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By Ed Yong of Nature magazine It is not every day that you are separated from your body and then stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife. But such experiences are routine in the lab of Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who uses illusions to probe, stretch and displace people's sense of self.

The brain usually has a pretty good idea of what is part of the body and what is not--although the classic rubber hand illusion can convince people to adopt a fake hand as their own when one of their real hands is hidden from view. Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have added a strange new twist to this experiment, persuading volunteers to believe that they have three hands rather than two. The psychologists accomplished this sensory legerdemain by placing a false rubber right hand next to the subject’s real right hand and covering both with a cloth from the wrist up (to obscure which one was connected to the body)

People may advise you to listen to your gut instincts: now research suggests that your gut may have more impact on your thoughts than you ever realized. Scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Genome Institute of Singapore led by Sven Pettersson recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that normal gut flora, the bacteria that inhabit our intestines, have a significant impact on brain development and subsequent adult behavior. We human beings may think of ourselves as a highly evolved species of conscious individuals, but we are all far less human than most of us appreciate.