March 17, 2009

Tactile illusions . aaaand I'm off to work. NOT going to hunt down a blackboard AT ALL.
posted by polychrome 15 years ago
  • Quit touching me! Stop it! Nonononono!
  • The Aristotle illusion doesn't work at all for me. Am I nuts, or are just my fingers crazy?
  • Flurker, it was not described well in the article. Referring to Wikipedia I think they mean: - Fully cross your index and middle fingers, so far that there is a gap between them (which is hard for me to do) - touch the blunt end of a pen onto your fingers so that it touches both the thumbward side of your index finger and the ringward side of your middle finger at the same time - best done with your eyes closed or the visual system can outweigh the tactile - move your fingers up and down the pen - how many pens can you feel? Touching my nose does not work for me - the touch sensation from my nose confuses the illusion, because I know how many noses I have. (It's one).
  • I tried the sticky note experiment, and it gave me a pretty decent effect. The Aristotle illusion works better for me based on ThinksTwice's instruction - - though it's not a profound tactile illusion, I can sense how it should "feel". This reminds of something I experienced just last month. My watch that I normally wear on my left arm had been irritating my skin for a couple days. One morning, I decided to switch it to my right arm. That completely threw my entire body off-balance! I could only stand it for about one hour before I took the watch off completely. I remember running up a flight of steps on my way to work, and I just didn't feel right; almost as if my body was off-balance, and I could easily fall. Once at work, my fingers didn't feel like they were in the "normal" bodily alignment. I couldn't type for shit for the remainder of the day!! My fingers seemed to get confused on the keyboard, and I could almost feel the neurons in my brain backfiring as they sputtered to fight through the confusion... Am I crazy?
  • Nope. Identical thing has been happening to me for the past week after an eczema flare-up on my left wrist.
  • "...I know how many noses I have." Yeah, but you had to ThinksTwice about it, didn't you?
  • Phantom cell phone vibration gets me at least once daily.
  • Wow, I just noticed that I haven't been attacked by the phantom cellphone since like a year ago. I used get it daily, too. I wonder why it stopped?