"Perky Pat Playset" by Steve Young
Cognitive researcher, neuroscientst and European hottie Henrik Ehrsson and his colleagues at the Karolinska Institutet have already mastered the existential art of illusory body-swapping — tricking the brain into believing that it has “swapped” bodies with another humanoid form.
Now this “eccentric” research is being taken a step further by playing with peoples’ perceptions of body size.
Ehrsson et al. have successfully tricked people into perceiving the world as if they were as tiny as a Barbie-like doll or as giant as a 14-foot mannequin. Basically, this means that subjects percieved the environments around them as if they were the body-size they were primed to “perceptually swap” with . . . So, if you were primed to swap bodies with a Barbie doll, the objects around you would look really, really big.
I know. Weird. Just think Alice’s “Eat Me” cakes — but all in your head.
AREN'T THESE NERDS HOT? Karolinska Institute in Sweden (from left) Arvid Guterstam, Henrik Ehrsson and Björn van der Hoort pose with the tiny, medium-size and giant mannequins used in the study. (Photo: Staffan Larsson, Copyright Staffan Larsson/Henrik Ehrsson)
Now, all we need is some Can-D or Chew-Z, so we can feed your head.
Ehrsson and his colleagues may claim that their research is the first step in mind-controlled robotics, but we Martians are pretty sure that they’ve been hired by Martian Mattel to design the new generation Perky Pat Playsets.
If you don’t know what a Perky Pat Playset is, you’ve never been bored on Mars.
