New Yoker Reads #1: Thoughts on VR, inspired by "As Real as It Gets" - Joshua Rothman (The Mind Issue)

My partner is a reader of "The New Yorker" magazine. Even though I do not read it as often as her, every now and then she recommends to me an issue or a specific piece. This time, she gave me a whole issue to read. "The Mind Issue" came out on April 2, 2018. It contains several reading that my partner thought I would find interesting because of my studies in cognitive science. In this post, I would like to share my thoughts and criticisms of the piece "As Real as It Gets" by Joshua Rothman.

What is real and what is not is a question philosophy has addressed ever since its conception. Is everything we feel and can touch in the world real? If all these stimulus that make up reality are just interpreted by the brain, couldn't we just be some brain in a lab being stimulated to resemble the "reality" we are living? In the end, for the practical purpose of living our everyday lives, we trust our body stimulus to tell us what is real and what is not. These stimulus come for the most part from our senses. We rely on our sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste to be able to tell what is real and what is not. Nevertheless, we do not rely solely on our senses. We also rely on more abstract processes to be able to tell what is real and what is not. These more abstract processes are related to emotions or self-awareness. Even though we are nowhere close to understanding what is reality, and how we experience it, virtual reality (VR) has come to turn it up a notch. I believe VR is a very exciting field full of possibilities. Nevertheless, I also believe it needs to be approached with caution.

When playing a VR game, a whole process of embodiment occurs. In real life, when you move your arm, you can see it moving and feel the wind as your arm cuts through the air, but that is not it. The whole experience is associated with the sequence of neurons triggered. This generates fluency which allows you to appreciate more the experience and be better at it the next time you do it. We take this whole process for granted which in return creates the illusion that our body model is very stable, but that is only because we have not encountered something different. VR is letting us experiment with something different. Getting used to it takes time, and varies depending on how aware of their bodies people are. It might not take that long for a gamer to get used to his VR body, but for people who are very aware of their bodies such as, dancers, athletes, and yogis it might take more practice.

Pixabay image source.

Several steps need to happen to make sure that the person in VR is experiencing proper embodiment. If while wearing a headset, I turn my head left but my virtual self does not turn in the same direction, it is impossible to trick the brain into thinking that the virtual me, is indeed myself. Because of this, proper calibration needs to be practiced. Now, if calibration is properly done and we manage to trick the brain into thinking that the virtual self is the real self, very interesting effects start surfacing. An experiment ran by Mel Slater took white participants and made them "live" inside the body of a black man learning Tai Chi for about ten minutes. Afterwards, their scores in a test designed to reveal unconscious racial bias shifted significantly. A week later, participants were tested again and the results showed that they still had less racist attitudes. The experiment has been replicated several times in Barcelona and London. The results suggest that VR allows us to tap into both conscious and unconscious portions of the brain, suggesting it is truly "experiential".

As explained before, anything we do is a whole embodied experience. That is what truly makes VR different than the other video-games. It is not the same to push a button and then see what happens on a screen than interacting with the environment in a natural form with your arms and legs. Interacting in such a natural way might be what gives VR the strength to actually tap deep into our brains to change behavior. Nevertheless, we need to also consider the other side of the coin. Even though I just portrayed a case in which it can be used for good, for a moment, think about how these immersive experiences can change us deeply if what we experience is sexual violence, or virtual killing. The reality is that we still do not know how the brain interprets this "virtual" reality. Furthermore, we do not know the possible consequences of living this experiences. Ten minutes caused white participants to be less racist for at least a week. As these technologies become more accessible, what will happen once we spend hours, or days playing in these virtual worlds? In the end, the brain relies purely on stimulus to be able to tell what is real and what is not, as this stimulus become better and better, they are slowly becoming real. Real experiences shape us, so we need to be careful to what and in what manner we are exposing ourselves to such experiences.

Sources:

• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/are-we-already-living-in-virtual-reality
• http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/m.slater/Mel_Slaters_Home_Page/Home.html

Best,

@capatazche