The Neuroscience of Out-of-Body Experiences

An out-of-body experience (OBE) is an altered state of consciousness in which someone feels their conscious awareness has left the confines of their physical body, able to perceive the outside world from a different vantage point. During an OBE, it is common for people to report seeing their body from a distance or to be floating above it. OBEs have many triggers, including brain conditions (e.g. epilepsy, migraine, and brain damage); drugs (e.g. ketamine and psychedelics); anaesthesia; sleep paralysis; and near-death experiences (NDEs).

The experience – which feels very real – may be taken as proof that individual consciousness (or the soul) is not dependent on the body, or that it can exist separately from it. There are simple ways to test whether people’s consciousness does, in fact, leave their physical bodies and float elsewhere in the room. One way, which has been tried, is to place an object in a location above a patient’s bed in a hospital room. If the patient undergoing an OBE genuinely gained a vantage point above their physical body, they should be able to view the object. However, no such experiment has convincingly demonstrated such a result; experiments that claim to show genuine out-of-body perception are often criticised for being unreliable, with other explanations for the phenomena seen as more plausible.

Other explanations for OBEs draw on neuroscience, which will be the focus of this article. At the outset, I should emphasise that identifying the neural correlates of OBEs does not mean that genuine out-of-body perception is ruled out. Perhaps one day, a robust and replicable experiment can be carried out, showing that out-of-body perception is more likely what is occurring, rather than mere chance.

Yet currently, the neuroscience of OBEs has provided more robust and replicable research on this phenomenon. This research has helped to shed light on how such convincingly real experiences can occur. After all, the brain’s architecture and its processes are involved in modelling reality, or what we take to be real. This has led scientists like Anil Seth and Donald Hoffman to refer to reality as a kind of controlled hallucination.

This doesn’t mean there is not a common, mind-independent reality that exists. But the nature of having specific and limited sensory apparatus (which also varies between species) could mean that perception is more like an airplane’s dashboard rather than a transparent window – to use an analogy from philosopher Bernardo Kastrup – although the philosopher Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes has suggested a porous dashboard as an alternative metaphor for perception. Appearance and reality may not, therefore, always be so distinct from each other. Nonetheless, the quality of altered states like OBEs does throw into question to what extent, or in what instances, our non-altered perception accords with reality.

Dr Joseph Parvizi, a professor of neurology at Stanford University, once saw a patient with epilepsy whose seizures were resulting in OBEs. Parvizi and a team of researchers traced the patient’s symptoms to a sausage-shaped area of the brain known as the anterior precuneus. This area, situated between the two brain hemispheres, appears to be essential in the construction of the bodily self (one’s sense of inhabiting one’s body). The team reported their findings in a 2023 paper published in Neuron.

The study involved the initial patient and eight other volunteers (who also had severe epilepsy). The researchers wanted to find the source of their seizures. This involved placing electrodes on different areas of the brain, which then delivered pulses of electricity. When the team stimulated the anterior precuneus, every participant experienced changes to their bodily self (i.e. an OBE was produced). People felt detached from their thoughts and bodies. The anterior precuneus is separate from brain areas dedicated to creating the narrative self, that is, the self (or sense of ‘I’) we imbue into the narrative of our lives. The latter is the identity created by the narrative we tell ourselves about our past, present, and future. It is an identity created through a story-like structure, which helps to make sense of our experiences.

In contrast, the anterior precuneus and, in turn, our bodily self, appear to be dedicated to the sense that something is ‘happening to me’ rather than someone else. "We think this could be a way for the brain to tag every experience in the environment as 'mine,'" says Parvizi in a piece for NPR.

Christophe Lopez, a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France, agrees that identifying the anterior precuneus as the neural correlate of OBEs makes sense. He has researched the role of the inner ear in the bodily self. The inner ear detects motion and tracks the body’s position in space. Parvizi et al.’s research suggests that the anterior precuneus processes signals from the inner ear. Thus, perturbing this brain area – by means of an epileptic seizure or drugs – can lead to quite strange bodily experiences.

Stimulating the anterior precuneus can lead to the sense that the body is falling or floating. This leads to a problem for the brain to solve. It’s dealing with conflicting information: signals from the inner ear saying the body is falling and signals from the eyes saying it’s stationary. Lopez suggests the brain can try to cope with this conflicting information by offering a single perspective. "Sometimes the best solution which is found by the brain is to think that you are somewhere else, out of the body," he says.

A similar conundrum occurs when people take drugs like ketamine, which also affects (and disrupts the function of) the anterior precuneus. This seems to correlate with the bodily subjective experience of the ketamine state; during the ‘k-hole’, users often report the sensation of falling or floating outside their bodies, as if looking at their bodies from above, in a different part of the room.

Other research has confirmed links between OBEs and abnormal integration of bodily signals. Alterations to vestibular signals (those related to the inner ear and perception of body position and movement) have long been implicated, and a 2024 study involved manipulating visual and vestibular integration in healthy volunteers, which led to OBE-like phenomena. Patients with vestibular disorders are more likely to experience OBEs, which indicates the key role played by the inner ear.

The temporoparietal junction (TPJ) – where the temporal and parietal lobes in the brain meet – has also been implicated in OBEs. This is an area of the brain that integrates sensory information. Based on associations between the TPJ and OBEs, researchers have suggested that the former is a crucial structure for the conscious experience of the normal self, constructing the spatial unity of self and body. This means it creates the sense that the self is located where the body is – more specifically, it is felt to reside inside the body. Indeed, part of everyday experience is the sense that we are conscious selves housed inside the body, sat in the head, behind the eyes, looking out into the world. 

In a 2005 paper, researchers drew on evidence from neurology, cognitive neuroscience, and neuroimaging, and suggested:

OBEs are related to a failure to integrate multisensory information from one's own body at the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). It is argued that this multisensory disintegration at the TPJ leads to the disruption of several phenomenological and cognitive aspects of self-processing, causing illusory reduplication, illusory self-location, illusory perspective, and illusory agency that are experienced as an OBE.

Research on the neural correlates of OBEs has philosophical implications too, as it bears relation to discussions on the nature of self, which is a philosophical concept as much as a neuroscientific one. For instance, if OBEs help to differentiate a narrative self from a bodily self, this throws into question what we deem more essential to our identity. Do we need to regard the body as ‘mine’ to feel we have a distinct identity? Alternatively, the concept of the spatial unity of self and body – which can be disrupted during OBEs, which people report as changes to self – suggests that people’s normal sense of self is deeply embodied by nature. Perhaps the true self cannot be separated from the body (although this does run up against philosophical views of self that see the self as distinct from the material realm, including our bodies).

Regarding more metaphysical questions, such as whether OBEs during NDEs show that consciousness could survive physical death, the psychologist Susan Blackmore writes:

I believe it is too early to say whether near-death experiencers can actually see things paranormally. There is certainly evidence in that direction, but it is not clear-cut, and we shall have to await the results of future work to find out whether or not it stands the test of time. However, it may be useful at this stage to consider what sort of evidence would be convincing. First, there could be better evidence for paranormal perception during NDEs; if that is obtained, then I would be forced to reconsider my position. But it would still be a long step to concluding that OBEs provide evidence for survival. We would still have to deal with the thorny question of ruling out ESP as an alternative explanation, even to conclude that something leaves the body. And even that is only the first step.

The second is to ask whether that “something” could survive death or operate without a physical body. One way of approaching the problem is to ask whether NDEs can occur when brain activity has ceased. If a complex structured experience occurs, involves the paranormal acquisition of information, and could be shown to occur at a time when there was little or no brain activity, then that would strongly challenge any purely cognitive or psychological account of the experience. The ability to collect that kind of evidence is in sight, and it would be important if found. However, I must add that even that still would not get around the problem that anyone who can tell us about his or her NDE was not actually dead at the time. Awkward problems like that beset the search for survival evidence at every turn.

As we can see, the neuroscience of OBEs – as well as the future of this area of research – can help shed light on other areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mysticism, the philosophy of psychedelics, epistemology, and metaphysics. These experiences can be viewed as either confirming or challenging the view that conscious experience depends on, or arises out of, physical states and processes. From a philosophical point of view, we should consider truth-testing factors like evidence, parsimony, coherence, consistency, and rationality in determining the explanation most likely to be true. Another important aspect of the debate is the epistemic weight we give to altered states like OBEs, in terms of what they supposedly reveal about the nature of consciousness, self, and reality.

Currently, OBEs lead people to be divided between two main philosophical camps. The first is the scientific/naturalistic/physicalist camp (which sees OBEs as a result of altered brain activity). The second is the non-physicalist camp (which views these experiences as evidence that consciousness can exist independently of the body/brain – a position that may have supernatural varieties, which frames this consciousness as the soul, spirit, or divine essence). OBEs, however, are just one type of non-ordinary state of consciousness among many that are seen to confirm or discount a particular philosophical worldview.