Home »  Browse News Briefs »  Out-of-body experience means I’m simply not feeling myself

I am standing in a plain, blue-curtained room in Stockholm having an out-of-body experience. In the space of a few minutes I am a 30-year-old female PhD student with dark hair and glasses and a shop dummy called François.

I think to myself: people normally have to take psychedelic drugs to induce this sort of effect. Either that, or suffer a near-death experience, and as far as I can tell I am feeling quite well — although I have to admit that I am not feeling myself. It is all very disturbing, and most disturbing of all when they threaten me with a knife; but more of that later.

My experience of not being myself has come courtesy of scientists at the Karolinska Institute, where they have devised an experiment to convince people that they inhabit a body other than their own.

An attempt to understand how people perceive their own bodies, the research has a range of potential applications, from improving robotics to the design of prosthetic limbs. It could also help psychiatric patients with a disturbed sense of self, including those with anorexia and bulimia, or even be used for confronting racial and sexual prejudice.

Normally the institute does the experiment with people who don’t know what is coming – “naive subjects”. I, however, have read about their work already and know what is going to happen, so the question is: can my mind be fooled into thinking that my body is not my own?

The experiment works like this. Special goggles are attached to my head, with small screens inside the eyepieces. Meanwhile, Valeria Petkova, the PhD student who is carrying out the research under the supervision of Henrik Ehrsson, is standing in front of me wearing a headpiece with a pair of cameras on top.

The picture from the cameras, which are pointing at me, is relayed via a wire to my goggles, which means that I see a stereoscopic image of myself from the point of view of someone standing in front of me. I look at this man in a blue suit and think: “He looks just like the bloke I saw in the mirror this morning.” But he is nothing to do with me.”

Then we shake hands; or rather, clasp hands and squeeze them rhythmically in time with a metronome. What it does to my head is very, very unsettling. I can see this hand where my hand normally is, and every time my brain says “squeeze”, I can see it squeezing the hand opposite, the one belonging to the bloke in the blue suit. That thumb pressing down on the man’s hand – that’s my thumb, surely? And those tendons in the wrist that I can see tensing – they are my tendons, aren’t they?

That is what my brain is telling me, anyway. But it is not my thumb, they are not my tendons: they are Valeria’s, and the last time I checked I was a male British journalist from Shepherds Bush in West London, not a neuroscience PhD student from Bulgaria.

Having had my fill of being Ms Petkova, I get to have a go at being François. He is a 6ft mannequin with a rippling torso, and a helmet on his head with twin cameras attached; part male demigod, part complete dork. This time the cameras are pointing down so that François is looking down his well-toned torso at his toes, and that is the image that I see in my goggles.

I look down at my toes too, with the result that what I see is not the familiar and frankly rather depressing sight of my less-than-perfect torso, but the mannequin’s impressive six-pack. It makes a pleasant change – although I cannot help noticing that François is somewhat lacking in the trouser department.

Ms Petkova takes a couple of pens, and simultaneously strokes my torso with one pen and the dummy’s with the other. That is not what I see in my goggles, however: all I see is the pen stroking the dummy’s torso, while I can feel the other pen stroking mine. What my brain tells me is that I can feel that pen stroking that rippling six-pack – even though intellectually I know that it is not.

Suddenly, she is drawing a knife across my stomach, and I give an involuntary gasp of shock. Half a second later I feel a complete fool, because not only did Ms Petkova warn me that she was going to produce the knife but I know that it was nowhere near my stomach, it was on the dummy’s. It just looked like where my stomach should be, and my brain reacted accordingly.

They all get fooled, apparently. In another experiment, an assistant draws the knife across the subject’s wrist while they clasp hands with Ms Petkova, while electrodes on the skin measure the body’s autonomic fear response. If he draws it across the subject’s wrist – not quite touching – but the subject thinks it is Ms Petkova’s wrist, then the body does not react; if he draws it across hers, but the subject thinks it is his or her own, then the body reacts as if it is under attack.

So perhaps I should not feel too much of a wimp. Anyway, it wasn’t really me, it was just a man who looked like me. I wasn’t even there.

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