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.