Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The sensation of walking in someone else's shoes has been taken one step further by scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Neuroscientists have created a "body-swap" illusion in a series of volunteers using simultaneous visual and motor stimulation from another's body. A headset covered the volunteers' eyes and displayed a 3-D view of the other person's perspective via a small camera next to their head. There were also tests done with a male mannequin as the "other person" and volunteers reported the same results. Both the mannequin and volunteer were poked in the stomach by a prod, giving them them the sensation that they were inside the body of the mannequin itself. They said that they had an expectation for the mannequin to move if their own bodies moved. However, they never reported feeling like plastic. 

The set of tests done with a female researcher instead of a mannequin were also very informative. Wearing the same visual headpiece, a volunteer would get a tingling sensation in their fingertips if they saw a knife being passed over the arm of the researcher. This sympathy reflex is more evidence that visual stimulation alone can cause false sensory reflexes. "In the body-swap illusion, we can see that multi-sensory information powerfully affects the brain," said neuroscientist Patrick Haggard, who was not on the research team. Another part of the experiment involved shaking hands with the mannequin while wearing the headpiece, giving volunteers the feeling that they were shaking hands with themselves.  

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/38664/title/Your_body_is_mine