A study designed to test whether people who report out-of-body experiences can actually perceive their surroundings from outside their bodies found no evidence that they can — with one striking exception that has researchers rethinking how to run the experiment.
Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine's Division of Perceptual Studies, publishing in the journal Explore, recruited 21 participants and asked them to try to identify a random object displayed on a laptop screen in a separate room, using only a reported out-of-body state to "view" it. Ten of the 21 participants said they experienced something resembling an out-of-body state during the trial, and 13 offered some description of the hidden object. On average, those descriptions were no more accurate than random guessing — the kind of null result common in tightly controlled perception research.
The twist came from two participants who, unprompted, described not the target object but the researchers themselves — accurately describing their positions and activities in a room the participants had no way to see. One described a researcher seated to the left at a laptop while a colleague sat farther back reading a book; another described a researcher on the right taking notes while a colleague worked at a computer on the left. Both descriptions matched what was actually happening at the time, according to the study team.
Lead researcher Marina Weiler said the finding does not amount to evidence for out-of-body perception, but suggests the experiment's design may have been testing the wrong thing: a static object on a screen may simply be less memorable, or less emotionally engaging, than a room full of people. "I hope this study encourages researchers to think creatively about how we test these experiences," Weiler said.
The Division of Perceptual Studies, established in the 1960s, has spent decades investigating reports of near-death experiences and similar phenomena that sit at the edge of mainstream psychology — publishing findings that are, by design, difficult to explain away and just as difficult to prove.