Instant Genius - Out-of-body experiences, with Dr Jane Aspell

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

Out-of-body experiences have long fascinated humans, with accounts of people feeling as if they’ve floated above their own bodies going back thousands of years. But what causes them? Intriguing new findings by neuroscientists could provide some answers. One such researcher is Dr Jane Aspell, head of the Self and Body lab at Anglia Ruskin University. She joins us to explain what happens in the brain during an out-of-body experience – and how virtual reality and the metaverse can replicate these events. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing.

Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio,

alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius,

the Bitesize Masterclass in podcast form. I'm Thomas Ling, digital editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Out of body experiences have long fascinated humans, with accounts of people feeling as if they're floating above their own bodies going back thousands of years. But until recently, there has been no scientific explanation for why these experiences occur. To talk me through the latest findings about what happens in the brain during an outer body experience, I'm joined by Dr Jane Aspel, head of the self-and-body lab at Angola Ruskin University. As well as the neuroscience, she also explains how virtual reality and the metaverse can replicate outer body experiences and the worrying impact that could have on your brain.

Hi, Jane. Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me on. So, what exactly is an out-of-body experience? An out-of-body experience is when somebody feels that their self somehow is coming out of their body. body and people usually feel that the self is floating above the body and that then you're able to yourself, which is floating above, is able to look down at your body that's sort of lying beneath you. So there's a feeling of what we call disembodiment. The self is no longer experienced as existing within the body as it is for most people, most of the time, although

it's something you don't normally question. But the self seems to be in one point. place and the body seems to be in another place. Okay. So I think when most people think about an out-of-body experience, they normally think, typically, I think, of a near-death experience, you know, descriptions of somebody floating above themselves on an operating table. Do most outer-body experiences happen when a person is close to death? I'm not sure about the exact kind of number. So there are quite a few different triggers and I don't think there's been a study comparing which are the most common triggers. I would say, suspect the near-death experience is not number one, possibly epilepsias, but they certainly can occur

in near-death experiences, and that's when most people have come across them, you know, perhaps in some kind of documentary where somebody, their heart might have stopped briefly, they're on the operating table, they might have other aspects of a near-death experience like seeing a light or a tunnel, and have this idea of, well, this experience that they're floating above their body that's lying down on the hospital bed. They might also have the experience of perhaps doctors in the room and machines in the room that they're able to see as well sort of from the perspective of the ceiling. So yeah, they can occur as part of a near-death experience. Does this detachment from the body, does it count as a form of psychosis? I wouldn't call it a form of psychosis. I mean,

it's a hallucination. So psychosis can, of course, include. hallucinations, but the trigger for an outer body experience, there's quite a few of them, but it's associated with some types of epilepsy, some kinds of migraine, some kinds of brain injury, near-death experiences where the heart might briefly stop. And they can actually occur even in healthy people with no obvious trigger at all. So some people seem to be prone to them, and we don't know why. And some healthy people have them triggered sometimes in cases of a traumatic experience, like a car accident and aniseaseaseia, sensory deprivation, and even extreme fatigue or stress. But sometimes there seems to be no apparent trigger at all.

If somebody has the experience, they're sort of floating above themselves when they're sort of sleeping, as I think is a fairly sort of common thing. Does that count as an outer body experience? Well, we'd usually say an out-of-body experience occurs when somebody's awake. So you could, of course, have a dream of an outer body experience, but I wouldn't call that an outer body experience. They can occur as well as part of a sleep paralysis experience, and sleep paralysis sort of occurs almost at the kind of border of consciousness and unconsciousness. So we think it happens when somebody, their consciousness starts to awaken, I suppose, but the muscles continue to be paralysed as they are when you are in REM sleep when you're dreaming.

So not everyone realizes when you are dreaming, all your muscles are effectively paralyzed to stop you, you know, acting out your dream, which could be problematic. In some people, we don't know why, consciousness awakens and you then become aware of that paralysis. And an out-of-body experience can occur as well at the same time. There seems to be quite a lot of triggers. Is having an out-of-body experience actually quite a common thing? I don't call it common. I mean, it's hard to estimate quite what the prevalence is, but most estimates are around about 10% of people

will have an out-of-body experience during their lifetime. We think they're probably underreported. I imagine a lot of people have them and they don't tell anybody. And, of course, if they do tell somebody, they're not going to be officially, you know, kind of report. either. But yeah, best estimate is around about 10%. I'm going to put you on the spot again and ask you how long do these outer body experiences normally last? Is there sort of a common length or does it completely vary? They're usually pretty brief, so kind of less than a minute, a matter of

minutes, so not things that last a long time. I guess the question I'm really, really interested in is what are the main ways that you can study this topic? On the face of it, it seems incredibly difficult. Do you sort of walk around town hoping you're going to find somebody having an antibody experience and then just shove them in a brain scanner? How does it work? Yeah, you'd spend a lot of time walking around town and not get anywhere, I suppose, if he did that. Yeah, so they're pretty rare, and obviously you don't know who's going to have one. I suppose it depends what you want to do. Yeah, so even in people who are susceptible to them, you can't predict necessarily when they're going to have them. I mean, we have come across some people

by accident where we can trigger them. So there was a paper published about 20 years ago by Olaf Blanca, a neurologist in Switzerland, who he was involved in a team who were assessing a lady who had epilepsy and she needed surgery for the epilepsy. So usually before you do that kind of surgery, the surgeons need to implant some electrodes into the surface of the brain. And what they do is they're able to record the brain activity and also stimulate the brain, which isn't harmful or painful in any way, but that enables the surgeons to know exactly which part of the brain they need to remove to stop the epilepsy. So as they were stimulating different parts of the brain, the patient is awake because they need to be telling the surgeon what's happening, you know,

when they stimulate different areas. And when they stimulated one particular area, she said to them, oh, I see myself from above. So she had an out-of-body experience. I think she could see the doctors in the room as well. And then when they turned the electrical current off, she came back sort of into her body. And there's been a few, there's been sort of a handful of cases like that.

There was another person who he had implanted electrodes because he had really bad tinnitus. And when the electrodes again were sort of turned on, that caused him to have an out-of-body experience. So that's one way, and there have been papers published on that, and that's given us a lot of information. But, of course, these are really rare occurrences. You can do surveys as well, where you ask a very large number of people, if they've

ever had an out-of-body experience, and then you can do, you know, you can interview them, perhaps, or see whether the tendency to have an out-of-body experience perhaps correlates or is associated with something else. And what we do in my lab is we try and simulate something like an out-of-body experience using virtual reality and healthy people. Wow, I'm definitely going to dive into this virtual reality lab, but I have to ask first, in the experiments where people's minds were sort of stimulated by electrodes,

does that point to a certain area of the brain that could be responsible? Yeah, it does. So, as I said, there's been a handful of cases. And the area which seems to cause an out-of-body experience when you stimulate it is called the temporal parietal junction, or TPJ for short. So that's an area in the cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain. And to sort of locate it, I would say it's kind of just above your ear. In particular, it seems to be the TPJ on the right side of the brain in the right hemisphere because we have one in the left and the right. So if you stimulate that part of the brain, it causes an out-of-body experience.

There's also other research that shows that people who have damage there or an epileptic focus there or some kind of lesion in that same area, those people have outer-body experiences as well. So there's quite a bit of evidence that suggests that that is the particular area, which if it's stimulated or if it's not functioning correctly because of some damage, or some abnormality there, then that causes an out-of-body experience to occur. So what is that area of the brain primarily responsible for? Yeah, so there's a lot of research that's looked into that before, not related to obese at all.

So it's a really important area for receiving information from multiple senses, like vision, hearing, touch. So it receives information from other brain areas about significant. in these different sensory modalities and it combines them, it integrates them together. And it's also receiving information from different parts of your body. And so what we think it is able to do when it combines all of that information together in a healthy person, that will then give rise to your experience of having a sort of a single body and a single self.

you know, if you think about your body and how your brain sort of knows about your body, you get information from different senses. You can look down at your body, so you get information from vision, you can feel things touching your body, you have the sense of balance, which gives information about where your body is with respect to the world. So we have all these different sources of information about our bodies, and the brain has to integrate or combine them together. And so we think that if this area isn't functioning as it should, that sort of integration of all of that sensory information doesn't occur.

And so instead of experiencing one self and one body, you have an out-of-body experience where in a sense you have two bodies or two selves. You have the self that's kind of floating up at the ceiling and then the other self, which is the sort of body lying below you. So it's a failure of that area to do its kind of proper job. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller.

Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.S. slash college PC. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt,

pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French Acoustic Specialist Focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound, and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. visit vocal powered by name.com for more information. So I do have to ask, is there any scientific evidence to support the idea that a person's consciousness can actually travel outside of the body? No, I mean, of course, you know, if you Google an out-body experiences, you know, you'll find as well as the scientific papers, there's lots of literature, you know, from the sort of within a kind of paranormal field, I suppose.

and some people who claim that, you know, they are able to induce an out-of-body experience and do this thing called astral projection where they don't just float to the ceiling, but their consciousness can kind of leave the room, leave the building, and their body kind of stays in one place, and they can travel to another place. And, you know, I've met some people who claim this. The problem is, of course, we have to scientifically verify it. We can't just, I suppose, you know, take someone's word. for it, particularly as, you know, what they're saying is really run in counter to, you know,

all kind of scientific, you know, our scientific understanding of how the world works. And when anyone has ever tried to verify these claims, they haven't been able to. I don't know if there's a study that's still happening, but there was a study, I think, in perhaps Southampton that some research is set up where, so they went into an emergency ward of a hospital and they had some very high shelves in the room where people were coming in and their heart might stop briefly. They'd have an accident or something. So they were, I suppose, hoping, sounds like a cynical word, but if there were the case that somebody came in, their heart stopped, perhaps they'd have an out-of-body experience. And so what they did on these

shelves, they placed some pictures of symbols and you couldn't see them from ground level. The only way you could see what these symbols were was by literally going up to the ceiling level and looking at them. So the idea would be if they had an out-to-body experience when they were in that room and if they actually did leave, you know, if the consciousness, if the spirit, the mind, whatever, left the body, floated up to the ceiling, then you might be able to see what those symbols are and then report back kind of afterwards. And that, I suppose, would be, you know, quite convincing evidence that consciousness is kind of leaving the body and it's not just a hallucination. But I haven't heard any positive results so far.

But, you know, as a scientist, I suppose you have to keep an open mind. But certainly until now, we haven't had any verification of that being the case. So as far as we can tell, it's a hallucination caused by the brain. sort of malfunctioning. That's really interesting. I really want to delve into you now, your virtual reality lab. And how are you using virtual reality to study this topic? Yeah.

So as I said, you know, OBEs are rare. And, you know, we can't go around sticking electrodes into people's brains, obviously for ethical reasons. So one way of creating something a bit like an OBE, but not as strong. But it certainly has some elements in common is to use virtual reality. So we have various setups in my lab where it's quite a simple setup in some sense. So you just need a camera and the camera could, for example, film the person from behind, from about two metres away.

And then you have the camera linked up with a virtual reality headset that they're wearing. So when you put it on, you are seeing what the camera sees. So you're seeing yourself from the outside. and then what makes the experience kind of stronger is if you have somebody else in the room who kind of taps you on the back while you have this VR headset on. So you're feeling these taps on your back, but you're seeing them on sort of your double or your virtual body that's being tapped. And then that kind of has this weird, it feels very strange.

You don't know anymore sort of where yourself is in the room. There's the feeling that the self is in the body as usual, but then when I've done it, then I kind of feel like myself is actually two meters away where I'm seeing my double. So it's a bit like an out-of-body experience. So where yourself is located is altered. So you no longer feel yourself located in your body, but yourself seems to be sort of located outside of your body. So it has some of the same elements that you have in an outer body.

body experience, but we're trying to find ways to make it kind of stronger. It's not as strong and salient and vivid as an OBE, but it does certainly have some elements in common. And there was a study which created this kind of experience in people while they were in a brain scanner, and it was the temporal parietal junction that was actually activated in that sense. So that shows that we are creating something a bit like an out-of-body experience using virtual reality. It sounds like a really important area of study, especially considering the rise of technologies such as the Metaverse. Yeah, it definitely relates to that.

And the ways that we use to try and make the sort of virtual outer-body experience stronger, just completely overlap with how you would try and make a VR experience more immersive. So, you know, when you have a virtual reality, experience or something in the metaverse where perhaps you have an avatar, you're in a different obviously virtual environment. And, you know, the goal is always to make it really immersive, to feel like you really are in that virtual environment. You really are in that virtual body rather than in reality. And so what we do in the lab, to make the sort of virtual outerbody experience stronger would also make a virtual experience more immersive. So what

what I mean is having more sensory input. So if you're in a virtual experience, it's not just that you see your hands move, your virtual hands move while your real hands move. But if you say touch the wall, you would also get a feeling of touch on your hand. So it really feels like the virtual wall is a real wall. So the more sensory feedback you get from the virtual world onto your real body, the more it feels like you are present in the virtual environment. So there's a big overlap.

That's really interesting. So if there's going to be more immersive VR experiences coming, maybe OBEs could be more common, which I think a lot of people might wonder then is having an OBE necessarily a bad thing? Does it have any sort of permanent impact on the brain, for example? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, like with so much technology now, we're kind of racing ahead with it, aren't we, without really knowing what any long-term consequences are.

Yeah, I think if you spend a lot of time in this kind of virtual world rather than the real world, I think, you know, it could have negative consequences. You know, virtual worlds can be more exciting, can't they, than the real world. And it's causing you to kind of dissociate from your body, I suppose. So there was a study that showed that even just using Zoom a lot and a lot of online remote meetings and things, again, where you're interacting with people, but not quite in the real world, that that can increase, oh, it's possible that that could increase something called depersonalization, which is a condition where you start to feel sort of detached and estranged from your own body and your own self, and it can even become chronic, it can become a psychiatric condition.

So we think that, you know, possibly that sort of condition might become more common, and that's not something that is a good thing. So, yeah, I think hours and hours of time spent in virtual worlds could have negative impacts on mental health. Does this chronic disassociation, is it hard to treat? It's really hard to treat. I was actually talking to some people with it last week from the charity called Unreal,

which is a UK charity for depersonalization. So we think possibly one in a hundred people have this. it's very distressing. It can last for years, for decades, and there isn't any good treatment for it. And oddly, given how common it is, so one in a hundred, that's the same kind of prevalence as schizophrenia, for example, a lot of even GPs and psychiatrists have barely heard of it. It's not part of medical training. It can occur kind of as its own disorder and go along with other things like anxiety and depression, strong link with trauma. And there isn't a good treatment for it. So the fact that, you know, some of aspects of modern life might be actually increasing the incidence of it, that that's quite worrying. So I think it's quite easy to tell if someone has this by putting them in a brain scanner. But I'm thinking if there's anyone listening who's spent quite a lot of time in virtual reality and they're wondering whether they have this disassociation or not. How can you tell if you have it? Yeah, I mean, when people have it, they say it's almost as though they're not present in their own life. They describe it as as though they're watching a film of themselves.

They're watching themselves in a movie or they're living in a dream. So, yeah, it's a feeling of sort of detachment from your own life, from your own body, from your own experience. It's not at all a pleasant thing. And you also get an experience that your emotions are kind of flattened. sort of numb. So a lot of people have it. You know, they go to the doctor, they get diagnosed with something else. The doctor's never heard of this. They don't even know that it's a thing. You know, sometimes I give talks on it and at the end people come up and say, yeah, I've had this for years. I didn't even know that had a name. I didn't know other people experienced it. It's a hard thing

to talk about and articulate, actually. But there is information, as I said, the charity unreal, if you Google that, there's a lot of information on their website. That's quite scary to be honest so i guess i really want to know like do out-of-body experiences have any evolutionary benefit at all or are they simply this quirk of the brain well sometimes they can be triggered um as i mentioned by something traumatic like a car accident or something very painful happening to you like a very difficult childbirth for a woman and in those cases we think perhaps there's an adaptive value in feeling like the experience is happening to somebody else. So if you're in a car accident, if you have that sense, oh, you're just kind of watching it happen to somebody else

rather than it happened to you. It's as though you're in one place and your body's in another place. That might almost help you survive it psychologically at the time. So it's possible that it has some benefits in that sense. But when it occurs, you know, to epilepsy or some kind of brain injury, we don't think there's any particular benefit from that. It's just really a byproduct of a part of the brain which isn't functioning as it should do. You know, to have a kind of healthy everyday experience of yourself and reality, a lot has to go right in the brain. You know, everything needs to work as it should do. And when things don't work as they should do, then you can have an experience that's very different to what most people

experience, I suppose. What do you find most exciting about the current research to do with out-of-body experiences? Well, because all of my research is focused on how our brain creates our sense of self, of who we are, how that relates to the body. So investigating out-of-body experiences can bring insights into that to understand. So the fact that we know the TPJ, when that doesn't function, causes an out-of-body experience. The kind of flip side of that is when it does function as it should, that is the area that actually underlies some of these, you know, fundamental aspects of our experience of ourselves,

you know, the feeling that we are a self that inhabits a body that relies on the TPJ working properly. But I've spoken about some kind of negative aspects, I suppose, of, you know, dissociation and virtual reality. But actually, virtual reality can also be used for benefits. So at the moment, we're exploring whether these kinds of virtual reality, these virtual outer body experiences might be used potentially as interventions in certain conditions, for example, in chronic pain. So I did a study a few years ago where we induced a virtual out of body experience and people with different kinds of chronic pain that's really hard to treat with any kind of medication

or other intervention. So when they even had just a two-minute out-of-body experience in virtual reality, the level of pain that they experienced reduced by almost 40%. And that's like taking a really good drug. And actually drugs don't work for their pain very well. So at the moment we're doing a study funded by versus arthritis, where we are trying to see how long-lasting these effects are. So if it only lasts for a couple of minutes, that's not really helpful.

If by doing this kind of virtual experience for a few minutes, that gives you a few hours of relief, then that actually does have, you know, potential as an intervention. So we're doing some research on that at the moment in my lab. That was Cognitive neuroscientist Dr Jane Aspel, head of the Self and Body Lab at Angler Ruskin University. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents as well as your preferred app store. You can, of course, also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth.

Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully check. choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes so you can feel

confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup. And right now, you can save $20 on your first delivery or pickup order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone. There's a moment when you start to wonder, what's the right next step? Not about changing who they are, just finding the right kind of support. Kingsley Manor, life stays expressive, connected, and full of character, shaped by people who have lived interesting lives and aren't finished yet. So it doesn't feel like a change. It feels like a continuation. Explore your options at kingsley Manor.org, a non-profit month-to-month senior community within the Front Porch family.