Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson.

And I'm David Peña Guzman.

Welcome to Overthink.

The podcast, where two friends, who are also professors, put philosophy and dialogue with the everyday.

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

Ellie, I recently read that scientists now have specific techniques they can use to trigger

out-of-body experiences in research subjects.

Cool.

And one of them is video games.

So gamers can sometimes feel themselves outside of their body when they play a video game

and they identify with the avatar that they are in the video game.

And a number of people, including neuroscientists, have made the argument that this shows

the playability of our body schema, the fact that who we experience ourselves to be can

change under controlled conditions.

Whoa, that's wild.

So basically it's like that psychological experiment where you start to feel like a prosthetic limb is your own because you see yourself stroking in a mirror, but like with video games.

Yes, that's called the rubber hand illusion. And people feel like this prosthetic thing, like a rubber hand that they see through the mirror, is their actual thing.

And then when you hit the rubber hand with a hammer, they cry out in pain, even though, of course, you haven't touched their hand.

Whoa. So if my video game avatar feels pain and I'm in this out of body experience, then I'm going to feel it too.

It's interesting because I think video games

often get a bad rap for displacing people from their context, right? Like, people get obsessed

with video games and they forget about real life. I remember there was this South Park episode

...