Scientists Simulate Out-of-Body Experiences

By Laura Blue / Source: Time Magazine

Get ready to see yourself in a new light. Two papers released this week by the journal Science describe what seem to be the first lab-induced out-of-body experiences in healthy people.

Using goggles hooked up to video cameras, and sticks to poke and stroke, researchers subjected study participants to a variety of visual and physical cues to confuse their brain about their body's location.

Sound a bit impractical? Consider, then, how the studies relate to humankind's most enduring question: what makes us ourselves in the first place? "I'm not really interested in out-of-body experiences," says Henrik Ehrsson, one of the study's authors and an assistant professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. "I'm really interested in in-body experiences: how the brain keeps and updates a model of the world and the body. To have a perception of your own body is the foundation of self-consciousness."

That is, of course, why out-of-body experiences have always been, well, out-of-body. People report such experiences after returning from the "brink of death," or being under the influence of mind-altering drugs — no doubt why the sensation has long been equated with spiritual awakening (and with crackpots).

But, today, with new advances in neurology, scientists are better able than ever to locate the physical roots of these bizarre perceptions of self.

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