摘要：设想一下睡眠中的你缩小到芭比娃娃的体积，醒来你会感觉到自己很微小和世界很庞大。瑞士的研究员解释了这一疑惑。根据教科书，体积和距离的感受取决于大脑如何解释视觉信息。一些研究员称：我们的体格影响我们对世界的感知。如果你很高大，距离就相对变短。截止到目前，还没有试验性地论证这一假说。
转换大脑思维的实验过程
Imagine shrinking to the size of a doll in your sleep. When you wake up, will you perceive yourself as tiny or the world as being populated by giants? Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden may have found the answer.
According to the textbooks, our perception of size and distance is a product of how the brain interprets different visual cues, such as the size of an object on the retina and its movement across the visual field. Some researchers have claimed that our bodies also influence our perception of the world, so that the taller you are, the shorter distances appear to be. However, there has been no way of testing this hypothesis experimentally -- until now.
Henrik Ehrsson and his colleagues at Karolinska Institutet have already managed to create the illusion of body-swapping with other people or mannequins. Now they have used the same techniques to create the illusion of having a very small doll-sized body or a very large, 13-foot tall body.
Their results, published in the online open access journal PLoS ONE, show for the first time that the size of our bodies has a profound effect on how we perceive the space around us.
"Tiny bodies perceive the world as huge, and vice versa," says study leader Henrik Ehrsson.
The altered perception of space was assessed by having subjects estimate the size of different blocks and then walk over to the blocks with their eyes shut. The illusion of having a small body caused an overestimation of size and distance, an effect that was reversed for large bodies.
One strategy that the brain uses to judge size is through comparison -- if a person stands beside a tree it computes the size of both. However, the sensed own body seems to serve as a fundamental reference that affects this and other visual mechanisms.
"Even though we know just how large people are, the illusion makes us perceive other people as giants; it's a very weird experience," says Dr Ehrsson, who also tried the experiment on himself.
