Artificially Induced Out-Of-Body Experiences
Posted On : Mar / 10 / 2008
Using
virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have
induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside
of one’s own body - in healthy people, according to experiments
being published in the journal Science. A representation of one of
the scenarios that scientists used to study out-of-body
experiences. When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves
through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the
stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.The research
reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily
self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said
Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at
Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not
involved in the experiments.