Supernatural Science

Out-of-body experiences commonly occur when people are very ill or suffer severe injuries. They are often reported as a feeling of the 'self' being outside the body, looking down on it. But what actually is an out-of-body experience, and what causes them? Jane Aspell is a senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University where she investigates this phenomenon and what is going on in the brain when people experience it. She even induces these experiences in healthy people, something we thought we would like to try on an unsuspecting member of the audience, as she explained to Chris Smith...

Jane -  People commonly associate them with near death experiences.  You have the idea that somebody is - that their self or their soul is leaving their body when they're on their death bed or in a hospital bed.  But scientists have looked at many people who've had out-of-body experiences to see if there's anything that unites them, if they have anything in common.  What they found is that there's a particular part of the brain which is not working properly in people who have out-of-body experiences.  It's a part of the brain which receives information from lots of different senses, about your body, and integrates them together.  So because that part of the brain is not functioning properly, you experience yourself outside of your body.

Chris -  There's a piece of research that was published a few years ago, a researcher in Switzerland called Olaf Blanke and I was fortunate when he discovered this to be able to talk to him.  He could induce these sensations in people by deactivating a certain region in their brain and he asked them, because they were doing this in people who were having brain surgery but were awake at the time.  All of the people said that they experienced a sort of shadow person who was themselves but a little bit behind into the side of themselves.  When he gave them something to take, they would say, "they're trying to get hold of it".  They couldn't really grapple with the fact that it was them who was reaching out to take something.  They experienced this other person trying to get hold of whatever he was offering them.

Jane -  Sounds really spooky, doesn't it?  I worked in Professor Blanke's lab for 4 years before coming to Cambridge and I met a patient who'd had this experience.  It's called feeling of a presence.  It sounds really spooky.  They feel like somebody is constantly behind them and always around about 1 metre behind them and usually, they can't see them.  It's just a feeling.  So, you might have had it if you walk down a street on your own in the night and you just sort of feel that someone is behind you, even though you can't hear it or see it.  So, these patients have this feeling all of the time.  And again, it's caused by a particular part of the brain which receives information from our body.  What seems to be happening is that usually, your brain should create a model of just one of you.  But what's happening in these patients is the brain is sort of duplicating that.  So, it's as though there are two of you and that other you is experienced as this presence.

Chris -  It's quite common though isn't it, when you get people actually describing these experiences, it's a very consistent and it's a very common description that they give.

Jane -  It's very consistent, yeah.  There's always the feeling of, the self is outside of the body, which is really hard to imagine. We take it for granted that we experience our self in our bodies, usually in our heads.  It might feel like your self is sort of behind your eyes.  But in these people, the self is always outside of the body and always above the body as well.  So, there's always an experience of elevation.  So yeah, exactly, the reports are very consistent across different people which is in keeping with this idea that it's the same brain region, it's the same abnormality which causes the problem in all people.

Chris -  Haven't some researchers like you attempted to find out whether or not people really are going out of their body by hiding things in operating theatres for example, in places you could only see if you were really having an out-of-body experience and then questioning people afterwards to see if they've spotted that you'd written, "Hello.  You're a liar" on the top of the light?  So that unless they had floated up to the ceiling and were looking down then they wouldn't report the words were there.

Jane -  Yes, exactly.  I think some scientists in South Hampton are involved in this.  So, they've got some people in an accident and emergency hospital to collaborate with them and they put these cards or pictures right very high up in the room where people are having a cardiac arrest, their heart is stopping, to see if they do go up there and they're able to report back what the picture was.  They started that a few years ago.  I haven't heard of any positive reports yet.  But you never know.

Chris -  Any questions from the audience.

Catherine -  My name is Catherine from Newmarket.  You laugh about a cardiac arrest having these out-of-body experiences, but I have experience as a patient, I have many experiences as a nurse and if this room was full of nurses, 80% of them would be able to tell you a story.  But going back to the cardiac arrests, sometimes they're successful believe it or not.  The people say that they were up in a corner, looking over themselves and there's no way they could make up what we did to them.  But they will tell you in detail what has happened to them.

Jane -  I'm sure it can be difficult to explain these cases.

Catherine -  I can't explain it.  I don't know.

Jane -  I imagine they're telling you something like, "While my heart had stopped, you pressed this button on that machine and then another person came in.." or whatever.  What's happening in an out-of-body experience is your brain is receiving this information about what's going on in the world and then it's somehow reconstructing it in a way so that you experience the room from a different perspective.  So, it could be that they hear a machine being switched on, they hear somebody walking into the room, and then that is integrated into their out-of-body experience.  And that's why they say that they saw those things, but actually, it could've been that they only heard them and then they experience them as though they saw them.  That's how I would try and explain it in a scientific way.

Chris -  Chris French...

Chris F. -  There's a lot of research on out-of-body experiences and a lot of research on near death experiences.  One of the kind of question that I would always raise here is that there are some people who claim that they can have out-of-body experiences more or less at will, by doing various kinds of mental exercises, meditation, etc.  Now, that would be very, very easy to test.  Nobody is doubting the experiences.  The experience of a near death experience can be incredibly profound.  It can be life transforming.  The experience definitely happens.  The question is, what is it?  Is it really a glimpse of some kind of afterlife or is it a very, very rich and powerful hallucination.  I would say the evidence very strongly supports the latter rather than the former.

Chris -  Has anyone else got any questions or experiences?

Naomi -  Naomi from Cambridge.  I've seen two different members of my family have hallucinations.  One was visual hallucinations - my sister when she had malaria.  Another one was my daughter when she was sleep-deprived and she had auditory hallucinations.  Having seen those both, I can believe anything.  Both people were completely convinced that something was happening, but it was obvious to the rest of us that it was just a hallucination.

Chris -  Chris French...

Chris F. -  There's a strong tendency for people to react very defensively.  If you say, "Well, maybe you were hallucinating" because what they equate that with is "you're saying I'm crazy!" and that's just not true at all.  We can all hallucinate under the right conditions.  Surveys show that typically, around about 20% of the population, people who don't need any kind of psychiatric care whatsoever will report having hallucinations of various kinds.

Chris -  Well, let's see if we can demonstrate some abnormal perceptions.  Ginny and Hannah, over to you...

Hannah -  So, Ginny is just prepping up our experimental table here.  And what she's got, is a white piece of cardboard that's standing up vertically on the table.  It's going to act as a barrier.  We've also got on the table a fake hand.  Now, who can be our little volunteer for this experiment?  There's a lot of keenness.  What's your name and how old are you?

Lottie -  I'm Lottie and I'm 11.

Ginny -  What I need you to do is sit down on that stool and then we're going to put both your hands on the table for me.  Now, we're going to make sure your left hand is behind the screen so you can't see it.  In the place where it kind of should be, I'm going to put the fake hand.  Then we're going to drape this shirt over you.

Hannah -  You can't see your left hand at the moment, can you?

Lottie -  No.

Hannah -  No and what's Ginny doing to your hand at the moment?

Lottie -  She's got some wooden sticks and is running them down my fingers.

Hannah -  You're looking now at the fake hand where she's also rubbing the chopsticks across the fingers.  So, she's doing exactly, she's mirroring the action on the fake and prosthetic hand and also, the guinea pig's real hand.  How is it starting to feel because you're just staring at the prosthetic hand now?  Is it quite mesmerizing?

Lottie -  It is.  It kind of feels like the prosthetic hand is my actual hand.

Hannah -  Really?  So, it's almost like your brain is starting to represent the fake hand as your own hand.  Ginny, in that case, do we want to do something else to the fake hand rather than just tickle it gently with chopsticks?  So, Ginny is now going to get a giant hammer!  Lottie's face there was priceless.  Lottie, how did that feel?  Have you recovered?

Lottie -  No.

Hannah -  What do you think just happened?

Lottie -  I kind of snapped back into reality.

Hannah -  Did you think that your hand was being hit by a hammer at some point?

Lottie -  Yes.

Hannah -  But you now realised...

Lottie -  It wasn't.  It was the prosthetic hand.

Hannah -  A big round of applause for Lottie.

(applause)

Hannah -  So, what on Earth was going on in Lottie's brain there, Ginny?

Ginny -  Our brains have to work out all the time, what is our body and what is not our body, what's the microphone you're holding, and all of that sort of thing.  What it does to do that is it combines different information it's getting from its senses.  So, most of the time, we can see our hands and we can also feel them.  So, if you see something being prodded and feel roughly the same thing, it's a pretty good guess that that's your hand that's being prodded.  So, what we were doing here is we were really confusing Lottie's brain by having her get the same feelings as what she could see happening on a hand that wasn't really hers.  That was tricking her brain.  It was making her brain think that that rubber hand was probably her hand because she could feel what was happening to it or at least that's what it seemed.  So then when I got out my large, heavy metal hammer, and thumped it down on this hand that she'd started having the feeling that it belonged to her, of course, poor Lottie jumped back, thinking I was about to hit her with a hammer.  I wasn't and it didn't hurt at all, did it?

Lottie -  Nope.

Ginny -  No.  So, it didn't actually hurt her but it gives you that moment of panic that something big and heavy is coming towards your body and it feels like it was her body even though it actually wasn't.  Jane, is that something similar that you do to induce these experiences in people?

Jane -  Yes.  So instead of having just a hand, what you could do is have a whole mannequin ,because you want people to experience that their self is somewhat different to their body.  So, the experiences I generate are not as strong as an out-of-body experience.  But usually, I would have somebody standing in a room.  They'd be wearing sort of virtual reality goggles like Oculus Rift or something.  A video camera would film them from behind.  The virtual reality goggles are connected to the video camera so then they suddenly see their double standing in front of them which is quite spooky.  Somebody has a long stick like you were using on the hand and then you tap the person's back with the stick so they can feel the tapping on their back and see the tapping on their double in front of them.  People start to experience then, that their body is actually over there where the virtual body is and that their self is outside of their physical body.  So, that's how I try and create out-of-body experiences in healthy people.  It's a little bit similar but it does...

Chris -  Did you hit them with a hammer?

Jane -  What some other researcher does is get a knife and it looks as though they're stabbing it and they also get a big fright like Lottie did.

Chris -  So, what do you learn by doing this?  It is exciting.  I have done that and it really is very strange to experience when you feel you're not in your own body, but why is this important, us understanding this?

Jane -  It's interesting to understand how an out-of-body experience works to start with, but my research in general is looking at how the brain creates a sense of self.  How on Earth does it generate a feeling of who you are, all these things that we take for granted that our self seems to be inside our body, inside our head, that we know this body is ours, we don't experience somebody else's body as ours?  So, how does a brain create this thing which is the most important thing in the world to us, our self?  So, it relates to that really and it's only by manipulating your sense of self in these kinds of experiments that you can try and work out how the brain creates the normal sense of self that we sort of take for granted.

Chris -  From Anglia Ruskin University, ladies and gentlemen, thank you, Jane Aspell.

Magic shows are hugely popular, but just how do magicians make us fall for tricks, over and over again? Gustav Kuhn, from Goldsmiths University of London, is a psychologist working on attention, and also a magician. He showed Chris Smith, Ginny Smith and the live audiences the secrets behind a couple of his tricks, and explain what they can tell us about how the brain works. 

Gustav -  I started off as a magician and my interest in magic really led me to study psychology and now, I study the science of magic.

Ginny -  If we look at science, are we going to ruin the fun of magic?

Gustav -  Well, I don't think so.  I mean, magic is very interesting in that magicians have developed really very powerful techniques to manipulate your perception.  By studying some of these techniques, we can actually work out quite a lot about how the brain works.

Ginny -  Can you show us a trick then?

Gustav -  Yeah.  I will show you a couple of tricks.

Ginny -  Okay, so I'm going to try and describe what you're doing for our radio audience.  So, you've got a Ping-Pong ball and you're throwing it up and down in one hand and it's gone.  You threw it up and I saw you catch it again, then you threw it again and I saw you catch it again then you threw it again and it disappeared.

Gustav -  So, this is known as the vanishing ball illusion.  It's actually is very, very simple.  How many of you saw a ball move up in the last throw?

Ginny -  That's at least a third of the audience think they saw it going up.

Gustav -  So about a third of the audience.  So, what's happening here is I've got a ball and I throw it up in the air a couple of times and on the final throw, I just pretend to throw it up, but in fact, it's actually held inside my hand.  Now, what's very interesting about this illusion is that most people actually experience a ball moving up and then disappearing somewhere sort of like between me and the ceiling even though the ball hasn't actually left my hand.

Ginny -  We're getting lots of nods from the audience, people who definitely thought they'd seen that ball.

Gustav -  And so, this is a really nice example to demonstrate that really what you're seeing is not necessarily the way the world is, but it's much more related to the way that you expect the world to be.  So because you're expecting the ball to be kind of like leaving the hand, that's why you actually experience the ball sort of like moving up.

Ginny -  And it is what you were doing with your hand and the fact that you actually followed it with your eyes, is that important as well?

Gustav -  Yes, so in magic, social cues are very important, so where I'm looking.  So, if I do the same illusion again, but this time, I'm just looking at the hand that's holding the ball, well the effectiveness of the illusion is really reduced.  What this shows us is that our brain is automatically picking up cues to predict what the world is going to be like in the future.  I can show you another example that sort of like highlights the importance of these social cues as well.

Ginny -  Who wants to see another trick?

Audience -  Me!

Ginny -  I think they'd like to see another one.

Gustav -  So, this is again is a very simple trick.  I've got a green lighter here on the table.

Ginny -  There's a green lighter on the table.  You're lighting it and clicked your fingers...oh, it's gone.  So, it was in your left hand.  You lit it.  You waved your right hand over the top of it then you opened your right hand.  It definitely wasn't in your right hand.  But then you also opened your left hand and it wasn't in that hand either.  Is that what everyone else saw?

Gustav -  So, can we just have a show of hands of how many of you saw how the lighter disappeared?

Ginny -  We've got a few hands.  What did you think?

Male -  I saw him dropping it.

Chris -  Gustav, you've been caught out.  You dropped it apparently.

Gustav -  I'll do exactly the same thing again.

Ginny -  Right.  So, you've lit the lighter, you waved your right hand and clicked, you've - oh, it's on your lap!

Gustav -  Now, how many of you saw how the lighter disappeared?

Ginny -  Okay, most of you saw it that time.

Gustav -  Yes, so the lighter was really just dropped.  This is not actually a real magic trick.  I'm kind of using misdirection to sort of demonstrate really how little of the environment that you're normally aware of.  So, what's happening is I'm picking up the lighter, I light it so we got a bright flame, and this flame will actually capture your attention.  I then pretend to take the flame with my hand and I'm using my social cues.  So, I'm using my gaze to distract your attention and move your attention from the lighter to my other hand.

Ginny -  So, we're all watching your right hand which you've been waving around over the flame and you've brought away from it.  So, we stopped looking at your left hand, the one that had the lighter in.

Gustav -  Yes.  So, no one's attending to the left hand holding the lighter.  I'm looking at the other hand, I'm snapping my fingers so you can hear a sound.  I'm moving it, hopefully, misdirecting your attention and therefore, preventing you from seeing the lighter drop.  One of the remarkable things about visual perception is that I'm kind of looking out here in this audience and I feel like I'm aware of most of the things that are actually going on around me.  Yet in actual fact, once we start probing our visual awareness, we realise that you're actually only aware of a really very small fraction of the information.  So, although you think you'd see things, in actual fact, most of the time, unless you're actually attending to them, you don't necessarily see them.  In a lot of our research, we use eye tracking that allows us to measure exactly where people are looking.  What's really remarkable there is that people can actually be looking at the lighter and yet, they still don't see it.  And of course, intuitively, you think that surely, if I'm looking at something, I should be able to see it.  But what a lot of these research is really telling us is that if your attention is being distracted, you just won't see it even if it's really right in front of your eyes.