'Swapping bodies' changes a person's personality, study reveals

Swapping bodies with another person would have a profound effect on the subject's behaviour and even their personality, a new study has revealed. Scientists at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden discovered a way to allow people to experience the effect of swapping bodies, through a perceptual illusion, in order to understand the relationship between a person's psychological and physical sense of self. They found that when pairs of friends "switched bodies", each friend's personality became more like the other. "Body swapping is not a domain reserved for science fiction anymore," said Pawel Tacikowski, a postdoctoral researcher at the institute and lead author of the study. In order to create the illusion that the study's subjects had switched bodies, Dr Tacikowski and his team fitted them with virtual reality goggles showing live feeds of the other person's body from a first-person perspective.