JITOTM46: The Rubber Hand

It starts as a simple illusion: place a rubber arm next to your own on a table, hide your arm, and stroke the fake one with a paintbrush. You'll be amazed! You'll be transfixed! You'll be in the mood to question just how easily your awareness can me misplaced!

The trick is a simple one, but the implications are profound. If stimulating a simulated limb can send your mind into a tizzy... isn't consciousness itself all about location, location, location?

Where is the mind, really? Can it be above and behind the body, as in a third-person-shooter? What about floating up and away, as in an out-of-body-experience? Can your mind be in your heart, as some Native peoples believe? Where did Helen Keller - blind and deaf from birth - feel her mind was? How did Wayne Gretzky "see the ice from above?"

These and many other questions are asked intriguingly, if not answered resoundingly, in the latest episode of JITOTM, The Rubber Hand. We stimulate - you respond!