With a Paintbrush, Researchers Make People Invisible and Lower Anxiety

To understand how the brain experiences invisibility, researchers developed a method of optical illusion that they believe could help curing social anxiety and related disorders.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden got 125 participants to wear head-mounted virtual reality displays and look down. Instead of their bodies, the participants saw empty space. To instill sensation of being in an invisible body, researchers performed simultaneous actions on both the subject and in empty space while in view of the subject. This tricked the brain into believing that the body was invisible. The action that researchers performed to trick brain was to provide a sense of touch with a paintbrush.

"Within less than a minute, the majority of the participants started to transfer the sensation of touch to the portion of empty space where they saw the paintbrush move and experienced an invisible body in that position," said Arvid Guterstam, study lead author.

The team also set out to learn if being invisible lowered social anxiety levels by placing putting participants before strangers.

"We found that their heart rate and self-reported stress level during the 'performance' was lower when they immediately prior had experienced the invisible body illusion compared to when they experienced having a physical body. These results are interesting because they show that the perceived physical quality of the body can change the way our brain processes social cues," said Guterstam.