Pickles & Dimes

I was playing around on the Internet one day and came across this article that talks about ways to trick your brain into seeing and hearing things that aren’t real.

One of the tests was called the Rubber Hand Illusion. And the intro to this test said, “If you happen to have a realistic-looking rubber arm in the closet, then this hallucination is for you.”

Well, duh? Who DOESN’T have a fake rubber arm lying around their home? Not me, that’s for sure! In fact, guess where I had it? IN THE CLOSET. It’s like it was meant to be!

Anyway. The gist of the test is to hide your real arm so you can’t see it, place the fake arm where it looks like it could be attached to your body, have someone touch both the real and fake arm at the same time, and when they smash the fake arm, your brain will think it’s really happening to your real arm.

I was beyond excited about this, I have to admit. Nearly every day when I got home from work I asked Jason, “When are we going to do this experiment?” And every day he’d answer something that sounded vaguely committal, like, “Uhhhhhrrrrrrrmmdunnonever.”

Finally, last weekend, we were taking our camper to Jason’s parents’ to store it for the winter. And I thought, “I bet Becky [Jason’s mom] will do the test with me.”

And she did, after pulling out her own fake rubber arm (“Yours looks better than ours. The skin on ours turned gray, like it died…”) AND a fake rubber foot. Out-fake-limbed by the in-laws!

OK, using the illustrations from the article linked above, here’s how the test was supposed to go.

Becky placed her real arm under a table, while I placed the fake arm on top of the table to approximate the position her real arm would have. Jason immediately called our scientific validity into question by pointing out that the fake was for the left arm, but I had placed it on Becky’s right. Because space was an issue and no one would be auditing these results, we ignored his protests and moved forward with the experiment. (There’s always those who want to stop scientific progress, right?)

I then rubbed both Becky’s hand and the fake hand at the same time with my index fingers. After awhile, Becky said it did feel weird feeling me touch her hand but seeing me touch the fake hand at the same time.

I then unexpectedly pounded the fake hand with my fist, which was supposed to make Becky scream in pain thinking I slammed her real hand, but all that happened was that she shrugged and we laughed and I sheepishly said, “This sounded so much better on paper.”

She then repeated the test on me, and besides a vaguely disconcerting feeling of watching the fake hand being rubbed while feeling my real hand get rubbed at the same time, there was no jolt of surprise when Becky hit the fake hand.

Scientific conclusion: bitter and real (not fake) disappointment in science