Word: labs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ready to see yourself in a new light. Two papers released this week by the journal Science describe what seem to be the first lab-induced out-of-body experiences in healthy people. Using goggles hooked up to video cameras, and sticks to poke and stroke, researchers subjected study participants to a variety of visual and physical cues to confuse their brain about their body's location. Sound a bit impractical? Consider, then, how the studies relate to humankind's most enduring question: what makes us ourselves in the first place? "I'm not really interested in out-of-body...
...ever to locate the physical roots of these bizarre perceptions of self. For example, neurologists have studied amputees who can feel sensation where their missing limbs used to be; researchers think this phantom limb phenomenon has to do with rewiring in the brain's somatosensory cortex. And, in the lab, researchers have been able to make people feel that fake rubber hands are attached to their own bodies. (This was done simply enough, by touching the participants' real hands while having them watch the rubber hands be touched in the same way and the same time.) Now, there...
...these lab experiments really feel like a true out-of-body experience? "It's very vivid," says Ehrsson of his test. Participants say they really did feel like they were outside of their bodies. People in both sets of studies found the experience "weird." Some of Ehrsson's subjects described the experiment as "cool" and giggled, while some in Blanke's study called it "irritating." But the extent to which the experiments succeeded "depends what you mean by the full-blown out-of-body experience," says Ehrsson. "Of course you know that it's not real, that...
...intelligence: we know Alex Rodriguez had to practice to become a great baseball player, and we don't think of special schools for gymnasts or tennis prodigies as élitist--a charge already leveled against the Davidson Academy. But giftedness on the playing field and giftedness in, say, a lab aren't so different. As Columbia education professor Abraham Tannenbaum has written, "Giftedness requires social context that enables it." Like a muscle, raw intelligence can't build if it's not exercised...
...every patrol, and landslides caused the collapse of a couple of barracks and a chow hall. The post's remote location meant that food supplies flown in by helicopter were sometimes delayed--and when they did come, half the vegetables had already rotted. Even the camp dogs, a white Lab named Musharraf and a mutt called Putin, were getting tired of potatoes. The Afghans held impromptu dance performances when patrols went well and cracked jokes when they didn't. "Even on the worst days, they'd still be smiling," says Rosell. "These guys can handle anything...