Out-of-Body Experience

The sensation of viewing one's own body from outside it has been described across many cultures and centuries, usually folded into occult or esoteric traditions under the name astral projection, which framed the experience as the literal separation of a subtle, non-physical body from the physical one. Psychical researcher G. N. M. Tyrrell coined the deliberately neutral term "out-of-body experience" in his 1943 book Apparitions, and British researcher Celia Green adopted and popularised it in 1968, stepping away from the occult framing and collecting several hundred first-person written accounts through public appeals, which she analysed and classified by common features: whether the experience arose spontaneously, during illness or trauma, during sleep paralysis, or through deliberate practice, and whether the person reported a distinct secondary body or simply a shift in visual perspective.

Green's work reframed the OBE as a psychological experience to be studied and categorised on its own terms, separable from the metaphysical claims traditionally layered onto it, and her terminology became the standard in both parapsychological and later neuroscientific literature, even as the two fields drew very different conclusions about what the experience actually was.

The most important recent development in OBE research has come from clinical neuroscience rather than parapsychology. Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke and colleagues reported in 2002 that direct electrical stimulation of a specific brain region, the temporoparietal junction, could reliably trigger an out-of-body sensation in a patient undergoing surgical mapping for epilepsy, and follow-up studies used mirror-box and virtual-reality setups to induce similar illusory self-location and self-identification effects in healthy volunteers by deliberately disrupting the brain's normal integration of visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive signals about where the body is. This line of research supports an explanation of the out-of-body experience as a genuine, reproducible brain state, arising when the brain's ordinary process of locating the self within the body is disrupted, rather than as literal separation of a non-physical consciousness from the body.

Separately, parapsychologists have specifically tested the strongest form of the OBE claim, that a person having a spontaneous or induced OBE can accurately perceive real information from a vantage point their physical body could not have accessed, typically using hidden target cards or images placed in a location the OBE claimant would need to view from above; no such target-identification protocol has produced results independent researchers accept as demonstrating genuine veridical perception, leaving the neurological account, disruption of normal bodily self-location rather than genuine perceptual travel outside the body, as the explanation best supported by controlled evidence.