- Pinocchio illusion
The Pinocchio illusion is an
illusion that onesnose is growing longer, as happened to the literary character,Pinocchio when he told a lie. It is an illusion ofproprioception , reviewed by Lackner (1988).To experience the illusion, a
vibrator is applied to thebiceps tendon while one holds one's nose with the hand of that arm. The vibrator stimulatesmuscle spindle s in the biceps that would normally be stimulated by the muscle's stretching, creating a kinesthetic illusion that the arm is moving away from the face. Because the fingers holding the nose are still givingtactile information of being in contact with the nose, it appears that the nose is moving away from the face too, in a form ofperceptual capture .The illusion involves activity in the
parietal cortex of thebrain responsible for integrating information from different parts of the body (e.g, Ehrsson, Kito, Sadato, Passingham, & Naito, 2005). Distortions of the size of parts of the body can sometimes occur spontaneously or duringepilepsy or migraine aura s.References
* Ehrsson, H. H., Kito, T., Sadato, N., Passingham, R. E., & Naito, E. (2005). Neural substrate of body size: Illusory feeling of shrinking of the waist. "PLoS Biology, 3"(12).
* Lackner, J. R. (1988). Some proprioceptive influences on the perceptual representation of body shape and orientation. "Brain, 111," 281-297.ee also
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Body image
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