You can change your perception of your body size in TWO MINUTES
- Thin images become ‘normal’ if exposed to pictures of skinny people
- Exposure to fatter bodies made participants see original bodies as skinny
- Results will help scientists better understand issues such as anorexia
- Findings could be potentially used to treat mental health problems in future
Stephen Matthews For Mailonline
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We’ve all looked in the mirror at some stage and wished for a different reflection.
Now it seems people’s perceptions of both their own and other people’s body weight can change in a short space of time, scientists have discovered.
Codes in the brain make you think you are bigger or smaller than you really are after briefly looking at images of other people.
The results add another piece to the puzzle towards the understanding of mental health problems involving body image disturbance, experts believe.
The results will help scientists to better understand mental health problems involving body image disturbance, researchers from Macquarie University believe (file photo)
The researchers found that while there were different brain mechanisms controlling a person’s perception of their own and other people’s body sizes, the two can also affect each other.
After two minutes of being shown images of thinner versions of themselves or others, participants began to see the thin images as ‘normal’ while the original-sized body shots looked bigger to them.
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The opposite was also true – exposure to fatter body shapes made participants see original body sizes as skinny.
Associate Professor Kevin Brooks, from Macquarie University, Sydney, and lead author of the study, described how the brain adapted.
‘After two minutes of being exposed to images of thinner versions of themselves or others, we saw that the neural mechanisms controlling participants’ perceptions actually adapted to see thin images as normal,’ he said.
‘Original sized body images now looked fatter to them.’
Scientists found while there were different brain mechanisms controlling a person’s perception of their own and other people’s body sizes, the two can also affect each other and change how we view things
Dr Ian Stephen, co-author, said it showed how easily people could be manipulated by images.
‘This means that being exposed to images of skinny people doesn’t just make you feel bad about your own body size, which has been known for a while, it actually affects the perceptual mechanisms in your brain and makes you think you are bigger or smaller than you really are,’ he said.
‘Duration and frequency of exposure definitely play a role, but the fact that the brain adapts after such a short exposure time suggests we are incredibly susceptible to being manipulated by images of different sized bodies.’
Scientists hope they could be potentially used in the development of treatments for conditions such as anorexia and muscle dysmorphia – or ‘bigorexia’ – when people think they look puny when, in fact, they are muscular.
Professor Brooks concluded: ‘By unpacking the details of the neural mechanisms involved in body size perception we are hoping to discover more about how the brain deals with this information as a whole, so that we can understand how conditions involving body image disturbance arise.’
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