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Автомобиль как продолжение тела водителя ↑

bowin в посте Metapractice (оригинал в ЖЖ)

Both these illusions are much more than amusing party tricks to try on your friends. The idea that you can actually project your sensations to external objects is radical and reminds me of phenomena such as out-of-body experiences or even voodoo (prick the doll and "feel" the pain). But how can we be sure the student volunteer isn't just being metaphorical when she says "I feel my nose out there" or "The table feels like my own hand." After all, I often have the experience of "feeling" that my car is part of my extended body image, so much so that I become infuriated if someone makes a small dent on it. But would I want to argue from this that the car had become part of my body?
These are not easy questions to tackle, but to find out whether the students really identified with the table surface, we devised a simple experiment that takes advantage of what is called the galvanic skin response or GSR. If I hit you with a hammer or hold a heavy rock over your foot and threaten to drop it, your brain's visual areas will dispatch messages to your limbic system (the emotional center) to prepare your body to take emergency measures (basically telling you to run from danger). Your heart starts pumping more blood and you begin sweating to dissipate heat. This alarm response can be monitored by measuring the changes in skin resistance—the so-called GSR—caused by the sweat. If you look at a pig, a newspaper or a pen there is no GSR, but if you look at something evocative—a Mapplethorpe photo, a Playboy centerfold or a heavy rock teetering above your foot—you will register a huge GSR.
So I hooked up the student volunteers to a GSR device while they stared at the table. I then stroked the hidden hand and the table surface simultaneously for several seconds until the student started experiencing the table as his own hand. Next I bashed the table surface with a hammer as the student watched. Instantly, there was a huge change in GSR as if I had smashed the student's own fingers. (When I tried the control experiment of stroking the table and hand out of sync, the subject did not experience the illusion and there was no GSR response.) It was as though the table had now become coupled to the student's own limbic system and been assimilated into his body image, so much so that pain and threat to the dummy are felt as threats to his own body, as shown by the GSR.
If this argument is correct, then perhaps it's not all that silly to ask whether you identify with your car. Just punch it to see whether your GSR changes.