Swedish scientists have created for the first time in the lab a perceptual illusion of having an invisible body among humans. The experiment involved 125 participants standing up and wearing a set of head-mounted displays. The participants were then asked to look down at their bodies but instead of their real bodies, they saw empty space. To evoke the feeling of having an invisible body, scientists touched participants' body in various locations with a large paintbrush while, with another paintbrush held in the other hand, exactly imitating the movements in mid-air in full view of the participants. "Within less than a minute, the majority of the participants started to transfer the sensation of touch to the portion of empty space where they saw the paintbrush move and experienced an invisible body in that position," explained Arvid Guterstam, lead author from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. In a previous study, the same team showed that the same illusion can be ...