After flight training, the brain began to treat the wings more like real limbs
In a new study, volunteers were trained to move wings in VR. Here, neuroscientist and study co-author Yiyang Cai uses the system. Its physical movements (top left) correspond to the real-time visual feedback inside the VR headset (center).
Ziyi Xiong/Beijing Normal University and Yiyang Cai/Peking University
In X-MenWarren Worthington III spreads huge white wings from his back and shoots into the sky. Scientists haven’t yet completely turned the gift of comics into fiction, but virtual reality offers clues about what it means to learn to fly.
After training in the use of virtual wings, people’s brains respond to wings more similar to how they respond to real limbswhich makes the wings look more like body parts, researchers report May 7 in Cell Reports.
“This is a fascinating study that clearly demonstrates how plastic the brain is,” says Jane Aspell, a cognitive neuroscientist at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. “If the brain can incorporate something as inhuman as a wing, it may also be able to incorporate many other types of limb enhancements.”
The study began because cognitive neuroscientist Yanchao Bi of Peking University had long dreamed of flying alone. “That would be amazing,” she said. “Your whole world would become different. »
In spring 2023, she shared this wish over coffee with Kunlin Wei, who directs the university’s motor control laboratory. Wei’s lab has long used virtual reality, or VR, to study how people perceive movement. The conversation sparked questions: Could people learn to fly with wings in VR? And how would their brains change?
To answer these questions, the duo’s colleague, neuroscientist Yiyang Cai, designed a week-long training program based on the mechanics of bird flight. Wearing VR headsets and motion-tracking equipment, participants looked into a virtual mirror and saw themselves as bird-like figures with enormous rust-colored feathered wings. When they turned their wrists and flapped their arms, the wings moved too.
Over the course of a series of tasks, the 25 participants gradually learned to use their virtual wings. They fended off falling aerial bullets, stayed aloft over sheer cliffs, and even navigated through rings in the air. “Some participants learned to fly on the first try, while others needed three or four sessions,” says neuroscientist Ziyi Xiong of Beijing Normal University. “But you could definitely see them improving.”
After the training, the researchers found that parts of the participants’ visual cortex, the region of the brain that normally responds to images of body parts, began to respond more strongly to images of different wings. And its response to the wings began to resemble its response to the upper limbs. “Participants began to view the wings as part of their own body,” says Bi, suggesting that the limits of brain plasticity, its ability to reorganize itself in response to learning and experience, may be broader than once thought.
But the experience did more than reshape the brain. This direct experience transformed participants’ understanding of flight in a way that abstract knowledge cannot, Wei says. This could apply to other technologies and artificial senses, allowing people to experience “reality” in ever more varied ways.
“In the future, we may spend a lot of time in virtual reality,” says Wei. “We are very interested in what this might mean for the human brain. »
