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Twenty-five volunteers put on VR headsets, moved their arms and twisted their wrists. On screen, feathered wings moved in response. Within a few sessions, they were learning to “fly.”

After a week of VR flight training, the volunteers’ brains changed how they reacted to wings. A visual area in the brain that usually helps recognize body parts began responding more strongly to wing images, and neural activity patterns identified with using wings in VR became more similar to those for arms. The result suggests that the brain’s body map can be pushed, at least a little, by experiences that exist only in a headset.

A Dream of Flying

The project began with a simple wish. Yanchao Bi, a cognitive neuroscientist at Peking University, had long imagined what it would feel like to fly without an airplane. “It would be amazing,” Bi told Science News. “Your whole world would become different.”

She discussed the idea with Kunlin Wei, who leads Peking University’s Motor Control Lab. Together with colleagues, including neuroscientists Yiyang Cai and Ziyi Xiong, they built a virtual-reality training program that gave people wings in place of arms.

The participants wore headsets and motion-tracking gear. In a virtual mirror, they saw themselves with huge feathered wings. Their real upper-limb movements drove the wings in real time. The training lasted four sessions across seven days, with each session including a short familiarization phase and about 25 minutes of flight tasks, such as deflecting balls, maintaining altitude, and flying through rings.

The software included a crude aerodynamics engine. Downward flaps created lift; upward flaps created drag. To climb, participants had to extend their wings on the downstroke, then contract them on the way up. By the end, their ring-navigation scores rose from 44.8% to 75.2%, and their reported sense of control over the wings also increased.

“Some participants learned to fly on the first try, while others needed three or four sessions,” Xiong told Science News. “But you could clearly see them improving.”

Experimental timeline showing four VR training sessions interspersed with two fMRI scanning sessions (pre- and post-fMRI). Credit: Xiong et al. The Brain Saw Wings Differently

Before and after the training, the researchers scanned participants’ brains as they looked at images, including wings, limbs, animal body parts, and various objects.

They focused on the occipitotemporal cortex, a region involved in recognizing human bodies, limbs, and silhouettes. After VR flight training, this region responded more strongly to wing images. More strikingly, in the right side of the brain, patterns of activity for wings became more similar to patterns for upper limbs.

There was more. When participants saw bird wings they had never controlled in training, their brains showed a similar shift, suggesting they had learned to treat wings as possible body-like “effectors”—parts that can act on the world like their own limbs.

The scans also showed stronger communication between the right occipitotemporal cortex and frontoparietal regions, areas involved in planning movement and integrating body signals. That coupling increased when participants viewed wings, but not other images.

The authors took care not to overstate the result. The wings did not become full-fledged body parts in the brain. After training, their neural patterns still shared similarities to patterns for tools or animal tails. But they had shifted toward the body’s territory.

What Virtual Bodies May Teach Real Ones

Immersive worlds like those in VR can create experiences the body never evolved to have, then reveal how far the brain can stretch to make sense of them.

“This is an intriguing study that nicely demonstrates how plastic the brain is,” cognitive neuroscientist Jane Aspell of Anglia Ruskin University told Science News.

That could eventually help people adapt to prosthetic limbs, artificial senses, or other body extensions. It may also help scientists understand why the brain can accept a rubber hand, a virtual avatar or, in this case, a pair of wings as something under one’s control.

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

The study has been published in the journal Cell Reports.