I was tempted to share some advertisements I recently spied for luxury items to be purchased in the name of Jesus' birthday, but such ads are ubiquitous. Pointing them out would be unneeded fuel on a small fire. Instead, I'll share a post I wrote two years ago about the Grinch.…
Dangerous intersection is now more than 1 1/2 years old. We currently have a couple dozen active authors who have contributed 1,500 posts on 60 categories. These posts have drawn almost 7,000 comments. Many of these posts (I'm guessing perhaps one-third of them) make reference to news of the day,…
Back in the 1970s, when I was an undergrad student at the University of Missouri, I took a psychology course that required me to interview someone who worked in the mental health field. A nurse working at the Missouri State Mental Hospital (on Arsenal Street in the City of St.…
The NYT has written a long piece of Mike Huckabee. Who is he? Huckabee is an admirer of the late Jerry Falwell (whose son, Jerry Jr., recently endorsed his candidacy) and subscribes wholeheartedly to the principles of the Moral Majority. He also affirms the Baptist Faith and Message statement: ‘‘The…
Intrigued by my review of numerous articles on neural plasticity, I concocted a simple experiment that had dramatic results. I set out to see whether I could cause people to have the illusion that a cheap rubber hand could “become” their own hand. Over the past few years, I’ve run this experiment on about a half-dozen people, just out of curiosity. Most of my “subjects” found that the experience was “creepy,” in that it appeared that the rubber hand “became” their own hand. It’s an do-it-yourself artificially-induced out-of-body experience.
Here’s how I ran my experiment. Step one is to buy a rubber hand, the creepy kind often used in gags.
Here’s one place where you can buy a fake hand. Alternatively, here’s a site that teaches you how to make your own rubber hand. You’ll also need to bend a coat hanger into a “Y” shape.
Finally, you’ll need a simple barrier, such as a large book. That’s all the equipment you’ll need. Here’s how you run the experiment.
Put the rubber hand side-by-side with the person’s same-side real hand.
You’ll be using the “Y” shaped coat hanger to touch precisely the same part of the rubber hand and the subject’s hand simultaneously. Move the hanger around and tap on or stroke a wide variety of corresponding parts of the two hands.
While you tap on the same portions of each hand, the subject should only be looking at the rubber hand–that’s why you’ll need some sort of barrier. …