Go towards the light
People who claim to have had out-of-body experiences may not be kooky or high, according to a study released on Thursday suggesting that such events can be explained scientifically.
The suggestion comes from a group of neuroscientists who were able to manipulate a group of perfectly healthy volunteers into thinking they had moved outside their physical bodies by distorting their perception of reality.
Using virtual reality goggles to mix up the sensory signals reaching the brain, they induced the volunteers into projecting their awareness into a virtual body.
The illusion was so strong that the volunteers reacted with a palpable sense of fear when their virtual selves were threatened with physical force.
The findings suggest there may be a scientific explanation for these types of out-of-body experiences, which are often thought of as delusional or paranormal.
"Brain dysfunctions that interfere with interpreting sensory signals may be responsible for some clinical cases of out-of-body experiences," said Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist formerly of University College London, and now at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
"Though, whether all out-of-body experiences arise from the same causes is still an open question," he added.
About one in 10 people claim to have had an experience in which they are awake and viewing their own body from a location outside their physical selves.
The phenomenon has been associated with traumatic experiences such as car accidents and linked to compromised brain function in epileptics, drug addicts and stroke victims, but scientists have never been able to determine what is actually going on.
The finding that you can induce a person to project themselves into a virtual world has interesting implications, Ehrsson said.
"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 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 paper appears in the journal Science.
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