“25 people learned to fly with virtual wings. Here’s how the brain changed”

Many people have probably imagined having wings like a bird and being able to fly. In a paper just accepted at Cell Reports (PDF attached), a Peking University team trained 25 participants over a one-week course to “fly” in virtual reality (VR) using a pair of virtual wings controlled by upper-limb movements.

After training, the researchers found that participants’ brain activity changed when they looked at images of wings. The change showed up in the occipitotemporal cortex, a region often treated as mainly visual. When participants viewed wing images (including both the wing designs they used during training and completely new ones), responses in this region were stronger. The responses also started to look more like its responses to upper limbs, as if the brain was beginning to treat wings as body parts. And this region became more tightly connected with parts of the brain that track the body and help control movement, suggesting it was plugging the wings into the brain’s body-control network.

The authors interpret this as evidence that occipitotemporal cortex is not purely visual, but can fold a newly learned body function into existing body-part representations, even when that new “body part” is artificial and learned only through VR.

For reporting, I’ve already spoken briefly with the team. For an independent and potentially critical perspective, I plan to reach out to Mel Slater, who studies cognitive neuroscience using VR, and Tamar Makin, who studies brain plasticity and how the brain represents artificial limbs.

By way of background, I’m a freelance science writer based in Beijing with a Ph.D. in chemical biology from Peking University. I previously spent two years as an editor and science journalist for the Chinese edition of Scientific American. I’ve included my resume and several clips here.

If this sounds of interest, I’d be delighted to write a news story for ScienceNews.