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Your Brain Can’t Tell the Difference
How do I KNOW that virtual worlds will become as real to us as the one we are living in now?
Because the human brain can’t tell the difference!
For most of us now, that might sound silly. Most might say “Anyone can tell that what goes on in Second Life, World of Warcraft, EverQuest, etc is not real.. It’s not REALLY happening!”
Well, it IS true that when your avatar/character in the virtual world picks up an item in that world, then the human sitting behind the keyboard has not physically picked up the item. In fact, the item doesn’t physically exist at all, but neither does love, the sound waves of speech, the quality of honor… yet they are a very “real” part of our everyday lives.
In the 1960’s, Stanley Milgram did an experiment dealing with Authority where people were told to give electric shocks to other people who could be heard over a speaker system. There were different shock levels up to a lethal dose… and the recipient on the other end could be heard crying out over the speaker, but kept saying to go up another level, and so some participants went up in shock levels even to the lethal dose, at which point the person on the other no longer cried out. BUT, little known to the person pressing the buttons… the people on the other end were not REALLY getting shocked, it was just an experiment to see if the person giving the shocks WOULD go that far… and many did.
Today, that kind of experiment is frowned upon due to ethical reasons, so Mel Slater along with a couple of university research groups has put together a similar experiment in a virtual world. Where half the humans being tested could see a virtual avatar of a woman who was to be “shocked” and the other half of the humans could not see her. Everyone knew there was no human being shocked, so you would think people would have no problems sending “pretend shocks” to a virtual woman, right?! WRONG ! In the group of people who could not see the virtual woman, they did send shocks up to a lethal dose, but those people who could see the virtual woman were more likely to stop… almost half said they considered withdrawing from the experiment before it was over and several actually did!
“Of course, consciously everybody knows nothing is happening,” says Slater. “But some parts of the person’s perceptual system just takes it as real. Some part of the brain doesn’t know about virtual reality.”
Measures of stress, such as heart rate and sweatiness of palms, increased. These measures are nearly impossible to fake, and confirmed for Slater that the volunteers were actually feeling uncomfortable, rather than performing as they thought the experimenter would expect.
There are many more examples and scientific finds which also show that the brain can’t tell the difference between something happening right now, or the memory of something that has happened in the past. The same neurons fire. And in this experiment we see that even when the human consciously KNOWS something is not happening in the physical world, the brain still interprets it as really happening, and the body reacts as if it was.
Where all this leads to is how our virtual worlds will become just as real to us as the physical world. Human brains will still have to deal with moral and ethical situations, and our bodies will still produce the same reactions to events we are experiencing.
It always amuses me when I hear someone dismiss virtual worlds as not being real….
What? When you have a conversation with someone in a virtual world is that not a real conversation? Is it any different than a conversation over the phone? When you form a bond with someone in a virtual world it can be just as strong as bonds formed with people in the physical world. When I go to work in the online world, I get paid just the same as the physical world… it all seems pretty REAL to me!
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