People who have spontaneous out-of-body experiences in everyday life show differences in how their brains integrate sensory information. In a rubber hand illusion experiment with 180 participants, those prone to out-of-body experiences did not show the typical fear response to a threat directed at the rubber hand when the brushing was asynchronous, unlike control participants who reacted more strongly during synchronous stimulation. This suggests that imprecise top-down tuning in multisensory integration, possibly through predictive coding mechanisms, may underlie aberrant self-consciousness even in nonclinical populations.
People who have had out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are more efficient at taking an external, third-person perspective on a novel perspective-taking task compared to people who have not had OBEs. They also report significantly higher levels of derealization—feeling alienated from their surroundings—but not higher levels of other anomalous body experiences, emotional numbing, or sensory recall anomalies. These results support a distinction between embodied dissociative experiences (like feeling unreal) and disembodied ones (like OBEs), with only the latter linked to enhanced exocentric perspective-taking. The findings suggest that OBEs may reflect a facilitated ability to adopt an external viewpoint, rather than a deficit.
People who report out-of-body experiences (OBEs) show more perceptual anomalies, particularly related to temporal-lobe instability and body-distortion processing, and are impaired at mentally transforming their own body. Two studies with university students found that 26% reported at least one OBE. OBEers scored higher on the Cardiff anomalous perception scale, and those with elevated temporal-lobe or body-distortion measures performed worse on a mental own-body transformation task. These results extend findings from epileptic patients to the general population, suggesting disrupted temporal-lobe and body-based processing underlies OBE-type experiences.