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leaving, on command

In 2002, stimulating one spot in the brain reliably produced a full out-of-body experience, on and off, on command. Since then, ordinary volunteers have been given the same illusion using nothing but a synchronized video feed and touch — most drift toward feeling located behind their own body, and the drift breaks the moment the signals fall out of sync. That's solid: the felt sense of where "you" are isn't fixed, it's built. What's still open is harder — whether an out-of-body state ever picks up real information the senses didn't. The one purpose-built test of that, during cardiac arrest, came back empty-handed, but barely got the chance to look.