Department of Design

Consciousness emerges from interlocking feedback loops between perception, action and self-modelling. This synchronisation is fragile and Bronze Age humans may have experienced their own thoughts as gods’ voices. Schizophrenia, marked by the same phenomenon, shows how thin this boundary remains.

Two systems probe this. A robotic arm beams participants’ AI-cloned voices into their heads, interrupting internal dialogue. A GVS headset paired with a live binocular video feed places one participant’s movements under another’s control, relocating the self outside the body and exposing the paradox that the self is both an instrument of perception and its own blind spot.