Scientists Tried to Prove Out-of-Body Experiences Are Real. Here’s What Happened.
By Ashley Fike
Out-of-body experiences can feel like evidence that consciousness can leave the body, but neuroscience has found ways to trigger them by disrupting how the brain processes where the body is in space. A new experiment set out to test a more difficult question: could people experiencing an OBE perceive something they couldn’t normally see?
The researchers asked 21 experienced practitioners to “leave” their bodies and identify a randomly selected image displayed in another room. Nobody successfully identified the image; results were consistent with guessing. But two participants independently described where researchers in the other room were sitting, including details that happened to match their actual positions. That’s intriguing, but it wasn’t part of the planned experiment, so the researchers can’t treat those observations as evidence of paranormal perception. The study leaves the neurological explanation for OBEs intact while showing we have a lot of ground to cover to understand consciousness