When I touched their tanks, I didn’t feel the mechanoreceptors in my fingers reacting to pressure. I simply felt. Our experiences of the world feel disconnected from the very sense organs that produce them, which makes it easy to believe that they are purely mental constructs divorced from physical reality. That’s why our stories and myths are so full of characters who can transfer their consciousness into the bodies of animals—the Norse god Odin, for example, or Bran from the once-popular series Game of Thrones. Such feats, in which humans literally step into the sensory worlds of other
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