Out-of-Body Experience Induced in
Laboratory Setting
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A neuroscientist working at UCL (University College London) has devised the
first experimental method to induce an out-of-body experience in healthy
participants.
In a paper published in Science, Dr Henrik Ehrsson, UCL Institute of
Neurology, outlines the unique method by which the illusion is created and
the implications of its discovery.
An out-of-body experience (OBE) is defined as the experience in which a
person who is awake sees his or her own body from a location outside the
physical body.
OBEs have been reported in clinical conditions where brain function is
compromised, such as stroke, epilepsy and drug abuse. They have also
been reported in association with traumatic experiences such as car
accidents. Around one in ten people claim to have had an OBE at some time
in their lives.
Dr Ehrsson said: “Out-of-body experiences have fascinated mankind for
millennia. Their existence has raised fundamental questions about the
relationship between human consciousness and the body, and has been
much discussed in theology, philosophy and psychology. Although out-of-
body experiences have been reported in a number of clinical conditions, the
neuro-scientific basis of this phenomenon remains unclear.
“The invention of this illusion is important because it reveals the basic
mechanism that produces the feeling of being inside the physical body. This
represents a significant advance because the experience of one’s own body
as the centre of awareness is a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness.”
Discovering this means of inducing an OBE could also have industrial
applications, as Dr Ehrsson explains: “This is essentially a means of
projecting yourself, a form of teleportation. If we can project people into a
virtual character, so they feel and respond as if they were really in a virtual
version of themselves, just imagine the implications. The experience of
playing video games could reach a whole new level, but it could go much
beyond that. For example, a surgeon could perform remote surgery, by
controlling their virtual self from a different location.”
The set-up of the illusion is as follows: the study participant sits in a chair
wearing a pair of head-mounted video displays. These have two small
screens over each eye, which show a live film recorded by two video cameras
placed beside each other two metres behind the participant’s head.
The image from the left video camera is presented on the left-eye display and
the image from the right camera on the right-eye display. The participant sees
these as one ‘stereoscopic’ (3D) image, so they see their own back
displayed from the perspective of someone sitting behind them.
The researcher then stands just beside the participant (in their view) and
uses two plastic rods to simultaneously touch the participant’s actual chest
out-of-view and the chest of the illusory body, moving this second rod towards
where the illusory chest would be located, just below the camera’s view.
The participants confirmed that they had experienced sitting behind their
physical body and looking at it from that location. Dr Ehrsson said: “This was
a bizarre, fascinating experience for the participants – it felt absolutely real for
them and was not scary. Many of them giggled and said ‘Wow, this is so
weird!’”.
To test the illusion further and provide objective evidence, Dr Ehrsson then
performed an additional experiment to measure the participants’
physiological response – specifically the level of perspiration on the skin – in
a scenario where they felt the illusory body was threatened. Their bodily
response strongly indicated that they thought the threat was real.
The creation of this perceptual illusion stems from an idea Dr Ehrsson had
as a medical student, when he wondered what would happen to the ‘self’ if
you could effectively move your eyes to another part of the room, just a few
metres away, so you could observe yourself from an outside perspective.
Would the self ‘follow’ the eyes or stay in the body?
Dr Ehrsson added: “The illusion is different from anything published
previously. It is the first to involve a change in the perceived location of the
self, relative to the physical body. It is also different from any virtual reality set-
up because it examines what happens when you look at yourself, and there is
also multisensory information that triggers the illusion. There has been no
way of inducing an OBE in healthy people before, apart from unsubstantiated
reports in occult literature. It’s a very exciting development, and has
implications for a range of disciplines from neuroscience to theology.”
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