The Science of Out-of-Body Experiences

How Our Brains Create the Illusion of Leaving Our Bodies

I used to ride my bike to work. The ride was short but a good way to squeeze in some exercise. The last day I rode my bike, a parked car, without warning, pulled out in front of me. I ended up in the middle of the road with three cracked vertebrae and a broken arm.

In the ambulance, on the way to emergency, the paramedics gave me a psychedelic cocktail that included a hefty dose of morphine and ketamine. By the time we reached the hospital, I was off with the fairies (as my Dad would say).

My memories of the emergency room are hazy, but I do remember a doctor asking if they could perform a CT scan to check for any internal damage.

My response:

“You can do whatever you like with my body, because I’m in a box.”

It was the strangest feeling. I thought I was in a box with wavy black and white striped walls, and my body was... on a gurney… somewhere I wasn’t. But I also thought… this was not actually true.

At the time, I was about six months into a PhD exploring the role attention plays in our conscious experience. Coincidentally, I had just been reading about out-of-body experiences only about a week before. So, while I was having this surreal experience of being in a stripy box, another part of me was thinking — isn't this amazing! With only a few mind-altering substances, my brain has me believing the most extraordinary things!

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Everything we know about the world — including what we know about our body — comes from our body. Our senses provide the data.

Normally, we don't question whether the body providing the information is ours. Normally, we see ourselves as unified with our body, occupying the same space — we are embodied.

This sense of embodiment is so fundamental to our existence that we often take it for granted, assuming it's an inevitable part of being human.

But as I discovered in that emergency room, our sense of embodiment isn't as fixed as we might think. People can experience out-of-body experiences, where their sense of self becomes detached from their sense of body.

It sounds strange, but out-of-body experiences are more common than you might think. Current estimates suggest that somewhere between 5 and 15% of the population will have an out-of-body experience at some point.

These experiences are often vivid and life-changing. And for many, the experience is evidence that consciousness can exist separately from the physical body. Which, if true, would challenge many scientific explanations of consciousness.

So, we might wonder… how do scientists explain out-of-body experiences?

To find out, let's answer three questions:

1. What is an out-of-body experience?

2. Why do we feel like we're in our bodies? and,

3. What’s going on in the brain during an out-of-body experience?

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Q1: What is an Out-of-Body Experience?

Typically, an out-of-body experience is where a person feels as if they are outside their physical body, often looking back at themselves.

In her comprehensive study of out-of-body experiences, author Celia Green documented numerous fascinating accounts. Here's one example:

"I was asleep on a settee with my wife. I was aware at one stage that I was out of my own body poised six feet or so above and peering down at the two of us laying on the settee."

This account vividly illustrates the three core features of an out-of-body experience:

1. Disembodiment — the person feels like they are outside of their body.

2. First-person perspective — the person perceives the world (and their body) from a disembodied viewpoint.

3. Self-identification — the person identifies with the disembodied perspective.

Out-of-body experiences can occur spontaneously, but they are typically associated with drug use, epileptic seizures, or brain lesions.

While accounts of out-of-body experiences are fascinating, they raise an interesting question — if an out-of-body experience makes us feel as if we are outside our bodies, why do most of us, most of the time, feel firmly rooted within our physical body? To understand out-of-body experiences, we first need to explore a more basic question:

Q2: Why Do We Feel Like We're in Our Bodies?

One of our brain's most crucial tasks is to keep track of where and how our body exists in space. In other words, it must maintain a body schema.

Imagine reaching for a glass of water on your bedside table. The movements required would differ depending on whether you're sitting up or lying down. So, to successfully execute the correct movement, your brain must keep track of your body's current position and orientation, accurately and consistently updating this body schema in real time.

To do this, your brain relies on information from four main inputs:

1. vision,

2. touch,

3. proprioception (sense of body position), and

4. the vestibular system (sense of balance and spatial orientation).

These four input sources can be grouped into two main systems:

1. the visual-vestibular system (which includes vision and the vestibular system) plays a crucial role in maintaining visual stability and,

2. the somatosensory system (which includes touch and proprioception) provides information about body position, movement, and sensations from the skin, muscles, and joints.

For simplicity, in this article, I'll focus on vision and touch as representatives of the two systems (but just know that proprioception and the vestibular system are also important for our sense of embodiment).

Let's see how these systems work together. Imagine reaching for that glass of water on your bedside table. As your hand moves towards the water, your brain processes information from both systems: Your eyes track the movement of your hand, providing visual information about its position relative to the glass. And when your fingers make contact with the glass, your skin adds touch information to the mix.

But your brain doesn't just collect these signals — it integrates them. For example, your brain combines seeing your hand move with feeling the cup. It is this integration that gives us a seamless, unified sense of being ‘in’ our bodies.

While this process happens automatically, it's a calculation our brains perform continuously. And for the most part, we get it correct. But not always. One of the most striking demonstrations of when this integration falters is a famous experiment known as…

The Rubber Hand Illusion

If you're unfamiliar with this illusion, the best way to wrap your head around it is to see it in action. So, I've included a clip below.

The man in the blue shirt is the participant. He places his left hand behind a cardboard screen, hiding it from view. Meanwhile, a rubber hand is placed on the desk, and he is asked to look at this rubber hand. The experimenter (the man in the green checked shirt) then starts brushing both the hidden real hand and the visible rubber hand in sync.

The brain receives two pieces of information: the visual input of a rubber hand being stroked and the touch sensation of brush strokes on the real hand. In a clever bit of problem-solving, the brain connects these dots and concludes, ‘That rubber hand must be mine!" It integrates the visual information (seeing the rubber hand) and the touch information (feeling the brush strokes) into its body schema. It's as if the brain is reasoning, ‘I can feel my left hand being brushed, and I can see a left hand being brushed, so that left hand I'm seeing must be mine.’

The fascinating thing about this footage is the participant's reaction to the surprise. The surprise comes from the participant's right side. If the participant’s reaction were a reaction to surprise in general, we would suspect that he'd move his right hand first — it's in the line of fire, so to speak. But that’s not what happens. He moves his left hand first and keeps his right hand on the table! It seems the participant has incorporated the rubber hand into his body schema. His instinctive reaction was to protect ‘his’ left hand.

In the rubber hand illusion, the visual information and touch information give conflicting reports about the real hand's location. To resolve this conflict and continue to keep track of where and how the body is in space, the brain must prioritize one source of information over the other. Typically, vision is the most reliable source of spatial information — so the brain goes with that. Because the brain only sees one hand — the rubber hand — it assumes this must be the hand it needs to keep track of. It integrates this false visual input into its body schema. As a result, the participant feels the brush touch where they see it happening on the rubber hand rather than where it's actually occurring on their real hand.

The rubber hand illusion is a well-documented phenomenon. But neuroscientist Olaf Blanke and his colleagues wondered if they could take this concept to the next level: could they create a similar illusion for the entire body?

The Whole Body Illusion

Blanke’s clever experiment, titled Video Ergo Sum (I see, therefore I am), made waves when published in the journal Science in 2007. I was lucky enough to experience a similar setup firsthand.

I strapped on a VR headset, which was linked to a video camera positioned 2 meters behind me. Looking through the virtual display, I saw myself — the back of me — about 2 meters in front of me. It was, admittedly, a little strange.

Source: DOI: 10.1126/science.1143439

Then someone began stroking my back with a brush — similar to the rubber hand illusion. From my vantage point in virtual reality, I watched as my virtual self received these brush strokes while simultaneously feeling the sensations on my actual back.

After about a minute or two of this unusual situation, I began to feel as if I was the virtual body I was observing. I felt being brushed, but I felt it in the virtual body in front of me — which is a strange thing to write and an even stranger thing to experience.

Next, I was guided to a new location and asked to return to my original position. Interestingly, I’m told I stopped closer to where my virtual body was in space than where my actual body was.

What's going on here? Well, just like with the rubber hand illusion, my brain was being tricked. It got visual input (I saw my body being stroked) and touch input (I felt the strokes on my back). The sources conflicted, and when this happened, vision dominated the other senses. My brain figured, if I'm seeing strokes on that body and feeling strokes at the same time, that body out there must be mine!" And just like that, my sense of body was where I saw my body.

My brain integrated information from vision and touch — it just got the integration wrong. It created a coherent, albeit incorrect, body schema based on the conflicting sensory inputs.

This experiment, fascinating as it is, doesn't exactly replicate a true out-of-body experience. Let’s find out what happens in the brain when someone experiences a genuine out-of-body experience without any VR trickery involved.

Q3: What’s Going On in the Brain During an Out-of-Body Experience?

For a long time, out-of-body experiences were viewed as a bit of a medical mystery. But in 2002, Olaf Blanke and colleagues published an article in Nature that shed some light on what might be happening in the brain during these experiences. The brief article made a bold claim — 'the part of the brain that can induce out-of-body experiences has been located'.

This groundbreaking discovery came from an unexpected source: a patient with epilepsy. While in the hospital undergoing a procedure to locate the origin of her seizures, surgeons implanted electrodes in different parts of her brain to stimulate specific areas of her cortex.

The results were unexpected. When one particular area was stimulated, the patient began reporting unusual sensations. At a low stimulation level, she felt like she was 'sinking into the bed'. As the stimulation increased, she reported, 'I see myself lying in bed from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk'. In essence, the stimulation generated an out-of-body experience.

Intriguingly, the patient didn't see her entire body during this experience. When asked to look at her legs during a subsequent stimulation, she reported seeing them 'becoming shorter', even though her actual legs never moved. This finding aligns with other reports that out-of-body experiences can disappear when a person tries to examine parts of their illusory body.

The area the doctors stimulated is called the temporoparietal junction, or the TPJ.

Since this paper was published, the TPJ has also been implicated in out-of-body experiences in other research.

For instance, Blanke and his team examined brain scans of six patients with out-of-body experiences. In five out of these six patients, they found damage in the TPJ area.

Another group took a different approach. They compared brain scans from two groups: eight who'd reported having out-of-body experiences and twenty-four who didn't. What did they find? Functional abnormalities in (you guessed it) the TPJ of those who reported having out-of-body experiences.

While the TPJ is involved in many cognitive processes, one of its key functions appears to be its crucial role in a larger brain network that is responsible for maintaining our body schema. Converging evidence from patients with damage to the TPJ and fMRI studies of healthy individuals shows that the TPJ seems necessary for integrating information from the two systems discussed above: the visual-vestibular system (vision and the vestibular) and the somatosensory system (touch and proprioception).

So, what might be happening during an out-of-body experience?

Normally, the TPJ integrates sensory input from the two systems to give us a unified sense of bodily self. However, when the TPJ is disrupted, the brain struggles to create a coherent body schema. The integration fails. The body schema is no longer unified — it becomes split.

In essence, the brain is experiencing two different versions of where the body is at the same time. The visual and vestibular signals have not integrated with the somatosensory (touch and proprioceptive) signals. So, the person might feel like they are floating above themselves while seeing their body from a distance.

It's as if the brain is struggling to create one coherent picture of where they are and what their body is doing. It's like the internal GPS has gone a bit wonky!

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These findings invite us to think about self-consciousness. If our brain can be tricked into believing we're outside our body, what does this mean for our sense of self? If our feeling of being ‘in’ our body is just a construction of the brain, what implications does this have for our understanding of consciousness?

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