The aesthetics of the mechanical placebo

I am trying to come up with ideas for a project to challenge my programming skills in this computer interactions class I am taking. These are just some notes.

SELF and machines

When you are driving a car or riding a bike, the machine is a natural extension of your body both in that you grow to intuitively understand the controls, but also to identify with the machine as part of your body - the physical manifestation of your SELF extends to objects under your direct control, not only to your body. For example, if something passes too close by your car, you may wince - anticipating pain although there is no sensory feedback. If you are driving uphill you may feel as though you are making an extra effort (though this may be related to the extra pressure that may be exerted on the gas pedal or changing sound of the engine). And when parking a car you are accustomed to, you may intuitively know when the car is approaching the curb or the car behind.

This article investigates this idea more scientifically and shows an interesting experiment (it has been rather sensationally promoted as the induction of an out-of-body experience in a clinical setting):article about identification of the self and body

THE PLACEBO EFFECT and the role of the mind

I am interested in the placebo effect as an investigation of the role of faith and consciousness over the material world, of the meaning of expertise and authority. Some facts: the general consensus on this controversial and hard-to-measure effect is that an average of 35% of patients in a clinical trial will be relieved by a sugar pill alone. The effect is not only mental, it is physical (though this is an artificial distinction - our minds are physical too); 75% of patients given a placebo for pain medication spontaneously release opioids in their brains. The circumstances in which a placebo is given are important; a placebo that involves ingestion, injection, or incision is often more powerful than a non-invasive technique. A placebo given
by an authority figure is more effective. Of course, a patient who knows they have been given a placebo will not show any evidence of the placebo effect.

The AESTHETICS of medical pseudo-scientific/sci-fi alternative medicine MACHINEs

This topic relates to the placebo effect in that the appearance of these machines and their relationship to the viewer are essential. The machine, appearing expensive, hi-tech, clean, and lacking any evidence of the hand in its craft, is seen as being in a position of AUTHORITY. This is doubled by the fact that many of these machines are employed while the patient is lying down - a physically and psychologically vulnerable and submissive position - and by the patient's state of partial or complete undress. The machines also tend to move the patient physically without their control (i.e. using a servo motor to slide the patient into position within the machine - i.e. in an MRI). The sounds of the machine's operation are also important, as are the fact that they often have special attendants.

Representations of the body that are not based on the visual sense

A homunculus is the representation of the body with the size of the body parts mapped to sensory intensity (or more accurately, density of nerve cells) rather than actual size. In a related field, in traditional Ayurvedic medicine and Kundalini/Chakra meditation as well as Japanese Reiki there are detailed representations of the body that map the flow of spiritual and psychosexual energy through various centers that do not correspond to physical anatomies. I relate this to our study of the tangible in that these representations explore the
ways in which our beliefs about our bodies affect our self-conception, as the qualia of our sensations are partially determined by metaphor.