A Swedish researcher has induced an out-of-body experience, through the use of virtual goggles. An out of body experience involves a perception that a person is viewing his/her own body from the outside. The experiment shows that such experiences could have a real scientific basis and are not just a figment of the imagination. Moreover, it tells us that the sense of being localised within the physical body can be fully determined by perceptual processes, that is, by the visual perspective in conjunction with multisensory stimulation on the body. Conducted at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, the experiment involved healthy volunteers wearing goggles connected to two video cameras placed 2 metres behind them. The right eye display of the goggles was connected to the right camera and the left eye display to the left camera. This arrangement enabled the person to see his or her back with the perspective of a person sitting behind him or her with stereoscopic vision. While the subjects were viewing their own backs through the goggles, the technician, who stood beside them, touched either their real chest, which was not viewable on the cameras, or their illusionary chest with a plastic rod. The latter effect was achieved by having the technician move the rod to a position just below the cameras, while still being in view. To determine if an out-of-body experience actually occurred, the subjects were asked 10 questions after the experiment. The results confirmed that the subjects did indeed have an out-of-body experience. This basically involved the creation of a perceptual illusion in which the subjects experienced that their centre of awareness, or self, was located outside their physical bodies. They could feel that they looked at their bodies from the perspective of another person. To verify these results, another experiment was performed in which the technician hit the illusionary body with a hammer and gauged the emotional response by measuring sweating with skin electrodes. The subjects responded as if they were viewing their physical bodies from the outside. The experiment tells us about the significance of the natural in-body experiences in forming the foundation of self-consciousness.
Science,
August 2007