Researchers have developed an Inception-style helmet which
makes the human mind unable to tell what is real and what is a fake. The device
fools the wearer into thinking that TV scenes they are being shown are live
when in fact they were recorded. Even after the mechanism of the experiment
was explained, some test subjects were not able to distinguish between the two.
The scientists behind the project said that it was
effectively the same process as that which takes place in Inception, the high
concept thriller movie from 2010. In the film Leonardo Di Caprio plays an
industrial spy who is hired to plant an idea in the mind of a businessman by
one of his rivals.
The central conceit - which is similar to that in the
Matrix series - is that in a powerful dream state we are unable to tell what is
real and what isn’t. In Inception the main characters are dreaming within their
dreams, giving more complexity to the labyrinthine plot.
The test involved a system known as Substitutional Reality
(SR) which has been developed at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute's Laboratory
for Adaptive Intelligence in Japan .
Lead researcher Keisuke Suzuki told The Guardian it could be a ‘powerful tool
to investigate how our conscious experiences are constituted in daily natural
scenes’.
In the simple but effective experiment, test subjects were
filmed entering a room and being told what to do by the researchers. They were
then sat in a chair and the helmet put on their heads, inside which was a
monitor which showed them a series of scenes, some of which were live and some
of which were recorded.
The first one was ‘fake live’, which was actually a
recording of a researcher at the door of the test room asking if the subject felt
OK. Then there was a 'doppelganger' scene where the subject saw the recording
of themselves entering the room. Thirdly they saw a second ‘fake live scene’ in
which the the researcher comes back into the room and explains how it all
works. The fourth and final scenes was live and featured the researcher coming
back in and saying everything else until that point had been a recording.
In most cases the doppelgänger scene caught the attention
of the test subjects and they realised it was a recording. However some were
not able to distinguish between live and recorded even after the entire experiment
was explained to them. This meant they took the fake live scenes to be real -
and were unable to tell them from reality. The results also showed that if the
test subjects moved their heads then it made it more likely they would
experience this Inception style effect.
Muhammad Abduh
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