Out-of-Body Experience

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A person lies in bed, or on an operating table, or at the edge of sleep, and the point of view comes loose. They are at the ceiling now, looking down, and the body below — recognizably their own — is no longer where the looking happens. People who report this almost always insist they were awake, and many describe it as more vivid than any dream, which is part of why so many of them conclude that something really left. By the most-cited estimate, roughly one person in ten has the experience at least once, and it recurs more often than it happens singly. It sounds as if it must be either revelation or breakdown. The research record says that in the plain run of cases it is neither.

The out-of-body experience — the term is deliberately colorless, and that is part of its history — names the state in which a person perceives the world from a location outside the physical body, typically an elevated vantage from which the body itself can be seen. Clinicians class it among the autoscopic phenomena and distinguish it from its neighbors by which question the experience leaves open: whose body am I looking at, and where am I. In an autoscopic hallucination one sees a double — a visual replica of oneself — while remaining firmly anchored in the physical body; the self does not move. In heautoscopy the double is felt as alive, sometimes as a second seat of awareness, and it becomes genuinely uncertain which of the two bodies is “me,” the self flickering or doubling between them. In the out-of-body experience proper, the ambiguity is resolved in the opposite direction: there is no contested double, the self has unambiguously relocated, and it looks back at the abandoned body from outside. The three states form a graded series in the disintegration of a single thing — the ordinary, seamless fact of being a self located in a body — and they tend to arise from the same region of cortex, which is part of why the typology has held up.

Celia Green, who collected some four hundred first-hand accounts and built the first taxonomy in Out-of-the-Body Experiences (1968), treated the phenomenon as an anomalous perceptual experience and left the larger question open. Her central division has outlasted the book: a parasomatic experience, in which the self travels in a second body — the floating duplicate of folklore — against an asomatic one, in which the experient is bare awareness, a disembodied point of view with no second body at all. The accompanying sensations are consistent across collections: floating, falling, a slipping-out at the verge of sleep, tingling, buzzing in the head, and, in about half of the sleep-onset cases, the locked-muscle feeling of sleep paralysis. Even the famous silver cord joining body and double turns out to depend on where the accounts were gathered. Robert Crookall, the English geologist who cataloged more than three hundred testimonies drawn largely from spiritualist and psychical-research publications, found the cord nearly everywhere; in Green’s less selected sample, fewer than one report in twenty-five mentioned anything of the kind, and most experients described being a disembodied awareness — Green’s asomatic type — rather than a traveling duplicate. The cord was not in the experience. It was in the corpus the collector chose.

The experience is far older than its name. Western esotericism called it astral projection: a deliberate excursion in a subtle vehicle — the body of light of Hermetic and Neoplatonic lineage — through an astral plane lying between Earth and the heavens. The phrase itself was coined and promoted by nineteenth-century Theosophists, who took the idea of the astral from the French occultist Éliphas Lévi and developed it within the wider ferment of nineteenth-century occultism. Victorian spiritualists spoke of traveling clairvoyance; Frederic Myers preferred “psychical excursion”; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn taught a named technique for going out in the Body of Light. Sylvan Muldoon — who reported his first projection at twelve, from a state of catalepsy — and Hereward Carrington’s The Projection of the Astral Body (1929) gave the practice its modern manual, the elastic cord described in loving detail, thick at the body and thinning to a filament with distance. The neutral term arrived in 1943, when G. N. M. Tyrrell introduced “out-of-the-body experience” in Apparitions — a researcher’s word, adopted by Green and others precisely because it did not decide in advance what the experience was.

Then came the figure who carried the neutral term to a mass audience and, in doing so, blurred the line between the laboratory and the séance. Robert Monroe was a Virginia radio-broadcasting executive, not a mystic, when in 1958 he began experiencing spells of vibration, paralysis, and a sensation of lifting free of his body. Journeys Out of the Body (Doubleday, 1971) sold on the order of a million copies and is widely credited with popularizing the term itself. Monroe built an institution around the search — the Monroe Institute, incorporated in 1985 — and an audio method, hemispheric synchronization or Hemi-Sync, which feeds slightly different tones to each ear on the premise that the resulting beat frequency entrains the brain toward states friendly to the experience. The institute’s residential Gateway program trained tens of thousands; and, as a matter of documented Cold-War record, the U.S. Army sent officers there for instruction in 1978 and again in 1983, a detail confirmed in the open press years later. The traffic was not all outward: Monroe was also a laboratory subject, sitting for the psychologist Charles Tart across some eight or nine recorded sessions in the mid-1960s — where, on the survivalist acid test described below, he failed.

The states in which the experience arises make a long and mostly ordinary list: drowsiness and sleep onset, sleep paralysis, migraine, extreme fatigue, sensory deprivation, epilepsy, general anesthesia, dissociative drugs, the near-death context, and deliberate cultivation by practiced individuals. None of this implies illness; most people who report one are psychologically healthy, and a study of epilepsy patients found nothing in the profiles of those with seizure-associated experiences to set them apart from the rest. Kevin Nelson and colleagues reported in 2007 that experients are markedly more likely to have a history of sleep paralysis, tying the phenomenon to REM intrusion — fragments of the dreaming state breaking through into waking arousal, so that the muscle-paralysis and vivid imagery of REM arrive while the mind is awake enough to narrate them. On this reading the out-of-body experience is not a departure from the body but a particular misfire of the brain’s machinery for switching between sleeping and waking, a machinery that in some people sits poised between the two — the same threshold that gives rise to lucid dreaming and to the slipping-out at sleep onset that fills the case collections.

Then the laboratory got a firmer handle on it, and the handle was electrical. The precedent reaches back to Wilder Penfield, whose mid-century cortical stimulation of conscious epilepsy patients (Penfield & Perot, 1963) Blanke cites as the forerunner of electrical induction, and who occasionally provoked sensations of floating from stimulation in the posterior temporal region. In 2002 Olaf Blanke and colleagues turned the accident into a result. Mapping the brain of a forty-three-year-old woman being evaluated for epilepsy surgery, they found that focal electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus — at the junction of the temporal and parietal lobes — induced an out-of-body experience, repeatedly and on demand. At low current she reported sinking into the bed or falling from a height; raised to 3.5 milliamperes, the stimulation produced the full displacement, the patient describing herself as seeing her own body from above. The same electrode site also produced illusory shortening and movement of her limbs and a sense of whole-body displacement, which pointed straight at a mechanism: a failure to knit the body’s touch, position, and balance signals together at that junction. Blanke’s larger 2004 study in Brain gathered six neurological patients with out-of-body experiences, autoscopy, and heautoscopy, found their lesions and seizure foci clustered at the temporo-parietal junction, and proposed that the graded typology — relocated self, contested double, anchored hallucination — maps onto graded failures to integrate proprioceptive, tactile, visual, and vestibular information at that one crossroads.

Five years after the electrode, two studies in Science showed that the experience needs no surgery and no patient — only a controlled conflict between the senses. The groundwork was a small, now-classic trick. In 1998 Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen had shown that a person who watches a rubber hand being stroked while their own hidden hand is stroked in synchrony comes, within a minute or two, to feel the touch in the rubber hand and to claim it as their own — the rubber-hand illusion, the brain reassigning the boundary of the self on the strength of correlated sight and touch. In 2007 Henrik Ehrsson scaled the trick up to the whole body: he fitted volunteers with head-mounted displays fed by cameras two meters behind them, so they saw their own backs from outside, then touched their real chest and the empty space below the cameras in synchrony. The volunteers’ sense of where they were drifted backward, out of the body and toward the camera’s vantage; and when the seen “illusory body” was menaced with a hammer, their skin-conductance response spiked, the nervous system flinching for a body that was not there. Working separately with Blanke, Bigna Lenggenhager, Tej Tadi, and Thomas Metzinger ran the complementary version — a virtual body seen ahead and stroked in synchrony — and found subjects relocating forward, into the avatar, identifying it as themselves. Blanke’s 2012 synthesis drew the arc together: the sense of being someone, somewhere, looking out from here is assembled continuously from visual, somatosensory, and vestibular signals, and when those signals are made to conflict — by an electrode, a rubber hand, or a head-mounted display — the assembly comes apart into exactly the three pieces an experient describes: whose body this is, where I am, and from where I see.

The literal survivalist claim — that something actually leaves and actually sees — admits a clean test, and it is a sharper test than the one faced by remote viewing or telepathy, since here the traveling observer is supposed to be physically present at a known place: place information where only a detached observer could read it, then ask. The tests have been run, and the shelves have gone unread. In 1968 Charles Tart had a subject known as Miss Z sleep four nights in his laboratory under EEG, with a five-digit number written large on a shelf mounted above the bed, out of any ordinary line of sight; on the fourth night she reported it correctly. Tart was candid that his own design was, in his word, too crude to exclude “mere telepathy,” since he himself knew the target. The experiment, documented today largely through the original report and the critiques that have accreted around it, is not accepted as evidence: the subject was not searched or continuously watched, the figure stood in the same room and could plausibly have been glimpsed — read in the reflection of a clock face on the wall, or, as Martin Gardner proposed, simply peeked at while Tart dozed — and the EEG record shows the disturbance one expects from physical movement at the relevant moment. Miss Z never returned, and no later subject matched the feat. Karlis Osis and Donna McCormick’s trials in the late 1970s with the psychic Alex Tanous asked him to project to a sealed optical device and read a randomly composed image; across 197 trials he called it correctly 114 times, with strain-gauge sensors at the viewing window twitching preferentially on the hits — but the target was not equiprobable, the hit rate sat at or near what chance alone would deliver once that is accounted for, and Blackmore’s verdict was that out-of-body vision had been tested and not found. In the AWARE study of cardiac-arrest survivors (2014), shelves bearing ceiling-facing images were installed across fifteen hospitals for exactly this purpose; only about two percent of survivors reported the explicit seeing-and-hearing form at all, and the single case of verifiable awareness — a man who accurately recalled events across as much as three minutes of resuscitation — arose in a room where no target had been placed. Those who hold the survivalist reading — that consciousness genuinely travels, in an astral vehicle or otherwise — continue to hold it; the arrangement designed to catch the traveler in the act has, so far, caught nothing.

The surveys, the inductions, and the tests

The scientific literature on the out-of-body experience now falls into three strands — the historical-phenomenological surveys that defined the thing, the neuroscience that induces and localizes it, and the parapsychological tests of the literal claim — and each can be read at the source.

The phenomenology begins with Celia Green’s Out-of-the-Body Experiences (Proceedings of the Institute of Psychophysical Research, vol. 2, Oxford, 1968), the four-hundred-case survey that fixed the parasomatic/asomatic distinction and the modern vocabulary, building on G. N. M. Tyrrell’s coinage of the term in Apparitions (1943). The neuroscientific turn is anchored by four papers. Blanke and colleagues’ “Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions” (Nature 419, 2002; doi.org/10.1038/419269a) reported the first deliberate induction by cortical stimulation and named the angular gyrus. Their longer “Out-of-body experience and autoscopy of neurological origin” (Brain 127, 2004; academic.oup.com/brain/article-abstract/127/2/243/347826) laid out the temporo-parietal-junction model across the full autoscopic typology. Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen’s “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see” (Nature 391, 1998; doi.org/10.1038/35784) had earlier supplied the key — that body ownership is reassigned by synchronous multisensory input — and two 2007 papers in Science carried it to the whole body: H. Henrik Ehrsson’s “The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences” (doi.org/10.1126/science.1142175) and Bigna Lenggenhager, Tej Tadi, Thomas Metzinger, and Olaf Blanke’s “Video ergo sum: manipulating bodily self-consciousness” (doi.org/10.1126/science.1143439). Kevin Nelson and colleagues’ “Out-of-body experience and arousal” (Neurology 68, 2007; neurology.org/doi/10.1212/01.wnl.0000256784.85952.6f) supplied the REM-intrusion link.

The survivalist tests are best read against their critiques. Charles Tart’s report of Miss Z appeared in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research (62, 1968); Karlis Osis and Donna McCormick’s Tanous trials in the same journal (74, 1980). Sam Parnia and colleagues’ AWARE study — “AWARE: AWAreness during REsuscitation — a prospective study” (Resuscitation 85, 2014; resuscitationjournal.com/article/S0300-9572(14)00739-4/abstract) — is the largest attempt to verify out-of-body perception at the edge of death, and it reported the shelf targets unread. Susan Blackmore’s Beyond the Body (1982) is the standing skeptical synthesis of the whole test literature, and its verdict was that out-of-body vision has been tested and not found.

What to make of all this is interpretation. For most of recorded history the out-of-body experience lived inside vocabularies that already contained its explanation — astral projection, the body of light, traveling clairvoyance. Carried into the laboratory, the experience gave up the vehicle and yielded a model: the brain’s continuously updated answer to the questions of whose body this is, where the self sits, and from what point it looks out — an answer that an electrode, a rubber hand, or a well-arranged sensory conflict can visibly revise. The induction results explain how the vantage can move; they do not, by themselves, adjudicate every claim ever made from it. What they do establish is strange enough on its own, and it presses directly on the hard problem of consciousness: the place a person seems to be standing is something the brain decides, and the decision can be changed — convincingly, from the inside, while the body lies still.

→ Related: Near Death Experience · Lucid Dreaming · Theosophy · Astral Projection · Remote Viewing · Telepathy · Hard Problem Of Consciousness