Credit: Pexels

Look with your mind’s eye and you may start visualizing different environments and perspectives.

But most probably, you’ll see what your brain expects you to see.

That, at least, is the less supernatural explanation for one of humanity’s strangest recurring experiences: the feeling that your consciousness has somehow slipped free of your body. Many call this an “out-of-body experience.”

The experiences themselves can be astonishingly convincing to the person who is going through it. But feeling that you have left your body and actually obtaining information from somewhere your eyes cannot see are two very different claims.

But if someone truly feels as though they have floated out of their body, can they actually see anything they shouldn’t be able to see?

A team led by Marina Weiler at the University of Virginia recently decided to put that claim to the test. The answer was ‘not really.’ Participants could not identify a hidden image better than chance.

But the experiment produced some outliers whose reports cannot be easily explained. Things got really, really weird.

The Ba Takes Flight

During an out-of-body experience (OBE), people typically report feeling as though their “self” has moved somewhere outside their physical body. Some describe hovering near the ceiling, looking down at themselves, while others feel as though they have traveled far away from their body. Scientists generally define the experience by this sense of disembodiment and, often, the impression of viewing the world from a distant or elevated perspective.

Of course, such experiences are much older than neuroscience.

The ba—an aspect of the person in ancient Egyptian belief, shown here as a human-headed bird—hovers above the mummified body. Although not an out-of-body experience in the modern sense, the image reflects the idea that part of a person could exist and move independently of the body. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Stories in which some part of a person leaves the body appear across ancient religious and spiritual traditions, including Egyptian and Buddhist traditions. Similar experiences have surfaced repeatedly in folklore and mystical accounts around the world. Later spiritualist movements gave the concept names such as “astral projection,” while modern accounts often overlap with near-death experiences, lucid dreams, and sleep paralysis.

Neuroscientists have increasingly treated OBEs as unusual but potentially explainable disturbances in the brain’s construction of the self. Experiments and clinical observations have linked them to disruptions in the systems that combine vision, touch, balance, and information about where the body sits in space. Researchers have even triggered OBE-like sensations by electrically stimulating parts of the brain involved in this integration.

A Seven-Meter Test for Remote Vision

The researchers recruited 21 people in Brazil affiliated with an institute that teaches techniques it says can help induce OBEs. They were hardly novices, reporting an average of 19 years practicing such techniques.

Participants spent 60 to 90 minutes trying to perceive a target about 7 meters (23 feet) away. In a closed third room, a laptop displayed one randomly selected image from a set of 100 objects, with its screen facing a wall. Neither the participants nor the researchers present during the session knew which image had been chosen.

Ten participants said they had an out-of-body experience during the session. Thirteen people, including several who described only an internal “mental screen,” gave researchers enough detail to compare their impressions with the hidden image.

That raised a practical problem. Suppose someone says they saw “something round, red and natural.” Does that count as a match for an apple? What about a tomato? Or a red ball?

Rather than have human judges make those calls, the researchers used a computer to compare the meaning of each participant’s description with descriptions of all 100 possible target images.

In effect, the system asked: Of these 100 objects, which one sounds most like what this person described?

If the participants were truly perceiving the hidden image, the correct target should have appeared near the top of that list again and again.

It didn’t.

In the 13 trials that could be analyzed, the actual hidden images ranked anywhere from 16th to 92nd out of 100 possibilities. None of the individual attempts stood out as statistically convincing, and when the researchers looked at the results as a whole, the participants performed no better than chance.

The team also checked whether its comparison method was capable of finding a real match. When the computer was given descriptions that genuinely fit the target images, it correctly pushed those targets toward the top of the rankings.

So the scoring system itself appeared to work.

Credit: PexelsThe Weird Part

The strange part emerged in interviews afterward.

Participant 7 spontaneously described one researcher sitting on the left at a computer while another sat farther back reading a book. Trial records showed that was correct. Participant 13 described one researcher on the right taking notes and another on the left at the computer. That also matched the researchers’ recorded positions.

But that was not part of the planned test.

Those observations were not predefined targets, were not scored using rules established beforehand, and were not subjected to statistical testing. The experiment therefore cannot say how improbable they were, and the observations cannot count as evidence for paranormal perception.

The authors treat them as anecdotes that might help design a better test next time. Future experiments, they suggest, could deliberately place distinctive people or objects in unseen rooms and decide beforehand exactly what would count as a match.

“We now have a specific idea that can be tested in future experiments, and that is exactly what science should do,” Weiler said.

For now, the study’s strongest result is also its least spooky one: when out-of-body vision faced a controlled test, it failed.

The study was published in the journal EXPLORE.