New Scientist reports:

Last time you checked you were a conservatively dressed, 28-year-old man. But you look down and notice that you now have the legs of a 10-year-old girl and appear to be wearing a skirt.

It turns out that this experience – facilitated by a virtual-reality headset and some brief arm-stroking – is enough to make men in their mid-20s react as if this new body is their own. They feel that way even when they subsequently move outside the girl’s perspective and watch her being attacked.

“This is the first experiment to show that body ownership can be transferred to an entirely virtual body,” says Mel Slater of the University of Barcelona, Spain, who led the team that carried out the experiment.

The finding highlights how far our sense of self and body image can be manipulated, and could lead to therapies for conditions of body-image distortion such as anorexia.

To read more and see the experiment for yourself check out New Scientist.