concept
Out-of-body experiences
Reliably induced in a laboratory by stimulating one spot in the brain, and by wearing a headset — which makes this the best-explained phenomenon in the section.
What it is
The experience of perceiving oneself as located outside the physical body — typically floating above it, often looking down at it.
It is not confined to dying. Out-of-body experiences occur in sleep paralysis, in extreme fatigue, in meditation, under anaesthesia, in epilepsy, in migraine, after head injury, and spontaneously in healthy people for no identifiable reason. Around five to ten per cent of the general population report at least one.
The near-death experience frequently includes one, but the two are separable and most out-of-body experiences have nothing to do with death.
Where it came from
As a phenomenon, presumably from as long as there have been people. As a doctrine, from Theosophy, which supplied the modern vocabulary of the astral body and astral projection in the late nineteenth century, and which the Golden Dawn and later occultism built on.
Robert Monroe's Journeys Out of the Body (1971) and the Monroe Institute made deliberate induction a popular pursuit, using audio techniques marketed as Hemi-Sync.
How it is used
In esoteric practice, as a technique to be cultivated. In neuroscience, as an unusually tractable window into how the brain constructs the sense of being located somewhere.
What we can and cannot say
We can say the phenomenon has been induced in a laboratory, repeatedly, in two independent ways — and that this makes it the best-explained thing in this section.
In 2002 Olaf Blanke and colleagues reported in Nature that electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus in a patient being evaluated for epilepsy surgery reliably produced out-of-body experiences. Stimulate, and she reported floating above the bed and looking down at herself. Stimulate again, same result. Vary the parameters, and the experience varied correspondingly.
In 2007 two papers appeared in Science on the same day. Blanke's group and Henrik Ehrsson's group independently induced out-of-body illusions in healthy volunteers, using head-mounted displays showing the participant's own back from a camera behind them, combined with synchronous touch. Participants reported being located behind their own bodies. Ehrsson's group went further, demonstrating that people could be induced to feel located in a mannequin, or to experience an illusory swap of bodies with another person.
The mechanism is now reasonably clear. The sense of where you are is constructed by the brain from vision, touch, proprioception, vestibular input and interoception, integrated in the temporo-parietal junction. Disrupt that integration — by electrode, by conflicting sensory input, by oxygen deprivation, by sleep-wake boundary states — and the constructed location comes apart from the physical one.
Self-location is a computed variable, and it can be made to give the wrong answer.
We can say the veridical claims are unsupported. The obvious test is whether someone in an out-of-body state can report information unavailable from the body's position, and the attempts have not delivered.
Charles Tart's 1968 study of a subject who reported reading a five-digit number placed on a high shelf is cited constantly. It is a single subject, in conditions that did not exclude ordinary routes to the information, and it has never been replicated. The AWARE shelf test described under near-death experiences is the modern version, and it found nothing.
And we can say the explanation does not diminish the experience. People who have had one generally describe it as among the most vivid experiences of their lives, and being told that self-location is a computed variable does not make it feel less real — any more than knowing about the blind spot changes how vision seems.
We cannot say what it is like to be told this by someone who has floated above their own operating table. The phenomenology and the explanation both stand, and reconciling them is left to the person who had it.
Further reading
- Blanke et al., "Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions" (Nature, 2002).
- Ehrsson, "The experimental induction of out-of-body experiences" (Science, 2007), and Lenggenhager et al. in the same issue.
- Susan Blackmore, Beyond the Body (1982) — by a researcher who had one herself and spent a career on it.