Out-of-body experience can vary person to person, but they often involve the sense of floating above one’s actual body and looking down. For neuroscientists, the phenomenon is a puzzle and an opportunity: Understanding how the brain goes awry can also illuminate how it is supposed to work. Neuroscientists now think that out-of-body experiences involve the vestibular system—made up of canals in the inner ear that track a person’s locations in space—and how that information gets integrated with other senses in the brain. [...]
Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, says that the study “puts previous anecdotal suggestions about a strong vestibular component in [out-of-body experiences] on firm grounds.” Blanke, who has worked with Lopez previously but not on the current study, has also shown that electrically stimulating the brain area that integrates vestibular and visual information can induce an out-of-body illusion. Whether the perturbation is in the inner ear itself or the brain, the end result seems to be the same: a feeling of having defied physics and left one’s body.
But there is still another mystery. While 14 percent of Elzière’s patients experiencing dizziness reported out-of-body experiences, 14 percent is not 100 percent. And healthy people appear to sometimes have such experiences, too. A vestibular disorder alone does not cause people to feel like they’ve left their bodies. “We believe out-of-body experiences might be a combination of several factors,” says Lopez. He also surveyed patients about their mental states, and found that those with anxiety and depression in addition to dizziness were more likely to have out-of-body experiences.
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