How can you experience this for yourself?
If you don’t have any chicken wire to hand, you can experience a similar effect on a shopping basket (yes, you may look slightly odd…), or a taut football net – anything that is fairly rigid with gaps of between 2.5-5cm.
How to do it:
- Place one hand either side of your material – you probably need someone else to hold it – and line up your fingers.
- Slowly move your hands forwards and backwards at the same time.
If it doesn’t work first time, try moving at a different speed (usually slower) or pressing more or less hard.
Consider: what does this feel like to you? What does the feeling remind you of? Look at the list below – can you get it to feel like any of those options?
What should happen?
Often people feel the illusion of something very soft and squidgy – either their hands, or like there is something soft and squidgy in the gaps of the material. People often have differing interpretations of what the feeling is like. Here are some that we have heard:
- Water
- Oil
- Glass
- Melted chocolate
- Marshmallow
- Jelly
- Slime
- Bubbles
- Toy car wheels
- Spider’s web
- Silken tofu
This illusion is known as the Velvet Hand Illusion, but we didn’t mention that earlier in case it changed what you thought it felt like.
How does this relate to pain?
When the brain receives information that it is ambiguous, it tries to work out what is going on. To do this, it uses previous experiences, context, and your current knowledge and beliefs. The brain automatically relates what you feel in this activity to your common experiences, as that is the easiest way to understand the information. For example, young children often say it feels like slime or melted chocolate, whereas adults tend to suggest glass, plastic, or oil. Most people can interpret the feeling in multiple ways – this is called reframing: actively changing how we think about something.
Knowing that we can reframe things can help with pain. People who have recovered from persistent pain have highlighted that one of the most important things for them to learn was that pain does not mean you are damaging your body – it means that your brain has concluded that you need protecting from a potential danger. Understanding this can help you reframe your interpretations of body sensations.
How does this illusion work?
The brain tries to make sense of what you can feel. If you rub your hand on a surface without much friction, you know that it must be smooth (friction, here, is how much drag you feel on your hand). With the chicken wire, your brain knows that your hand is moving over something because you can feel the wire. However, the main surface that you’re touching is your other hand – the wire is only a tiny fraction of what is being touched. As your hands are moving at the same time, there is no friction, so your brain concludes that the surface you’re touching is very smooth. If you press your hands together, there is pressure, so it can feel squidgy, too.