Life is complicated. It’s a funny world. People can’t communicate.
According to the textbooks, our perception of size and distance is a product of how the brain interprets different visual cues, such as the size of an object on the retina and its movement across the visual field. Some researchers have claimed that our bodies also influence our perception of the world, so that the taller you are, the shorter distances appear to be. However, there has been no way of testing this hypothesis experimentally – until now.
Henrik Ehrsson and his colleagues at Karolinska Institutet have already managed to create the illusion of body-swapping with other people or mannequins. Now they have used the same techniques to create the illusion of having a very small doll-sized body or a very large, 13-foot tall body. Their results show for the first time that the size of our bodies has a profound effect on how we perceive the space around us.
photo { Helmut and June Newton }
