It has been argued that disorders in body-ownership and aberrant experiences in self-consciousness are due to biases in multisensory integration. Here we examine whether such biases are also associated with spontaneous out-of-body experiences (OBEs) in a nonclinical population. One-hundred and 80 participants took part in a rubber hand illusion (RHI) experiment with synchronous and asynchronous...
Introduction: Hallucinations that involve shifts in the subjectively experienced location of the self, have been termed "out-of-body experiences" (OBEs). Early psychiatric accounts cast OBEs as a specific instance of depersonalisation and derealisation disorder (DPD-DR). However, during feelings of alienation and lack of body realism in DPD-DR the self is experienced within the physical body....
Introduction: The current study examined the presence of cortical hyperexcitability, in nonclinical hallucinators, reporting different forms of anomalous bodily experiences (ABEs). Groups reporting visual out-of-body experiences and nonvisual sensed-presence experiences were examined. It was hypothesised that only those hallucinators whose experiences contained visual elements would show...
It has been argued that hallucinations which appear to involve shifts in egocentric perspective (e.g., the out-of-body experience, OBE) reflect specific biases in exocentric perspective-taking processes. Via a newly devised perspective-taking task, we examined whether such biases in perspective-taking were present in relation to specific dissociative anomalous body experiences (ABE) - namely...
Individuals with no history of neurological or psychiatric illness can report hallucinatory Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs) and display elevated scores on measures of temporal-lobe dysfunction (Braithwaite et al., 2011). However, all previous investigations of such biases in non-clinical populations are based on indirect questionnaire measures. Here we present the first empirical investigation...
Recent findings from studies of epileptic patients and schizotypes have suggested that disruptions in multi-sensory integration processes may underlie a predisposition to report out-of-body experiences (OBEs: Blanke et al., 2004; Mohr et al., 2006). It has been argued that these disruptions lead to a breakdown in own-body processing and embodiment. Here we present two studies which provide the...