Bodily Oddities

Rubber hand illusion

Also called: Proprioceptive drift · Body transfer illusion

Stroke a rubber hand and a person's hidden real hand at the same time, and within a minute or two the brain adopts the rubber hand as its own. It shows that your sense of your body is built moment by moment from sight and touch.

Brain Involuntary Involuntary
Illusion Try it

How common

70–80% of participants Very common · > 50% Laboratory studies. Strength varies a lot between people.

Does this happen to you?

These are answers from visitors, not a study.

How it works

Proprioception is the sense of where your body parts are without looking2. The brain combines it with sight and touch to build a running model of the body. Normally the three senses agree. The illusion makes them disagree, and sight wins.

The setup is simple. Your real hand is hidden behind a screen. A rubber hand lies in view, where your real hand would be. An experimenter strokes both hands with brushes, on the same spot, at the same time1. Within a minute or two, the feeling of touch moves to the rubber hand. The rubber hand starts to feel like yours1. Asked to point to your real hand with eyes closed, you point closer to the rubber one. This shift is called proprioceptive drift1. If someone then threatens the rubber hand with a hammer, your sweat and stress responses rise1. Stroking the two hands out of time breaks the illusion1.

Between 70% and 80% of participants feel the illusion1. It was first reported in 19981. With virtual reality the same trick works on the whole body, which is the body transfer illusion3.

Try it

You need a friend and a fake hand. A rubber glove stuffed with paper or a cheap costume hand works.

  1. Sit at a table. Put your real left hand out of sight, behind a book or under a cloth.
  2. Place the fake hand where your left hand would be. Cover the wrist with a sleeve.
  3. Your friend strokes both hands with two paintbrushes or two fingers, same spot, same moment.
  4. Look at the fake hand for one to two minutes.
  5. Notice when the touch seems to come from the fake hand.
  6. Your friend taps the fake hand sharply with a pen. Watch for your own flinch.

The illusion is safe and wears off within seconds of moving your real hand.

History and culture

Researchers use the illusion to study phantom limbs, body-image conditions, and how people accept prosthetic limbs1.

Sources and further material

  1. Encyclopedia Rubber hand illusion First reported by Botvinick and Cohen, 1998, in Nature.
  2. Encyclopedia Proprioception The body-position sense that the illusion overrides.
  3. Encyclopedia Body transfer illusion The whole-body version, using virtual reality.
  4. Video Rubber hand illusion demonstration YouTube search.
Nerves Perception

Pinocchio illusion

Vibrate the biceps tendon while a person touches their own nose with their eyes closed, and their nose feels as if it is growing. It shows how the brain works out where the body parts are.

Most people, in lab conditions
Nerves Reflex

Cutaneous rabbit illusion

A few quick taps at the wrist followed by taps at the elbow feel like a small animal hopping up the arm. The brain fills in taps between the two spots that never happened.

Works on most people tested
Brain Rare ability

Mirror-touch synesthesia

About 1 in 60 people feel a touch on their own body when they watch someone else being touched. The brain system that mirrors other people's actions appears to be turned up too high.

About 1.6% of people
Brain Involuntary

Derealization and depersonalization

The world suddenly seems flat, distant, or like a film (derealization), or you feel like you are watching yourself from outside (depersonalization). Most people have a brief episode at some point, usually under stress.

50–75% of people, at least once