Experiments Become fearless through invisibility

The feeling of being invisible frees you from fear

People who believe they are invisible are less anxious in situations with other people. This was the result of a study by neuroscientists around Arvid Guterstam from the Swedish Karolinska Institute. The researchers pretended to the study participants the illusion of being invisible. Then they had their subjects in front of an audience, among other things, which usually provokes a stress response. However, the supposedly invisible did not show social anxiety in the situation. The researchers published their results in the "Scientific Reports".

The brain perceives the body, though it is invisible
Physicists have been working for years to make people invisible. In the not-too-distant future, the cloak and cloak might actually become reality. Against this background, Guterstam and his team wondered how the human brain would react when people no longer visually perceived their bodies.

As part of a study, they asked 125 subjects to put on special glasses in the lab, which they pretended to be invisible. The glasses were prepared so that they no longer saw their bodies when they looked down at themselves. Instead of their bodies, they only saw the previously recorded and projected onto the glasses floor of the laboratory. The researchers touched the subjects with a large brush, so that they no longer saw their body, but still felt. According to the researchers, it took less than a minute for the study participants to assume the illusion of being invisible.

In the next step, the study participants were presented with the glasses that a knife in their supposedly invisible body is stung. As it turned out, skin conductivity, a natural stress response of the body, actually increased. The researchers concluded "that the brain perceives the body, although it is not visible".

Social anxieties are reduced by supposed invisibility
Afterwards, the study participants should stand in front of a foreign audience - a situation that usually causes stress. However, the researchers found that the pulse of the supposedly invisible remained surprisingly low. Thus, social anxiety is significantly reduced by the illusion of being invisible.

This result could be of interest to, among others, clinical psychologists whose patients are suffering from anxiety and could benefit from such an illusion. "We have characterized certain perception-related and socio-cognitive consequences of the invisibility experience that have an impact on current theories of body awareness and behavioral science," the researchers write in the journal. Guterstam and his team suggest that further investigation into moral trade in invisibility be conducted. Nobody knows which thoughts and ideas people will develop when they are actually invisible and thus able to act unnoticed. (Ag)

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Picture credits: günther gumhold