Lots of Ink: With a little virtual reality, researchers evoke out-of-body sensations

Published: August 24, 2007, 1:26 pm

Injured, half-asleep, ill, and heavily-meditating people, plus those following surgery, sometimes report later they’d experienced a sense of leaving their bodies, sometimes floating around and seeing themselves from the outside. Now in Science researchers report they have tricked people into feeling they, too, had left their bodies. The technique, reports Sandra Blakeslee in the NYTimes, helps put a logical explanation on sensations sometimes “ascribed to otherwordly influences,” a source tells her. Separate teams in Switzerland and Sweden put virtual reality goggles on people that gave them a view of themselves. By stroking or otherwise touching both the people, and showing the illusionary images being similarly touched, they led test subjects to feel they were watching themselves from afar. And they got mean, too: Whacking or threatening the images and thus eliciting fear or flinches in the (unhit) experimentees. More important, the work helps neuroscientists

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