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AkashicNET Research · EXPAND²

Out-of-Body Experiences: What EEG Can Tell Us

A sleep-lab study put a timestamp on unusual bodily experiences. A separate experiment asked whether participants could identify a hidden image. Here’s what each test measured and where its answer stops.

February EEG research revisited in November ·

01 · At a Glance

Two Questions, Two Tests

When Did It Happen?

An eye signal gives researchers a point in the EEG recording to compare with a participant’s later account.

What Could They See?

A blinded hidden-target test asks whether descriptions match the actual target better than plausible alternatives.

A report can be meaningful and precisely timed even when its explanation remains open.

02 · DISCERN

What the Studies Found

Campillo-Ferrer and Colleagues · 11 February 2026 Online

Observation: In a sleep lab, 35 participants underwent high-density EEG alongside eye, muscle and heart recordings. Meditation and light stimulation were used to facilitate unusual bodily experiences. Twenty participants reported 36 episodes, mostly during waking meditation but also across several sleep conditions.

Testimony: Of the 36 unusual bodily episodes, 10 involved feeling outside or above the body. Most of those 10 unfolded without visual content. Participants used a deliberate eye movement to mark when they noticed an unusual experience and described it in an interview afterwards.

Interpretation: An exploratory analysis pooling all 36 episodes found higher relative beta and gamma power and lower relative delta and theta power compared with the corresponding sleep or meditation baselines. The changes were strongest over temporal scalp regions. The study’s prediction about intermediate alpha activity did not hold consistently.

Hypothesis: Overlapping features of sleep and wakefulness may help explain some unusual bodily sensations. Unresolved: Whether the pattern distinguishes these episodes from ordinary arousal or eye and muscle artefacts, whether it is specific to OBEs and whether it replicates in other samples.

Original paper ↗ · PubMed record ↗

August Follow-Up: A bioRxiv preprint ↗ reanalysed the same 36 episodes and reported greater EEG signal complexity during unusual bodily experiences. Independent replication remains open.

Weiler and Colleagues · 12 August 2026 Online

Observation: In a separate study, 21 people attempted to perceive a concealed visual target. The primary rank test found no evidence of above-chance matching across the 13 analysable descriptions.

Testimony: Two participants spontaneously described researchers’ positions or activities in an adjacent room. The accounts matched session records and fell outside the planned target comparison. Unresolved: Whether a larger study with calibrated scoring and tightly controlled access could reliably detect a small effect.

Speculation boundary: EEG cannot show whether awareness left the body. The target study did not support above-chance matching under its conditions; it did not test every kind of OBE or settle survival after death.

Original paper ↗ · PubMed record ↗

03 · EXPAND² · DEEPEN

Search Broadly. Test One Claim at a Time.

In one line: Search the Atlas, trace the original, change one thing, measure what happens and repeat before updating the claim.

The Sandbox method keeps discovery, evidence and editorial review separate. The Levin-inspired addition is to draw the comparison first: decide what to change, what to measure and what result would make you revise the explanation. In Durant and colleagues’ planarian experiments, researchers perturbed bioelectric signalling and tested whether outcomes could be reversed. The transferable idea is the design, not the biological mechanism.

  1. AskDefine the claim before choosing a measure. Feeling located outside the body and identifying an unseen image are separate questions.
  2. Change One ThingCompare matched sleep stages and use a randomised, counterbalanced comparison of stimulation and sham. Keep meditation and instructions constant for that contrast.
  3. MeasureRecord EEG, eye movements and muscle activity. Use the same signal for unusual and ordinary comparison events. Collect immediate accounts before showing any targets or scores.
  4. Check AlternativesUse matched arousals and eye-movement controls. Have blinded raters score location, perspective and bodily sensations separately. For a hidden-target arm, calibrate scoring on known targets and keep target generation and the answer key separate.
  5. RepeatRegister exclusions, primary outcomes and analysis before collection. Report all eligible trials, misses and intervals. Test the same comparison in another sample and lab.

What would change the assessment? A replicated EEG contrast against matched arousals would support a more specific neural association. A failed artefact control would weaken it. A replicated above-chance target result would warrant checking ordinary information routes and the scoring process before considering broader explanations.

Michael Levin’s Figure-First Method ↗ · Sandbox Curation Methodology · Sign-in May Be Required ↗

AkashicNET × N2N × AkashicOMNI: Keep one source trail per paper, invite alternative explanations and record what would change the assessment. Treat testimony with care and obtain consent before sharing personal accounts.

Intellectual Honesty in Practice

Philosopher Thomas Metzinger argues that science and secular spiritual practice can share a commitment to intellectual honesty. In OBE research, that means recording what someone experienced in their own terms, asking what the measurements can establish and saying what would make us revise an explanation. Metzinger’s essay on spirituality and intellectual honesty ↗

In the sleep lab, the eye signal marked when someone noticed an experience. The EEG comparison pooled several kinds of experience, so a separate comparison of altered self-location with ordinary arousal and other unusual bodily sensations would test how specific the pattern is.

Related Examples From ICPR 2024

Animal Dreaming. David M. Peña-Guzmán’s When Animals Dream brings together behavioural and neuroscientific evidence with philosophy. It raises a question that also matters for sleep-lab OBE research. What can physiology and behaviour tell us about an experience when a verbal report is unavailable? Princeton University Press ↗ · Overthink, with Ellie Anderson and David Peña-Guzmán ↗

Plant Intelligence. Tony Trewavas discusses plant signalling and stress priming in terms of communication, learning and memory. A testable question is whether prior exposure changes a plant’s later response under matched conditions. That comparison can measure a lasting effect of exposure. Subjective experience would require different evidence. Trewavas’s overview ↗ · Mallatt and colleagues’ critical review ↗

Sassafras and MDMA. Sassafras oil can contain safrole, one of several possible precursors to synthetic MDMA. Whether a particular batch used a plant-derived precursor is a question of supply-chain provenance. Whether participants experience kinship with a plant is a question about the meaning of their experience. European Union Drugs Agency profile ↗

Non-Human Personhood. Graham Harvey uses ‘animism’ as a scholarly term for ways of relating respectfully to a world that includes other-than-human persons. The term covers diverse perspectives. When discussing a specific Indigenous tradition, identify the community and prioritise how its members describe their own relationships and responsibilities. Harvey’s essay on animism and ecology ↗

Health in Kamëntsá Cosmology. A slide from the Kamëntsá session describes health as a harmonious relationship with nature, other beings and ourselves. This account gives a specific example of how a community can frame healing through relationships. The conference programme credits Taita Juan Bautista Agreda’s presentation, Healing, Ancestral Legacy of Our Elders. OPEN Foundation programme ↗

Yagé and Biajiy. A companion slide gives Biajiy as the Kamëntsá term for yagé and glosses it as ‘spiritual journey’. It describes healing of body, mind and spirit through relationship with Mother Earth. The spelling and gloss follow the conference slide. ICPR session listing ↗

The ICPR 2024 programme lists Metzinger’s talk on intellectual honesty, Peña-Guzmán’s The Psychedelic Animal and Laura Pustarfi and Keith Williams’s talk on kinship with plants and fungi in psychedelic therapy.

ICPR 2024 · Research Context

Language and the Sense of Self

Four slides from ICPR 2024 in Haarlem bring together a historical argument about language, two first-person accounts of neurological injury and a proposed mapping of altered-state questionnaire items. They suggest a question for OBE research. When the sense of self changes, what changes in inner speech, time, bodily boundaries and the felt location of awareness? ICPR 2024 programme ↗

William James · Language Across the Brain

In his discussion of aphasia, James described how damage to particular regions can disrupt particular language abilities and argued that using language draws on multiple parts of the brain. The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1, p. 56 (1890) ↗

Lauren Marks · Time and Connection

After a ruptured aneurysm left her with aphasia, Marks recalls being absorbed in the present, paying little attention to her past or future and feeling deeply connected to her surroundings. A Stitch of Time (2017) ↗

Jill Bolte Taylor · Bodily Boundaries

Taylor recalls her inner chatter fading during a stroke and having difficulty sensing where her body ended and the world began. The two memoirs describe what these changes felt like. Whether changes in language contributed to the shifts in time and bodily boundaries remains open. My Stroke of Insight ↗ · Taylor’s TED talk ↗

What the Chakra Chart Counts

The conference slide groups items from the Five-Dimensional Altered States of Consciousness questionnaire (5D-ASC) under seven chakra categories. The bars count questionnaire items assigned to each category. The underlying questionnaire records subjective experiences. The slide’s presenter, assignment rules and any validation of the chakra mapping remain unverified. Psychometric study of the questionnaire ↗

Approximate Item Counts From the Slide
ChakraItems
Crown27
Ajna26
Throat17
Heart3
Solar6
Sacral4
Root10

Counts estimated from the photographed bars.

How to Code OBE Reports

Record felt unity, blurred body boundaries, felt location outside the body and a shifted visual viewpoint as separate features. Also record changes in inner speech and time when the person describes them. This lets researchers test which features occur together while retaining the person’s own account. A separate hidden-target comparison tests whether a description matches a concealed image. Blanke on OBE features ↗ · Questionnaire items on unity, bodily boundaries and disembodiment ↗

Research Follow-up · 14 November 2026

When Sleep and Wake Signals Overlap

A 13 November experiment in mice stimulated vagal sensory neurons. The animals showed slow, non-REM-like EEG alongside increased activity in a wake-associated brain region. This gives human researchers a reason to track more than one physiological marker. The study did not examine out-of-body perception or establish what the animals experienced.

Read the AKN24 report and its evidence notes ↗

04 · Source Discovery

Search the Source Atlas

The search runs automatically across all 158 source families in the 2026-11-09 directory snapshot. It checks names, categories and roles. A match is a lead; it does not mean an article has been retrieved or reviewed.

16 of 158 families match. Clear the search to browse the full directory.

05 · Provenance

Sources and Review Limits

This review draws on the February EEG paper, the August preprint using the same EEG recordings, the hidden-target study and ScienceAlert’s 12 November coverage. The conclusions are based on published analyses. The Atlas provides leads for further review.

Big Question 001 · Consciousness Beyond the Individual remains unresolved.

v0.17.0 · Evidence Intelligence Beta · PUBLISHED PRE-RELEASE
Project release published 27 September 2026
Evidence Intelligence Beta published · Review-only scope · Release context →