Monday, June 6, 2016

"My Smartphone and I"

        As I Googled my way through the internet, I found a fascinating website called "Science Daily".  It is here that I found one of the articles I want to post about on our class blog. The ideas that come from the article below can be closely associated with chapter 6 of our book "See What I'm Saying". Towards the end of chapter 6, Rosenblum describes what the "Rubber Hand Illusion"is and how our minds are manipulated by an experimental set up they create. The basic break down is that the participants left hand is covered and they only can see a life like rubber hand and their true right hand. As another person strokes both the fake left hand and the real right hand, the participant begins to mistake the left rubber hand as their own.
        This experiment is used in this article to explain how individuals are able to do the same thing with their smartphone, as they have done with the "Rubber Hand Illusion". We spend such a large part of our day with our smartphones, that experimenters predicted that we would acknowledge the phone as a part of our body.

This is an excerpt from the article:

"The real, not visible hand and the visible artificial object were then stroked with a brush for a few minutes, synchronously or asynchronously (as a control condition). The fact that the test person feels their own hand being stroked, and simultaneously sees the object being touched synchronously, produces the sensation that the object is part of their own body -- because both pieces of information merge into one single percept."


  1. Hi Kat!

    This post was really interesting. A friend of mine is a recent amputee, and I know she struggled for the first few months with phantom limb syndrome. She explained to me that she was perceiving a body part that was no longer there, and even experiencing the phantom pain associated with it. This concept seems to exist within the same wheelhouse as the Rubber Hand Illusion you've found. It's a little terrifying to consider that smartphones could one day be perceived as an extension of our bodies. I certainly hope we're able to curb our usage before something like that were to happen, but I'd agree that that seems to be the path we're currently on as a society.

  2. I agree with the above comment, it astonishes me how attached we have grown to our smart phones and it is quite scary when living in the moment now refers to uploading social media.

  3. Great read, I too hope that our smart phones do not one day become "a part of us." Thanks for posting the article!