How 'swapping bodies' with a friend changes our sense of self

Date:
August 26, 2020
Source:
Cell Press
Summary:
A new study shows that, when pairs of friends swapped bodies in a
perceptual illusion, their beliefs about their own personalities
became more similar to their beliefs about their friends'
personalities. The findings suggest that this tie between our
psychological and physical sense of self is involved in memory
function: when our mental self- concept doesn't match our physical
self, our memory can become impaired.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
Our sense of who we are is thought to be influenced by things like our childhood experiences, our interactions with others, and now, researchers
say, our bodies. A study appearing August 26 in the journal iScience
shows that, when pairs of friends swapped bodies in a perceptual illusion, their beliefs about their own personalities became more similar to their beliefs about their friends' personalities. The findings suggest that
this close tie between our psychological and physical sense of self is
also involved in functions like memory: when our mental self-concept
doesn't match our physical self, our memory can become impaired.


==========================================================================
"As a child, I liked to imagine what it would be like to one day
wake up in someone else's body," says first author Pawel Tacikowski,
a postdoctoral researcher at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. "Many
kids probably have those fantasies, and I guess I've never grown out
of it -- I just turned it into my job." The team from the Brain, Body,
and Self Laboratory led by Henrik Ehrsson outfitted pairs of friends with goggles showing live feeds of the other person's body from a first-person perspective. To further the illusion, they applied simultaneous touches to
both participants on corresponding body parts so they could also feel what
they saw in the goggles. After just a few moments, the illusion generally worked; to show that it did, the researchers threatened the friend's
body with a prop knife and found that the participant broke out into a
sweat as if they were the one being threatened. "Body swapping is not
a domain reserved for science fiction movies anymore," Tacikowski says.

Participants were only made to feel like they had "woken up in
someone else's body" for a brief period of time, but that was long
enough to significantly alter their self-perception. Before the body
swap, participants rated their friends on traits like talkativeness, cheerfulness, independence, and confidence. Compared to this baseline,
during the swap, they tended to rate themselves as more similar to the
friend whose body they were in.

The illusion also impacted memory. "There is a well-established
finding that people are better at remembering things that are related to themselves. So, we thought if we interfered with one's self-representation during the illusion, that should generally decrease their memory
performance," says Tacikowski.

And it did: participants in the illusion generally performed worse on
memory tests. More importantly, however, participants who more fully
embraced their friend's body as their own and significantly adjusted
their personality ratings to match how they rated their friend performed
better on the tests than those who indicated they felt disconnected
from their body. The researchers say this could be because they
had less "self-incoherence," meaning that their mental and physical self-representations still aligned.

These findings may be important when looking at depersonalization
disorder, where people feel an incoherence between their mental state
and their bodies, and other psychiatric disorders like depression. "We
show that the self-concept has the potential to change really quickly,
which brings us to some potentially interesting practical implications,"
says Tacikowski. "People who suffer from depression often have very rigid
and negative beliefs about themselves that can be devastating to their
everyday functioning. If you change this illusion slightly, it could potentially make those beliefs less rigid and less negative." For now,
though, he wants to formulate a more general framework for how the sense
of self is constructed across the bodily and psychological levels. "Now,
my mind is occupied with the question of how this behavioral effect works
- - what the brain mechanism is," says Tacikowski. "Then, we can use
this model for more specific clinical applications to possibly develop
better treatments."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Cell_Press. Note: Content may be
edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Pawel Tacikowski, Marieke L. Weijs, H. Henrik Ehrsson. Perception
of Our
Own Body Influences Self-Concept and Self-Incoherence
Impairs Episodic Memory. iScience, 2020; 101429 DOI:
10.1016/j.isci.2020.101429 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200826110322.htm

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