Roger Newport

Lab updates

Latest Project Finishes

Our most recent finger stretching arthritis project (funded by the Dunhill Medical Trust) has come to an end so we would like to thank all the people that took part for us. We’re still ploughing through all the data, but we can tell you that the results, overall, look pretty similar to last time with pain being reduced in around 3/4 of those with arthritic pain in their hands. We’ll keep you posted, so keep checking back for updates.

Image of a patient's hand being stretched

Helen to stay in the lab

In additional news - we received some fantastic news last week that Helen Gilpin, our hard-working researcher for the latest arthritis project, has been granted a Ph.D. studentship at Nottingham so that she can continue her research over the next three years, starting in September. This is great news for the lab as it means that we can start testing some of our new illusions as well as continuing our research into the mechanisms behind different kinds of pain.


Coming Soon! Part 4 of From Box Files to the British Science Festival and the Spring Quarterly Illusion...Supernunerary Limbs.

MIRAGE finally arrives in Australia!

Only a month after eventually remembering to pick up the package, Excess Baggage have finally delivered MIRAGE to Tasha in Australia. We haven’t heard whether it’s arrived in one piece yet, but here’s hoping that we’ll soon be reading about some new great illusions and experiments from their lab.

MIRAGE lab Australia

Dr. Tasha Stanton from the Neuroscience Research Australia group has been visiting the MIRAGE lab in Nottingham for the last 3 weeks. The aim of her visit was to learn how to use MIRAGE before taking one back to Australia with her. This picture was taken at the UCAS open day held at Nottingham yesterday (15/02/12) where she was demonstrating the illusions to prospective students and their families. The best way to learn how to use MIRAGE properly is to be thrown into a live public demo. She did brilliantly.

Tasha Stanton from the Neuroscience Research Australia at the University of Nottingham UCAS open day

From Box Files to the British Science Festival: Part Three

Here is the much await third part of the story of the making of MIRAGE:

Recall that I had solved the problem of having a small cursor appear in the same place as the hand and have the cursor move about independently of it, but I had not solved the problem of the cursor looking nothing like a hand. There were several ways in which I could have addressed this issue and, after careful consideration, I went for the easy option. I took a picture of a passing Ph.D. student’s hand (Catherine Preston) and simply replaced the cursor with this picture. Now, I had a life-sized hand moving about in what appeared to be the same place as the subject’s real hand. It was not their real hand (and it only ever fooled one person) and I was stuck with a female hand, but it was a hand, nevertheless. This set up was used in a Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) study investigating agency attribution (distinguishing between self generated action and action generated by other agents) and the right hemisphere (Preston and Newport 2008, published in SCAN).

Hand image used for this version of MIRAGE

The surrounding framework had also moved on, from box files and blu-tack to a homemade wooden structure. It would have cost me almost a thousand pounds to have a proper one built, but I didn’t have any research money, so I ignored all health and safety procedures and decided to build my own. I did most of this in secret, using the cover of students waiting noisily for a lecture in the corridor to drown out the noise of sawing and hammering. It was only after I nearly cut my own ear off with a power tool that I decided to tell anyone what I was up to, just in case I went missing for a few days and no-one thought to investigate the spreading pool of blood seeping out from under the lab door. Unfortunately, my woodworking skills were only as good as my Grade C O-level and the whole thing came tumbling down on a patient that Catherine was testing. At that stage, we decided to do things properly – and went to IKEA.

Next Time: IKEA, a boot, technological advancements and the first idea of what I might have inadvertently created.


Post written by Dr. Roger Newport

Winter Illusion - The Disappearing Hand Trick

This month’s illusion, the disappearing hand trick, is exactly what it says it is - an illusion that makes your hand disappear. It works on the principle that if we can be made to feel like a fake hand is belongs to our body or that our finger is really stretching using multisensory integration (matching of vision and touch) then by using multisensory disintegration we can make our real limb seem to disappear.

Participants place both hands in MIRAGE so that they are hovering just above the tabletop. Blue bars then appear that gradually close in on the hands over about 25 seconds. The participant's only task at this point is to keep their hands within the blue bars.

Participant trying to avoid the blue bars.

What is actually happening here is that the images of the hands move very slowly inwards so that to keep their hands still the participant must move their hands ever so slowly outwards - so slowly that the don't know they are doing it (for full details on the experimental procedure see the supplementary material from the published article - Multisensory disintegration and the disappearing hand trick, Current Biology). After 25 seconds the hands are placed down on the tabletop and then the image of the right hand disappears along with the blue bars.

At this point the participant does not feel like their hand has actually disappeared, although all that they can see is the table where their hand used to be, but then they are asked to reach over with the left hand and touch their disappeared right hand.

We believe vision more than our body position sense (proprioception) so the the participant thinks their hand is where they last saw it, Because their hands are actually further away than they realise, when they reach to where they think their other hand is - it is no longer there and seems to have disappeared. It is this failure to touch the right hand with their left hand that is key to multisensory disintegration and the experience that the hand has actually gone.

The illusion is so effective that most people show some kind of stunned or amused reaction and some even pull their hands out to check they still have them both!

This video shows what the volunteer sees during the illusion.

This video shows a volunteer reaction to her disappeared hand. Note that her reaction is elicited at the moment that she reaches for her right hand but does not find it.

Looking ahead to 2012

Well this is the first blog of 2012 and this year we hope to have another very productive year in the MIRAGE lab, finishing the arthritis grant sponsored by Dunhill medical trust, getting a new branch of the lab up and running in Malaysia as well as the day to day body/ action representation research. 

Our quarterly illusion posts will continue with the Winter illusion (disappearing hand trick) in the next few days and of course the continuation of the "From Box Files to the British Science Festival" posts explaining how and why the MIRAGE began.

At the end of last east year Roger appeared on Health show talking about our arthritis research, if you missed it then however, you can still watch now thanks to Rockhopper.tv. Watch the video below or download your own copy from this link:

http://www.rockhopper.tv/the-health-show/programmes.aspx?programmeid=735

Roger explaining about our arthritis pain research on the Health Show. 

Video provided by Rockhopper.tv