People Learned to Fly With VR Wings, Then Their Brains Did Something Weird - VICE

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When it comes to flying, humans are a bunch of posers. Yes, we’ve built incredible machines capable of dragging us across oceans at 500 miles an hour, but we can’t just get up and fly on our own. Researchers in China may have found a way to trick the brain into thinking that fake virtual wings are actual, physical parts of the human body.

According to a new study published in Cell Reports, initially reported by Science News, the experiment was developed by cognitive neuroscientist Yanchao Bi of Peking University and motor control researcher Kunlin Wei, who wondered whether people could learn to “fly” in virtual reality and whether the brain would adapt to it.

Researchers created a weeklong VR training program where 25 people wore motion-tracking equipment and controlled giant VR feathered wings by rotating their wrists and flapping their arms. Over several sessions, they learned to stay airborne, maneuver through rings, and swat away airborne objects, sounding like a very elaborate, scientifically-grounded video game.

Human Brains Really Like the Idea of Flying

Sounds like a blast, but once the video game part of it was over, brain scans showed that the part of the brain normally associated with recognizing human body parts, the visual cortices, were responding to the digital wings the way they respond to our physical human arms. They were treating the fake wings like they had belonged there.

We’re not going to be gene-splicing ourselves with eagles anytime soon, so it’s likely that we won’t be able to take advantage of our brain’s rapid ability to adapt to suddenly having wings, but maybe one day it will help us adapt to artificial limbs more easily. And who knows. Maybe a set of artificial wings like Sam Wilson’s is in our deep future?

This could all mean that maybe one day VR can be used as more than entertainment. It could train the brain to more rapidly accept whole new physical experiences.

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