Philosopher Thomas Metzinger emailed me a bunch of cool stuff he’s doing with some neurosicentists to utilize virtual reality to induce out-of-body experiences.
The “I” one thinks of as “myself” is inextricably attached to one’s bodily location. In patients with certain neurological conditions this sense of spatial unity can break down, causing disturbing sensations such as out-of-body experiences in which the global self is localized outside one’s body limits (often called disembodiment).
Previous experiments have shown that people may attribute fake body parts to their own bodies. In the “Rubber Hand Illusion”, a person’s unseen hand is stroked synchronously with a visible fake hand, and then the person is asked to point to his own hand. Subjects invariably err in the direction of the fake hand, attributing it to their own bodies. Because the attribution does not involve the whole body, the sense of global bodily self-consciousness is not affected. EPFL Professor Olaf Blanke, graduate students Bigna Lenggenhager and Tej Tadi, and philosopher Thomas Metzinger hypothesized that the same approach could be used to study the concept of global bodily self consciousness by using a single, coherent body representation instead of just a body part.