 Hey, Psych2goers, welcome back to our channel. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you swapped bodies with your best friend? I mean, we're not in a science fiction novel, but we can wonder! How could you view your friend now having taken a step into their shoes? Would your sense of self-change? Well, that may very well happen. At least that's what research suggests in a study where pairs of friends swapped bodies in a perceptual illusion. This study, from Karolinska Institute in Sweden, found that the subject's beliefs about their own personality became more similar to how they viewed their friend's personality. Their sense of self changed. The study was conducted by a team of researchers from the Brain, Body, and Self Laboratory, led by Henrik Arsambi. The researchers wanted to understand the relationship between one's physical and psychological sense of self. In order to simulate the effect of two friend-swapping bodies, researchers fitted pairs of friends with goggles that showed a live, first-person perspective feed of their friend's body. Researchers then applied simultaneous touches on subject's corresponding body parts, providing the illusion that they were really feeling what they saw in the goggles. Just a few moments later, participants felt as if they had woken up in someone else's body, according to the researchers from Brain, Body, and Self Laboratory. Researchers wanted to prove this further, so they decided threatening the subject's friend with a knife was the best way to go. A prop knife, that is. Still a bit harsh, Doc. Once the subjects felt their friend and seemingly their present body was in danger, they broke out into a sweat as if they were the one being threatened. Not only did their body react to the danger their friend was in, but swapping bodies also affected the participants' confidence. Each subject's cheerfulness, talkativeness, and confidence were affected, often matching their friend's traits instead of their own. The friend's self-perception and beliefs about their own personality also changed. We found that during the perceptual friend-body-swap illusion, participants rated their own personality characteristics more similar to the way they previously rated their friend's personality. Post-bacterial researcher and first author Paweł Takiekowski told ZME Science, this main finding suggests that our beliefs about own personality, self-concept, are flexibly adjusted to the perception of our body, bodily self, in order to provide a coherent sense of self in a current situation. The research, which was published in the Journal iScience, also affected subjects' memory. It's commonly known that humans are better at remembering things relevant to themselves, as opposed to others. So when someone's mental self-concept doesn't match their physical self, their memory performance can decrease. The researchers plan to develop the technique further, with hopes to use it for certain clinical applications, such as treating psychiatric disorders, including depression. Besides pure curiosity, neuroscientist Takiekowski says he researches the sense of self for reasons that are clinically relevant, saying some psychiatric disorders like depersonalization disorder, or schizophrenia, are related to atypical experiences of one's own self. My goal as a cognitive neuroscientist is to formulate a general model of the self-representation at different levels to help develop new treatments. So, what did you think of this study? Would you want to swap bodies with your friend? How do you think your personality or sense of self would change? Let us know in the comments down below. If you found this video helpful, don't forget to click the like button and share this video with someone you'd want to swap bodies with. Subscribe to Psych2Go and hit the notification bell icon for more content like this. As always, thanks for watching!