A Secret of Hypnosis: A Dynamic Rubber Hand Illusion

Presenting a suggestion of heaviness to a person in a hypnotic trance (e.g., "your arm is getting heavier and heavier") tends to result in a corresponding change in the person's body position (e.g., the arm lowers). This phenomenon may be a result of activation of the mirror neuron system, which leads the subject to anticipate actual weight on the arm. The mirror system underlies people's ability to sense, in the absence of actual sensory input, experiences of other people. Perhaps this system allows the same anticipatory experience regarding non-human objects. In this study, we showed participants a picture of a rubber hand holding what appeared to be a lightweight rubber ball. In reality, the ball was weighted with sand. We instructed participants to move their arms to a horizontal position and hold them immobile. Those participants who knew the actual weight of the ball tended to raise their arms above the horizontal, perhaps in response to their expectation of the need to resist the weight of the ball. This illusional phenomenon might be similar to that induced by the hypnotic suggestion of heaviness. That is, the body's response may reflect activity in the mirror system, which anticipates greater weight

REMOTE SENSING, GIS AND PUBLIC HEALTH

The role of remote sensing (RS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in public health is potentially great. As computer technology it continues to transform our ability to gather, analyze, and map health data, new roles for RS and GIS in public health may emerge. Keywords: Public Health, Disease Mappin

Two Agents in the Brain: Motor Control of Unimanual and Bimanual Reaching Movements

Previous studies have suggested that the left and right hands have different specialties for motor control that can be represented as two agents in the brain. This study examined how coordinated movements are performed during bimanual reaching tasks to highlight differences in the characteristics of the hands. We examined motor movement accuracy, reaction time, and movement time in right-handed subjects performing a three-dimensional motor control task (visually guided reaching). In the no-visual-feedback condition, right-hand movement had lower accuracy and a shorter reaction time than did left-hand movement, whereas bimanual movement had the longest reaction time, but the best accuracy. This suggests that the two hands have different internal models and specialties: closed-loop control for the right hand and open-loop control for the left hand. Consequently, during bimanual movements, both models might be used, creating better control and planning (or prediction), but requiring more computation time compared to the use of one hand only

The Language Trap: U.S. Passing Fiction and its Paradox

Through exploration of William Faulkner's, James Weldon Johnson's and Nella Larsen's "passing novels," this dissertation points out that narrative representation of racial passing facilitates and compromises the authors' challenge to the white-dominant ideology of early-twentieth-century America. I reveal that, due to their inevitable dependence on language, these authors draw paradoxically on the white-dominant ideology that they aim to question, especially its system of binary racial categorization. While the "white" body of a "passing" character serves the novelists as a subversive force in white-supremacist society (which depends on the racial other to define "whiteness"), language, which is essentially ideological, traps the writers in racial binary and continually suggests that, while the character looks white, s/he is really black. Accordingly, the authors have to write under the constraints of the problem that American discourse of race must and, for the most part, does systematically suppress its own essential fictiveness