Are we not already living in the Matrix that has been thought up by the Government?
The real-life ‘Inception’ helmet that can fool people into thinking fake scenes are real
Researchers have developed an Inception-style helmet which makes the human mind unable to tell what is real and what is a fake.
The device fools the wearer into thinking that TV scenes they are being shown are live when in fact they were recorded.
Even after the mechanism of the experiment was explained, some test subjects were not able to distinguish between the two.
The scientists behind the project said that it was effectively the same process as that which takes place in Inception, the high concept thriller from 2010.
In the film Leonardo Di Caprio plays an industrial spy who is hired to plant an idea in the mind of a businessman by one of his rivals.
The central conceit – which is similar to that in the Matrix series – is that in a powerful dream state we are unable to tell what is real and what isn’t.
In Inception the main characters are dreaming within their dreams, giving more complexity to the labyrinthine plot.
The test involved a system known as Substitutional Reality (SR) which has been developed at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute’s Laboratory for Adaptive Intelligence in Japan.
Lead researcher Keisuke Suzuki told The Guardian it could be a ‘powerful tool to investigate how our conscious experiences are constituted in daily natural scenes’.
He said: ‘In a dream, we naturally accept what is happening and hardly doubt its reality, however unrealistic it may seem on reflection.
‘Our motivation is to explore the cognitive mechanisms underlying our strong conviction in reality.
‘How can people trust what they perceive? Answering these questions requires an experimental platform which can present scenes that participants believe are completely real, but where we are still able to manipulate the contents.’
In the simple but effective experiment, test subjects were filmed entering a room and being told what to do by the researchers.
They were then sat in a chair and the helmet put on their heads, inside which was a monitor which showed them a series of scenes, some of which were live and some of which were recorded.