Even if you’ve never actually been in a near-death situation and felt yourself rising up out of your corporeal form and observing things from afar, you’ve certainly heard about people who’ve had an out-of-body experience. Or, at least they believed that they had one. Are OBEs, as they’re known in paranormal circles, real? Or are they merely the brain playing tricks on itself?
We don’t have the definitive answer, but whatever OBEs actually are, we now know that they can be reproduced in a laboratory setting. The scientific journal Nature recently published papers on the subject by two separate groups of researchers, both of whom managed to induce the sensation of having an out-of-body experience in healthy test subjects. (The Nature articles are pay-per-view, but for those who don’t care to shell out $10, here’s a Time magazine article and a press release from University College London describing the experiments and the researchers’ findings.)
In one study, former UCL neurology researcher Dr. Henrik Ehrsson — now with the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm — successfully simulated an OBE by putting each test subject in a chair and equipping him with a virtual-reality helmet. The latter’s twin video displays showed live 3-D images shot by two video cameras placed behind the subject, so that he can see what appears to be a disembodied version of himself. A researcher then stood beside the subject and used two plastic rods to simultaneously touch both the subject’s actual chest and the virtual version of him. The subjects reported that they had experienced sitting behind their physical body and looking at it from that location.
Ehrsson’s team also tested the vividness of the illusion by swinging a hammer just below the camera setup, so that the virtual body would appear to be hit. They then measured how much the test subjects perspired, and discovered that they showed the usual bodily response to fear.
In the second study, a team led by Swiss neuroscientist Dr. Olaf Blanke showed some subjects in VR goggles 3-D projections of either their own bodies or of dummies being stroked by a paintbrush, while actually stroking the subjects' backs in sync with the image. The subjects were then blindfolded, guided backward and asked to return to their positions. The researchers found that those who had their backs touched in sync with the virtual image of themselves consistently went past their actual location in the direction of the VR image. (A second group that was stroked out of sync with the image didn’t go as far off target, while a third group who weren’t shown the illusion got closest to their original location.)
While some of the test subjects were discomforted by their visit to the astral plane, others actually seemed to enjoy the ersatz OBE. “Many of them giggled and said ‘Wow, this is so weird!’” Ehrsson noted in the press release. On a more serious level, however, he described the new research as “a very exciting development … (with) implications for a wide range of disciplines from neuroscience to theology.”
