London - Those who talk of having an out-of-body experience often find their claims of a spiritual experience aremocked.
And now scientists have joined the sceptics, saying such events are nothing more than vivid hallucinations - and some of us are predisposed to them.
Researchers at the University of Birmingham claim they occur when “instabilities in the brain” cause people to become disorientated and lose all sense of where their body is.
Far from being a “funky, hippie, spiritual event”, they are “real neurophysiological occurrences”.
The study claimed that people with irregularities in the temporal lobes, which control memory and object recognition, are much more likely to “transform their own body position”.
This trick of the brain could explain why model Miranda Kerr felt an out-of-body experience while giving birth to her son Flynn. Earlier this week, Kerr, 28, who is in a relationship with actor Orlando Bloom, said: “I actually thought I was going to die at one point and left my body. I was looking down on myself. The pain was so intense.”
She is now likely to find herself classed in some scientific circles as an OBEr - after the abbreviation given to an out-of-body experience (OBE). Dr Jason Braithwaite, who led the latest study, said: “We studied 65 psychology students and we found OBErs had biases in body distortion and transformation.”
Volunteers who frequently experienced de ja vu, felt a limb did not belong to them or sometimes felt their body move while they were still were much more likely to feel out of body experiences.
Previous research has also pointed to practical causes.
In April, Kevin Nelson, Professor of Neurology at the University of Kentucky, argued that the condition could be attributed to disturbed dreams.
He found that those who had OBEs were more prone to suffering rapid eye movement (REM) intrusion, where people become paralysed before they are fully asleep.
Swiss neuroscientist Professor Olaf Blanke, a world authority on consciousness, claimed that such experiences are a result of temporary glitches in perception caused when the brain becomes confused.
During one experiment, volunteers became so immersed in the computer-generated landscape they were shown through a virtual reality visor that they tricked their brains into temporarily believing they occupied the body of a 3D computer-generated character.
The study by Dr Braithwaite, of Birmingham University’s Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre, is published in this month’s issue of Elsevier’s Cortex journal. - Daily Mail