Topsy-turvy world is quite a spectacle

A psychology student's world has been turned upside down because she wears glasses that invert everything she sees. Tracy Peters, 29, is wearing the special glasses for a week to test how the brain reacts to a new environment.

A psychology student's world has been turned upside down because she wears glasses that invert everything she sees. Tracy Peters, 29, is wearing the special glasses for a week to test how the brain reacts to a new environment.

Mrs Peters, a student at the University of the West of England in Bristol, takes the glasses off only to sleep and shower, when she has to wear a blindfold.

She said some tasks were getting easier but her brain had not "flipped over" to make the world the right way up, as happened in similar experiments.

"It can be very disorientating," she said. "I have just been shopping and in a crowd of people it is quite disturbing and it feels as if people are rushing at you. In the car it is great fun just sitting back and watching. It's all upside down and it's like being in a rally car."

Mrs Peters has re-learnt to stack building blocks and to write legibly "vertically, at first", but she said using a knife and fork was difficult, so she was eating with her fingers, mostly pizza.

The experiment is part of a series called the Human Zoo, at Bristol's millennium attraction, at-Bristol. The results will be shown on a BBC2 series, Are You Superhuman?, which will be broadcast over Christmas.

The experiments can be seen on the internet at www.bbc.co.uk/humanzoo.