The thought of having a ghost roam around your home, or over at the place that you work, can be a frightful one for the weak of heart. What happens when robots and ghosts cross over into each other’s worlds? That is the theoretical question which has been more or less “answered” with this recently designed robot that is capable of creating the illusion of a “presence” in the room, although it is not meant for a haunted house. Basically, this unique tool is meant for neurological research, where it could help edge scientists along in their understanding of various conditions such as schizophrenia.
Scientists have discovered that patients who suffered from hallucinations that involve sensing someone who isn’t there, due to various conditions such as epilepsy, strokes, migraines, and brain tumors, happened to have different regions in the brain which deal with self perception being damaged most of the time.
Lead author Giulio Rognini, a post doctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, shared, “We also found that the hallucinated presence was usually in the same position as the subject — if the patient was standing, so was the sensed presence, and the same if the patient was sitting. So we felt that the feeling of a presence was being caused by a misperception of one’s own bodily signals.”
Hence, a robot was developed to induce a similar mind-body confusion in healthy patients, and this robot proved to be a particular success. Even when blindfolded, subjects who their finger into a mechanism, being asked to push it around would report that they felt as though there was someone standing behind them. In fact, some of them even asked for the experiment to stop halfway.
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