Accounts of out-of-body experiences — in which a conscious person sees his or her own body from a location outside the physical body — have been reported in clinical conditions that disturb brain function, such as near-death experiences, epileptic seizures, drug abuse, stroke, and certain psychiatric and neurological disorders. Last year, two research groups induced out-of-body experiences in healthy participants with virtual reality techniques. The experiments, described last August in studies by H. Henri Ehrsson and Olaf Blanke and colleagues in Science, demonstrate that out-of-body experiences, previously confined to the realms of psychiatry, fiction and the occult, occur when the normal processing of sensory information is disrupted. This research provides an important tool to understand how the feeling of self is generated by the brain.
Full story at Scientific American – when can we buy OBE-generators for recreational use?