Ok. The title might be a bit misleading. Recently, Olaf Blanke and his team of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne identified the region of your brain involved in such hallucinating ghostly presences – the feeling of someone near you when there’s no one there.

Robot recreates the sensation of a ghostly presence.

The robot they used had two parts to it: the master and the slave. The volunteers maneuvered the arm of the master robot while the slave robot used those exact movements to feel around their backs. The master robot also applied a force back onto the volunteers’ hands while being moved around. The two robots were offset by 500 milliseconds (0.5 seconds). This made the brain, confounded by the mismatch between internal bodily signals (movements of their arms) and the out-of-sync sensation of the touch on their backs, attribute the touch to the presence of someone standing behind them.

The researchers then picked out the part of the brain stimulated and compared that to the scans of other tests done on epileptics and others with sensory-motor problems. And while the robot isn’t the main focus of this story, it’s pretty cool how robots are helping in the advancement of physiology and psychology, fields that they are not usually associated with helping.

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