VR can train the human brain to treat wings like real limbs

In X-Men, Warren Worthington III sprouts huge white wings from his back and shoots into the sky. Scientists have yet to fully turn that comic-book trick from fiction to fact. But virtual reality, or VR, is offering hints of what it’s like to fly.

Yanchao Bi is a cognitive neuroscientist at Peking University in Beijing, China. She long had dreamed of flying. “It would be amazing,” she says. “Your whole world would become different.”

In spring 2023, Bi shared this wish over coffee with Kunlin Wei. Wei leads the university’s motor-control lab. There, researchers use VR to study how people perceive movement. The conversation sparked questions: Could people learn to fly with wings in VR? And how would their brains change?

To answer those questions, Bi and Wei teamed up with neuroscientist Yiyang Cai. In a new experiment, the Beijing team coached 25 people via VR on how to move virtual wings.

After training, the recruits’ brains responded almost as if the fake wings had been real limbs, the researchers now report. They shared their findings in the May Cell Reports.

This study shows how adaptable the brain is, says Jane Aspell. It’s interesting that the brain can adjust to “something as unhuman as a wing,” she says.

It also suggests, she adds, that the brain may adapt to other kinds of limb features. A cognitive neuroscientist at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, Aspell did not take part in the new work.

Learning to wing it

Cai designed a weeklong training program for the human recruits. It was based on bird flight.

Participants wore VR headsets and motion-tracking gear as they looked into a virtual mirror. In it, they saw themselves as birdlike figures with huge, rust-colored, feathered wings. When they rotated their wrists and flapped their arms, the wings moved too.

Across a series of tasks, the 25 recruits learned to move their virtual wings. They flapped away from falling airballs. They stayed airborne over steep cliffs. They even steered themselves through rings in the air.

Some participants learned to fly on the first try. Others needed a few sessions to get it right. “You could clearly see them improving,” says Ziyi Xiong. One of study’s authors, he’s a neuroscientist at Beijing Normal University.

Bi’s team also scanned the participants’ visual cortex. Some parts of this brain region are especially sensitive to images of our limbs. After training, those parts responded more strongly to pictures of wings. And their response to wings began to resemble their response to the upper limbs.

“Participants began to see the wings as part of their own bodies,” Bi concludes. This discovery could mean the brain adapts in response to change more readily than once thought.  

The training did more than reshape the brain. It transformed how these people understood flight in ways that abstract knowledge cannot, Wei says. This might apply to other technologies and artificial senses, too. People might experience “reality” in ever more varied ways.

“In the future, we may spend a great deal of time in VR,” Wei says. “We are very interested in what that could mean for the human brain.”