The Out-of-Body ElectricCan scientists make your soul fly away?
Posted Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007, at 6:01 PM ET
Two teams of neuroscientists have made a breakthrough in the study of "out-of-body experiences," according to this week's issue of Science. About one in 10 people report having had the strange sensation of floating away from their bodies at some point in their lives. According to the new studies, it's now possible to induce that feeling of astral projection in the lab.
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StumbleUponThere have been similar claims in the past: At Laurentian University in Canada, Michael Persinger has used a helmet studded with magnets to create quasi-mystical experiences, including—for some subjects, at least—the sensation of drifting outside the body. But the authors of the new research manage the feat without any neural poking or zapping. Instead, they use little more than a pair of virtual-reality goggles.
The new approach seems to work as advertised—test subjects said the experiment made them feel like they were outside of their own bodies. But that's where the story ends. The out-of-body VR setup does a great job of mimicking the superficial aspects of the out-of-body experience. But it teaches us very little about how or why it happens in real life.
The first of these studies, titled "The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences" and conducted by Henrik Ehrsson, shows that you can create something like an OBE using special effects. First, you sit in a chair and don a pair of virtual-reality goggles that are connected to a 3-D camera that's pointed at the back of your head. Looking through these goggles already makes you feel, at least to some extent, as though you're where the camera is, sitting a few feet behind your own body. (It's possible to create a similar feeling of displacement without looking at your own head: If the goggles were showing a three-dimensional video feed of the bathroom, you might feel a bit like you were in the bathroom.)
Now, Ehrsson tries to make the effect more realistic. He starts rubbing your chest, while at the same time reaching a hand toward the camera that's providing the video feed. As you feel the touch on your chest, you're also seeing an arm reach below your video "eyes." This combination, it turns out, makes you feel even more like you're sitting behind yourself. (Likewise, if you were watching a video feed of the bathroom and the experimenter flushed a toilet, it would make you feel even more like you were in the bathroom.)
To measure the strength of this illusion, Ehrsson conducts one more test. About a minute into the experiment, he suddenly picks up a hammer and swings it toward the empty space just below your camera "eyes." At the same time, he measures your emotional arousal using skin conductance electrodes: The more realistic the experience, the more charged up you'll get at the sight of the hammer coming toward your virtual nose.
The study confirmed that synchronized touching makes the illusion more vivid. ("Wow!" giggled one subject. "I felt as though I was outside my body and looking at myself from the back!") If you saw Ehrsson rub your imaginary chest at the same time that you felt it happening, you'd be more startled when he swung the hammer. In fact, this "multisensory correlation" of vision and touch helps you figure out your position in space—and decide whether you're in body or out of body. (The second paper, by Bigna Lenggenhager and Olaf Blanke, uses a different setup to arrive at the same conclusion; click here for more details.)
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Remarks from the Fray:
Favoring the premise that the simplest explanation is the best one, I suspect that most of these experiences are dreams. Though dreams are not my area of interest, I am a clinician and researcher in sleep disorders. I have had a few patients describe out of body experiences to me, and they invariably occur while the patient is sleeping, never while they are awake. But I admit I've only had a handful of patients tell me about them, so I'm no expert.
I suspect the OBE is a specific subtype of Lucid Dream - a dream in which the subjects have some awareness of being in the dream, and retain their own personality and memories (which are usually lost or distorted in normal dreams). Some of my patients have even volunteered that the OBEs most frequently occur in the twilight state between wakefulness and sleep (i.e. "half-asleep") and that also happens to be prime territory for lucid dreams.
--mnemon
(To reply, click here.)
Don't know whether the phrase has been coined yet, but I'd call this phenomenon "sensory consonance", meaning that multiple senses are stimulated in a consistent way to generate a realistic feeling. Sensory consonance is what we experience all the time every day. The experimenters took advantage of sensory consonance to induce a real feeling of an unreal situation.
"Sensory dissonance" happens if different senses give you conflicting information. This happened when the hammer was swung in the experiment. Your eyes say you've been hit, but your nose says otherwise.
This conflict can induce an uneasy, even sickening feeling. If you've ever been to an IMAX movie, you've probably experienced it. The movie screen fills your whole field of vision, and it tells you that you're swooping through the Grand Canyon, or something equally engaging. But the seat of your pants tells you you're sitting still. Depending on your constitution, you can get serious motion sickness during those swooping scenes.
I work in Iowa City, home of the National Advanced Driving Simulator. The "advanced" simulator has a 360-degree screen and a sophisticated motion base. The video and motion respond very realistically to your driving inputs, accelerating and turning through a virtual landscape. An earlier, "pre-advanced" simulator had the video, but not the motion base. The video responded realistically to your inputs, but the "car" did not move. I drove this old simulator once. During gentle maneuvers, it felt OK. But during the more evasive maneuvers I felt some serious motion sickness.
And heaven help you if the software isn't working right on the advanced simulator, because the steering wheel/gas pedal, the video, and the seat of your pants can be telling you three different things.
--alewbail
(To reply, click here.)
Both Persinger and Erhsson miss the point of true out of body experiences. They've crafted methods of creating an as-if experience, but what they describe is a hallucination. The experimental results are to a real out of body experience as Wilder Penfield's brain-stimulation hallucinations are to real music and images.
As anyone who's had an OBE can tell you, you see things you really can't have seen any other way. The top of your own head, for example. The position of others around you from above, and the location of landmarks you can't possibly have seen from the ground. Simulating that sense of floating behind yourself with a camera may feel like the real thing, as may stimulating the angular gyrus with an electrode. But it doesn't prove or disprove the reality of OBE. I'm not saying OBE is a supernatural or spiritual experience, I'm just saying that it's not imaginary either. When you have a surgeon relating his personal experience with it to Oliver Sacks (in a recent New Yorker), it gets harder to dismiss every incident as wishful thinking or brain damage.
--Isonomist
(To reply, click here.)
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