![]() ![]() A camera filmed a subject from behind, and the images were sent to a 3D head-mounted display that the subject was wearing. In 2005, philosopher Thomas Metzinger proposed an experiment and teamed up with Blanke and Blanke’s then student Bigna Lenggenhager, and designed an elegant experiment. The next step was to try to produce OBEs in healthy participants. Blanke concluded that the electrical stimulation was somehow disrupting the integration of various sensations such as touch with vestibular signals, leading to the woman’s OBE. The angular gyrus lies near the vestibular cortex (which receives inputs from the vestibular system that’s responsible for our posture and sense of balance). When the stimulating current was low, she reported “sinking into the bed” or “falling from a height” when Blanke’s team increased the amperage, she had an out-of-body experience: “I see myself lying in bed, from above,” she said. The procedure, pioneered by Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, is often the best way to find out the function of different brain regions, and much of what we have learned about the brain has come from courageous patients who have let themselves be stimulated while conscious. This technique allows surgeons to double-check that they’ve really found the cause of the seizure, while also ensuring that they don’t excise some key brain region. During this procedure, the woman volunteered to have her brain stimulated using the implanted electrodes. His team inserted electrodes inside the cranium to record electrical activity from the cortical surface directly, rather than from outside the skull as you would if you were using standard EEG. Brain scans did not show any lesions, so Blanke resorted to surgery to figure out the focus of her epilepsy. He had been treating her for drug-resistant temporal-lobe epilepsy. In 2002, Blanke managed to induce repeated out-of-body experiences in a 43-year-old woman. Some clues come from the work of Olaf Blanke, a neurologist a Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. The strange experiences are probably our best window on some very basic aspects of our sense of bodily self – explaining how the brain builds our perception of being present in the here and now, and the subjective, emotional feelings that dominate our consciousness. During a classic full-blown OBE, people report leaving their physical body and seeing it from an outside perspective, say from the ceiling looking down at the body lying in bed.ĭespite their vividness, they are all hallucinations caused by malfunctions in brain mechanisms that root us in the here and now. But probably the most widely experienced and best-known form of autoscopic phenomena is the out-of-body experience (OBE). The doppelganger effect takes this phenomenon a step further, so that a person may hallucinate that they are actually seeing and interacting with another “me” – a visual double. The simplest form of an autoscopic phenomenon involves feeling the presence of someone next to you without actually seeing a “double” – a sensed presence. ![]() Such hallucinations are classified as autoscopic phenomena (from “autoscopy” in Greek, autos means “self” and skopeo means “looking at”). Soon, fear and confusion took hold: Who was he? Was he the man standing up or the man lying in bed? Unable to stand seeing his double any longer, he jumped out of the window. When he inhabited the supine body in bed, he’d see his duplicate bending over and shaking him. To complicate things further, his awareness of being in a body would shift from one body to the other. Furious at the prone self, the man shouted at it, shook it, and even jumped on it, all to no avail. He was aware that the person in bed was him, and was not willing to get up and would thus make himself late for work. He felt dizzy, stood up, turned around, and saw himself still lying in bed. But it turned out to be a harrowing lie-in. One morning, instead of going to work, he drank copious amounts of beer and stayed in bed. The incident seemed to have been started when the young man had stopped taking some of his anticonvulsant medication. The young man, who worked as a waiter and lived in the canton of Zurich, had very nearly killed himself one day, when he found himself face-to-face with his doppelganger. A fellow neurologist, who had been treating a 21-year-old man for seizures, sent him to Brugger. More than two decades ago, Peter Brugger, as a PhD student in neuropsychology at the University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland, was developing a reputation as someone interested in scientific explanations of so-called paranormal experiences. ![]()
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