FLICKR, TAMBAKO THE JAGUAR
In a famous 1998 psychology experiment, researchers at Princeton placed a rubber hand in front of subjects while having the person hide their real hand behind a screen, then stroked both the real and fake hands with a small paintbrush. The subjects all reported “feeling” brushstrokes on the rubber hand. Their minds had been tricked into registering the prop as a part of their body, an indication, the researchers suggested, of how we sort out what belongs to us and what doesn’t.
A study published this week (October 26) in the Journal of Neuroscience repeated the experiment in mice using rubber tails, the first time this illusion has been tried in animals other than primates. The mice, it turned out, responded just the way humans ...
