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'Rubber hand illusion' shows how our minds can be manipulated and it's totally trippy

He feels every sensation in his real hand even when it's not being touched.

The rubber hand illusion demonstrates how we can shift how our brain perceives reality.

The human mind is incredibly powerful in fascinating and sometimes terrifying ways. Conmen and cult leaders know how to manipulate people by taking advantage of psychological vulnerabilities and using tricks of the mind. But there are also physical examples of how our brains can be fooled into thinking something is real that isn't, even when we know it's happening.

The "rubber hand illusion" is a prime demonstration of how we can manipulate our brains into experiencing physical sensations—even pain—purely through the power of visual cues and parallel touch.


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Science

Engineering students created a life-size 'Operation' game—with a fun twist on the fail buzzer

The game trades in tweezers for tongs and the anxiety-producing buzzer for an audio meme.

Students at Washington State University created a life-size Operation game.

Anyone who has ever played the game Operation likely feels a teensy bit of anxiety just thinking about it. The experience of painstakingly trying to extract the Charlie Horse with those tiny, wired tweezers with a steady hand, only to accidentally touch the metal side and get the lightning-like jolt of the buzzer is hard to shake. That's the stuff of core memories right there.

But what if you had a humongous game board the size of a real human, with life-size bones and organs to extract? What if instead of tweezers, you had large tongs as tools to perform your operation? What if instead of Pavlovian-style fail buzzers, the game produced a much less traumatic womp womp womp sound when you mess up?

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Science

A study found 4 different categories of couples. Where do you belong?

What if I told you someone did find a way to "categorize" your love style but with actual real science?

This movie couple definitely could have used some healthy therapy.

This article originally appeared on 02.15.16


Ever fallen into one of those Internet dating quizzes? You know, the ones that promise to categorize you? Like "what your astrological sign says about your relationship style."

They can be fun, but we all know they're mostly fluff.

What if I told you someone did find a way to "categorize" your love style but with actual real science?

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via NASA

Setiment in Louisiana

This article originally appeared on 01.23.17


NASA satellites continually monitor the Earth, snapping photos and sending information to researchers on the ground.

Most of the time, things seem to be more or less the same as they were the day before, but the Earth is actually constantly changing. Sometimes it changes through discrete events, like landslides and floods. Other times, long-term trends, such as climate change, slowly reshape the land in ways that are difficult to see.

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