What is the difference between astral projection and obe

Dissociative disorders, particularly depersonalization-derealization disorder , can involve frequent feelings or episodes where you seem to be observing yourself from outside your body. Sleep paralysis , a temporary state of waking paralysis that occurs during REM sleep and often involves hallucinations, has also been noted as a possible cause of OBEs.

Research suggests many people who have OBEs with a near-death experience also experience sleep paralysis.

In addition, research suggests sleep-wake disturbances may contribute to dissociative symptoms, which can include a feeling of leaving your body. Other substances, including marijuana , ketamine , or hallucinogenic drugs, such as LSD , can also be a factor. In some cases, you might feel a bit dizzy or disoriented after. You might feel confused over what happened or wonder if you have a brain issue or mental health condition.

You might also not like the sensation of an OBE and worry about it happening again. You may have this experience once just before drifting off to sleep, for example, and never again. They may be able to help by ruling out serious conditions or offering some reassurance. But for centuries, many people have reported similar sensations of their consciousness leaving their body. OBEs appear to be more common with some conditions, including certain dissociative disorders and epilepsy.

Many people also report having an OBE during a near-death experience, including electric shock or injury. Dissociative identity disorder, previously known as multiple personality disorder, is a type of dissociative disorder.

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The motion correction did not exceed 1 mm. Images were then smoothed with a 10 mm full-width at half-maximum Gaussian filter. A fixed effects analysis was performed with data from each Run separately.

The blocks of ECE were compared with the rest blocks from the same Run. In the KVIQ, the participant scored an average of 4. Only when contemplating my own mortality ; T. Occasionally but voluntary. Sometimes late at night, I can play with perspective i. Also, sometimes, ordinary objects seem bizarre in the sense that all existence is bizarre ; T.

Always voluntary. I can make it feel like my body is going down into my bed ; T. Almost always this is voluntary … usually when I am bored in class. The participant reported being successful at beginning and ending her ECE on demand of the experimenter.

The experience for Run 1 began immediately and she began to see herself above her body rocking with her feet moving down and up as her head moved up and down as in bobbing in ocean waves. The second ECE Run was the most intense and involved the participant watching herself above her own body, spinning along the horizontal axis.

Neural activation patterns for each of these ECE Runs were analyzed separately with rest subtracted from the experience. Given the lack of significant difference between the results of each of the three Runs, all ECE Runs were combined into one analysis to increase power and observe brain regions that were concomitantly activated for each Run. Results are reported with a family wise error FWE very stringent correction for multiple comparisons at 0. Results are presented in Figure 1. The parietal and superior temporal activation taken together correspond to the temporal parietal junction.

Figure 1. Rendered image of significantly activated regions of the brain while the participant was having extra-corporeal experiences. Most significantly activated regions are lateralized to the left side and include the supplementary motor area F , the cerebellum B,D,E , the supramarginal gyrus D,F , the inferior temporal gyrus B,D,F , the middle and superior orbitofrontal gyri A,C,D,E.

The p -value was set at 0. Figure 2. Areas of reduced activity during the ECEs compared to rest. The visual cortex is particularly impacted. A Representation of the right side; B activity on the left. The p -value for this image was set at 0. Figure 3. Results from visualizing herself doing the same action she performed in the first ECE vs. A Bilateral lingual gyrus differences in activity and B the left cerebellar differences.

The second control task involved the participant imagining herself performing jumping jacks and then not imagining anything and just keeping her eyes closed waiting for the next start cue for the jumping jacks.

Results are presented in Figure 4. Figure 4. Results from visualizing herself performing jumping jacks compared to rest. The p -value for this image was set to 0. Another contrast of interest was the actual movement of the fingers to the thumb compared with imagining the same movement Figure 5.

There was significantly more activation during the imagining vs. Figure 5. There was significantly more activation during the visualization of finger movement compared to the actual movement.

Each letter represents a different view of the brain A anterior view, B posterior view, C right lateral view, D left lateral view, E ventral view, and F dorsal view. Figure 6. Motor areas significantly activated more during movement of her fingers to thumb compared with visualizing the same movement.

A Representation of the left primary motor cortex; B representation of the right cerebellum. The present experiment examined functional brain imaging patterns in a participant that reported being able, at will, to produce somatosensory sensations that are experienced as her body moving outside the boundaries of her physical body while remaining aware of her unmoving physical body.

The reported experience is similar to what is defined by Brugger as an out-of-body experience but without the feeling of being only outside of her body and without any of the emotional content typically reported in out-of-body experiences Brugger and Regard, The subjective description of the participant led us to use the term ECE throughout this manuscript to underline the difference between the phenomenon studied here and the more common definition of out-of-body experiences.

With these caveats in mind, we find that the brain functional changes associated with the reported ECE were different than those observed in motor imagery. The results suggest that the ECE reported here represents an unusual type of kinesthetic imagery that shares some features of previously described out-of-body experiences and some features of more typical motor imagery.

The ECE was reported as a mixture of visual imagery and kinesthetic imagery but the kinesthetic component was prominent as evidenced by the report of feeling dizzy when performing a rotational movement.

The prominence of kinesthetic experience over the visual experience is consistent with a strong bilateral deactivation of the lingual gyrus and cuneus encompassing the primary visual cortex.

Activations are mainly left-sided and involve the left SMA, supramarginal and posterior superior temporal gyri the last two overlap with the temporal parietal junction, which has been associated with out-of-body experiences. There are also left middle and superior orbital frontal gyri activations, structures often associated with action monitoring. The TPJ activation that was observed during the ECE is consistent with patient cases that report autoscopy and out-of-body experiences when the functional integrity of that area is altered Blanke et al.

Studies of experimentally induced altered body imagery have demonstrated that transcranial magnetic stimulation of the TPJ area can interfere with the ability of healthy individuals to imagine themselves in body orientations similar to out-of-body experiences Blanke et al. Electrical stimulation of the TPJ in epileptic patients also produces various sensations associated with out-of-body experience Blanke et al. Interestingly, several of the active clusters found in the present experiment during the ECE left supramarginal gyrus, left inferior temporal gyrus, left cerebellum correspond closely to clusters with mirror properties associated with action observation and execution that were identified by a recent meta-analysis Molenberghs et al.

The middle orbital frontal gyrus is a highly multimodal area that has been associated with performance monitoring and provides flexibility in response to selection based on ongoing feedback Elliott et al. The cluster that we observed in the left orbital frontal gyrus corresponds to cluster 6 of the K-6 solution described by Kahnt et al.

They reported functional connectivity with adjacent regions in the lateral prefrontal cortex as well as regions in the inferior parietal cortex and the lateral inferior temporal cortex; the latter two structures correspond to activations we observed during the ECE. The goal was to guide the participant toward taking a first-person perspective of her own experience and transposing it to a third-person perspective. The first-person perspective was associated with a bilateral increase in the lingual gyrus and another one in the left cerebellum: this may indicate that imagining herself included both a visual component and possibly a kinesthetic component even following a specific instruction to avoid this that was absent when visualizing using the third-person view.

The self-visualization was accompanied by a reduction in orbitofrontal activation that may indicate that visualizing herself was easier than taking the third-person view and required less monitoring of activity. Jackson et al. They found significantly more activity in the left sensory-motor cortex for first-person, during observation alone, and in the lingual gyrus for third-person perspective suggesting that perspective taking is associated with a different pattern of activation Jackson et al.

It is difficult to reconcile the higher lingual cortex activity observed with our participant taking the first-person view and the higher activity with the third-person perspective in Jackson et al. However, in that study, participants were only shown pictures corresponding to first- or third-person view of static limbs whereas our participant was instructed to visualize a whole body movement. A similar procedure contrasting first and third-person view was used in a study in which participants viewed hand movements from the two perspectives Lorey et al.

Both these studies reported activation differences when contrasting first- and third-person views. The pattern of differences that we observed was unsurprisingly quite different than in previous studies likely owing to the task differences and the number of participants Ruby and Decety, ; Lorey et al.

In the third condition, we examined the brain areas involved in a whole body motor imagery to examine if the ECE was similar to motor imagery in this participant. The first general observation is that in this condition, activations tended to be bilateral as opposed to mainly left-sided activations observed in the ECE. The second observation is that the activations when the participant was told to imagine doing jumping jacks were less extensive than for the ECE.

They included bilateral SMA extending into the paracentral lobule, bilateral inferior parietal lobule, right middle and superior temporal gyri, and left precentral gyrus. There was reduced activity in the cuneus bilaterally and in the superior orbital frontal gyrus also bilaterally. Activations of the SMA, inferior parietal lobule, and precentral gyrus have been reported in two previous studies of kinesthetic imagery using hand movements Guillot et al.

ECE and whole body motor imagery were both associated with a reduction in cuneus activation but less so for motor imagery suggesting that visual imagery was inhibited during both conditions. During motor imagery, there was less activity in the superior orbital frontal cortex whereas there was more activity in the middle and superior orbital frontal cortex during ECE.

This is suggestive of more motor monitoring during ECE than motor imagery. The last condition was an attempt to compare the activations associated with actual hand movements to imagining the same movement in this participant Guillot et al. In one of these studies, there were 13 participants selected on the basis of excellent motor imagery Guillot et al. The number of participants in both these studies achieved a greater statistical power and reported many more activations than in the present single-case study.

The finger movements used in the Guillot et al. The movement used in the Szameitat et al. Although it is not clear how comparable these studies are with the present observations, there are a number of concordant findings. First, real and imagined movements produce activations in the SMA. The activations reported by Szameitat et al.

It has been shown that visual imagery is reliant on the occipital lobe and the superior parietal lobule, as well as lateral premotor cortex, while kinesthetic imagery is more associated with motor areas and inferior parietal activity Guillot et al.

The ECE in the present study activated the left side of several areas associated with kinesthetic imagery and was associated with a strong deactivation of the visual cortex. This suggests that her experience really was a novel one, with a strong kinesthetic component.

This was a healthy young woman with no brain abnormalities, thus providing a window into the brain during non-pathological, self-elicited ECE. There are a number of limitations to the present study. Given that the participant spontaneously reported her experience assuming that it was a common occurrence and the detailed and unusual description of how she developed this ability, we are inclined to take her report at face value.

The private nature of imagery is common to most research in imagery including other imagery conditions in the present report although a number of control measures have been devised but they were not used here.

One example of such measures is the increase in heart rate and pulmonary ventilation during imagined actions Decety et al. Statistical power was obviously limited in this single-case study, which means that potentially several activations escaped detection.

This is the first study with a non-pathological participant who is able to elicit an ECE upon demand. Clearly, replication is required to ascertain if this pattern of activation is similar in other people who can have self-initiated ECE. The existence of such a case and its presentation raises the possibility that this phenomenon may have a significant incidence but unreported because people do not think this is exceptional.

Alternatively, the ability might be present in infancy but is lost without regular practice. This would be reminiscent of the discovery and eventual study of synesthesia that some researchers now hypothesized is more prevalent in young people or can be developed Deroy and Spence, ; Simner, Claude Messier and Andra M. Smith designed the experiment, collected the data, and wrote the manuscript. Andra M. Smith analyzed the MRI data and prepared the figures.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. We would like to thank Drs. Francine Malouin and Julien Doyon for helping with the visual and kinesthetic imagery questionnaire and Dr. Olaf Blanke for the perceptual aberration scale. Arzy, S. Duration and not strength of activation in temporo-parietal cortex positively correlates with schizotypy.

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