Your Body is Easily Fooled...but why do that?!

When my children were young, I took them to an entertainment park. Although I avoided going on the Thrills & Spills rides because I don’t enjoy excessive stimulation (me being so sensitive and all), I thought it would be safe to go inside one of the Virtual Reality rooms. At the time, Virtual Reality was not really available outside of research labs so to claim it was a VR experience was an exaggeration. In truth, it was a wrap-around screen (which, even then, only wrapped around at the edges forming a slight curve) showing a film of a train ride while us viewers stood huddled in a group in the middle of ‘the action’. No glasses, no simulations. Just a curved film embracing a standing audience.

Importantly, the film was shot from first person perspective as if we were riding on the train which was rushing through crazy landscapes twisting sideways, speeding up, slowing down, and nearly falling over a cliff. We viewers squealed with delight as our brains tried to coordinate external information with our internal sensations, that, after all, being the only way this entertainment works. As we perceive the external landscape moving, our somatosensory system immediately instigates internal balancing mechanisms to keep us upright, stop us falling out of the train, prevent us from injuring ourselves by flopping about in a moving vehicle. But because we are not actually moving, these internal gyroscopic adaptations make us feel weird. Hence, the entertainment.

Most of the audience were chatting and giggling. I, on the other hand, was transfixed by the experience. It had my full attention.

As the ride came to a climax, the train got faster and faster, winding through forests, around hazards and over mountains. Then, suddenly, the train driver slammed on the brakes and it stopped, and I fell forward, flat on my face on the floor.

Even though I knew the film was not real, my body was automatically responding to visual information as if true. My somatosensory system attempted to compensate for the observed sudden braking of the train by contracting strong postural muscles which would keep me upright as the train braked. But, of course, the visual information was not true (I was not on a train suddenly stopping) and so I was not really experiencing forces of deceleration on my body, so the muscular compensation caused me to lurch forward.

Survival requires instantaneous unconscious responses. There is no time to verify the threat and so all visual danger is assumed to be real until it can be assessed safely later. Although I understood intellectually that the experience was not real, that bit of information processing that takes place between seeing and doing does not compute fiction; it just computes information.

Somatic experience is processed as if it were true. “There is no distinction at the sub-cortical level between real or imagined,” writes systems analyst, Myrna Estep. Cognition comes higher in our intellectual processing after embodied perception. The upshot of this is that we are easily tricked by visual and tactile information.

The famous ‘rubber hand’ experiment is rather cruel (but nonetheless amusing). The test person rests both arms in front of them on a table. A screen is placed in front of one arm and a replacement rubber arm put inside the screen. Now the test person can see two arms (one real, one rubber) but they can still feel their real arm behind the screen. The experimenter strokes the back of the rubber arm while also stroking the hidden real arm in the same place. The person sees the rubber arm being stroked while feeling their real arm stroked. The visual and tactile information agree which creates what is called psychological ownership of the rubber arm. If the experimenter now suddenly stabs the rubber arm with a sharp point (why would you do that?!), the test subject leaps and screams. The mental processes linking seeing with feeling assume everything to be true.

If we didn’t feel a somatic response to films we watch, video games we play, or books we read, there would be no film, gaming, or publishing industry; certainly, no porn industry.

The Netflix series, Game of Thrones, was (in 2019) the most popular TV series ever. Its fictional world of fighting warlords involved a controversial amount of rape, torture, and graphic violence. Looking at the sales statistics, violence sells. As each of the eight series included increasing amounts of violence so audience numbers increased proportionately. Although sex drew early audiences into the first series, violence was what grew and sustained audience numbers. Of course, you know the TV series is fictional, but your body responds as if the events you are watching are true.

Capable of adapting to keep you alive, your nervous system will change to meet the perceived threats. Exposure to traumatic imagery changes the nervous system to ‘expect’ bad things to happen. The more traumatic imagery you watch (whether real or fictional), the more anxious, alert, and ‘ready’ will be your automatic responses to the world.

Why do that to yourself?