I get that sensation when I fall asleep on my arm and my hand twitches too close to my face. One night, I thought a rat was attacking me.
By deliberately scrambling a person’s visual and tactile senses, it is now possible to give them an “out-of-body” experience. |
Two procedures – which are the first to imitate an out-of-body experience artificially – use cameras to fool people into thinking they are standing or sitting somewhere else in a room. They provide the strongest proof yet that people only imagine floating out of their bodies during surgery or near-death experiences. |
| To trick his subjects, Ehrsson gave had them wear a head-mounted display that showed them footage of themselves filmed from behind, while preventing them from seeing anything else. |
He says the work is important because it de-stigmatises reports of out-of-body experiences by people who are on drugs, or ill with conditions such as migraine or epilepsy. “They don’t have to be mad to experience these things,” he says. |
| Both researchers say their experiments reinforce the idea that the “self” is closely tied to a “within-body” position |
|
|
