Scientists Discovered What It Feels Like To Be Invisible

A group of neuroscientists from Sweden's Karolinska Institute delved into the perceptual aspects of being invisible. They found an affective illusion as well as its changes to human’s stress responses to high-pressure social events.

Several theories involving invisibility and its effects on the human mind have been presented, and science advancements made experts thinks that the concept is not far from possible in the near future. Nonetheless, little is known about the possible affectations that invisibility can cause the human perception.

The researchers presented a possible perceptual illusion than an invisible body can create. The experiment, published in the journal Scientific Report, was initiated by donning a set of displays on the head of the participant whilst standing. The researcher then instructed the participant to look down on her body, but instead saw an empty space. A large paintbrush was ran through all the parts of her body to simulate an invisibility. Another paintbrush was stroked in mid-air and imitated how the first brush was exactly guided to the participant's body.

"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," Arvid Guterstam, the study lead author, said. "We showed in a previous study that the same illusion can be created for a single hand. The present study demonstrates that the 'invisible hand illusion' can, surprisingly, be extended to an entire invisible body."

Additional experimental activities were performed by the team to show that the illusion is indeed present. They gathered 125 study subjects and started making stabbing movements on an empty space representing their invisible bellies. It was discovered that the participants increasingly produced sweat responses when the illusion was being executed and decreased when it was stopped. This suggested that the mind regarded the threat to the empty space as a threat to one’s own body.

Furthermore, the authors extended their investigation by looking at the social perception that a human may have if he/ she becomes invisible. They did this by exposing the participants in front of a pool of strangers. It was discovered that the heart rate and self-reported stress of the participants were lower when they already had an experience of being “invisible” compared to those who knew of the physical body only, Guterstam said. He explained that these results imply that our physical attributes correlate to the social signals.

The authors are looking into expanding their studies, so they can contribute to the future of clinical research regarding various disorders such as those involving social anxieties. Dr Henrik Ehrsson, the study's principal investigator, closes by saying that follow-up studies should also tackle the effects of invisibility to moral decision-making, as this may open up a lot of moral issues when the invisibility cloak becomes widely available -- a premise Plato said during his time.

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