There Is No Evidence of a Neural Explanation for Out-of-Body Experiences

When neuroscientists or the mainstream press attempt to suggest natural explanations for near-death experiences or out-of-body experiences, we often get some bad examples of misstatements and inaccuracies. I discussed some of these misstatements and inaccuracies in my post "Misleading Claims in Attempts to Naturally Explain Near-Death Experiences and Out-of-Body Experiences." There was in a recent press article another case of a neuroscientist misspeaking about out-of-body experiences, claiming that neuroscientists have some understanding of what causes them. There is no mention of any new research, just a reference to one of the papers below. I will discuss below some of the main papers cited by neuroscientists claiming some evidence of a neural explanation for out-of-body experiences, and I will explain why they fail to show such a thing. 

But first let me note that neuroscientists speaking on such a topic typically mislead us about the incidence of out-of-body experiences. For example, the neuroscientist mentioned above quotes an estimate that 5% of the population have out-of-body experiences, citing Susan Blackmore. But according to the paper here, "For example, from a selection of 321 individuals on the electoral register, 12% of respondents identified that they had experienced at least one OBE (Blackmore, 1984)." Below is a graph from page 185 of a paper on this topic, the paper "Out-of-Body Experiences" by Carlos S. Alvarado. 

Surveys of the general public have found 10% having out-of-body experiences; surveys of students have found 25% having out-of-body experiences; and surveys of parapsychology groups have found 48% of the persons reporting out-of-body experiences. 

As another preliminary, let me mention the unreliability of second-hand accounts of unusual experiences.  I may put accounts of unusual experiences in three categories. 

• Lowest quality: accounts that are entirely second-hand, without including any quotations from the person having the experience, particularly if such accounts are responses to questions not quoted, which may have been leading questions. 
• Medium-low quality: accounts that are second-hand, but include fragmentary quotations of words or phrases used by the person having the experience (with the quality being low not medium if the answers were responses to leading questions). 
• High quality: accounts consisting of paragraphs or contiguous sentences stated by an observer,  which were not responses to leading questions.  

Here is an imaginary example of some very low-quality evidence, one in which we have a leading question in the middle:

Dr. Fictional: Here try on these special "wrong prescription" glasses that are for people three times more nearsighted than you.

Miss Hypothetical: Oh my goodness! My perception is all scrambled! 

Dr. Fictional: So is it kind of like you're out of your body?

Miss Hypothetical: Well, hmm, I guess you might say it's a bit like being out of my body.

Dr. Fictional: Okay, I'm recording you said it was "like being out of my body." 

Below are some of the main papers cited by neuroscientists claiming a neural explanation for out-of-body experiences.

• "The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences."  This paper has an inaccurate title, as nothing like an like out-of-body experiences was induced. The paper describes some artificial hi-tech setup in which people wearing goggles like virtual reality goggles watch video footage of their body produced by a video camera behind them. Anyone wearing such goggles would know he was experiencing some virtual reality setup, and such an experience would not match those reported by those having out-of-body experiences. The paper does nothing to show any neural explanation for out-of-body experiences. 
• "Out‐of‐body experience and autoscopy of neurological origin." This 2004 paper cites six cases of people with some kind of neurological problem, usually partial seizures, but in one case migraine headaches. The paper tries to get us to believe that these six people had out-of-body experiences. Problematically, we fail to get any first-hand full-sentence accounts from these people consisting of quotes that are one or more sentences long. The accounts are second-hand accounts of their experiences, made by the paper authors, who may have been motivated to make the accounts sound like out-of-body experiences. We get mere sentence fragment quotations from the subjects. In general, second-hand accounts of someone else's unusual psychic experiences are not reliable. Although the authors claim that four of these supposed out-of-body experiences were caused by partial seizures, we have no way of knowing whether that it is correct. We have no way of knowing whether the experiences reported were things that took place during any medical incident such as a seizure. Since out-of-body experiences are extremely common, and since partial seizures are also common (occurring to about 1% of the population), a few reports that might be out-of-body experiences coming from people who sometimes suffer from partial seizures does nothing to show that the partial seizures caused the out-of-body experience. The only reliable way to verify that an out-of-body experience might be caused by partial seizure would be to get something like a video of someone describing an out-of-body experience while they were hooked up to an EEG machine that showed brain waves that characterize a partial seizure. The authors have done no such thing. The authors failed to do anything to show that the supposed out-of-body experiences occurred while the partial seizures occurred. 
• "Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions." This 2002 paper has some quotes by a subject in whom the authors had brain-zapped with electricity, by inserting electrodes in her brain. The authors have attempted to portray this as evidence of an artificially induced out-of-body experience. But the only sentence that the paper quotes from the subject is one that does not indicate a full out-of-body experience. That sentence is this: "I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk." That sounds like some weird electricity-induced perception anomaly that is not properly described as an out-of-body experience. During an out-of-body experience a person will typically report leaving his body and seeing his entire body (not just the legs and lower trunk) from outside of the body. Eager to report some experimental induction of an out-of-body experience, our authors seem to have taken some account that does not match those of out-of-body experiences, and called that an out-of-body experience. The authors make this claim: "Two further stimulations induced the same sensation, which included an instantaneous feeling of 'lightness' and 'floating' about two metres above the bed, close to the ceiling." Since this is not an actual full-sentence quote from the subject, it has very little value as evidence. A second-hand account of a person's weird experience during brain zapping (by some other person who did not have that experience) is pretty worthless as evidence. What would we have read from a transcript of what the subject said, one including any questions the subject was asked? We have no idea. 
• "The Out-of-Body Experience: Disturbed Self-Processing at the Temporo-Parietal Junction."  The authors of this 2005 paper cause us to lose confidence in their credibility on this topic when they state, "OBEs have been observed predominantly in patients with epilepsy and migraine." This statement is not at all correct. The authors try to justify it by saying this as their next sentence: "Thus, Lippman (1953) reported two migraine patients with OBEs, and Green (1968) reported that 11% of the OBE subjects that participated in her survey suffered from migraine headaches." Any person who seriously studied out-of-body experiences would have found out that surveys report them occurring in significant fractions of the human population, and might realize the folly of trying to justify a claim that out-of-body experiences are caused mainly by migraines or epilepsy by citing a mere two patients having migraines and out-of-body experiences. And anyone writing carefully would have realized the folly of trying to justify a claim that most out-of-body experiences are produced by migraines or epilepsy by citing some person claiming that merely 11% of some group of people having out-of-body experiences had migraines. Trying to claim that out-of-body experiences are largely caused by migraine headaches makes no sense. In a book about near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences (OBEs), Dr. Peter Fenwick states, "A prominent feature of OBEs is that pain is entirely absent." But since migraine headaches are episodes of intense pain, it makes no sense to claim they are the cause of painless out-of-body experiences. The paper presents no original reports or original experimental research, and does nothing substantive to back up a claim that out-of-body experiences are caused by "disturbed self-processing at the tempero-parietal junction." The Figure 3 we see in the paper (a brain image based on scans of only three subjects) will seem very laughable to anyone familiar with the requirements for robust evidence in brain scanning correlation experiments, which is an absolute minimum of 15 subjects per study group and the following of a detailed, careful blinding protocol. In fact, now experts tell us that thousands of subjects are needed for reliable results in brain scan studies trying to establish correlations. Scientists have no understanding of how a sense of self could possibly arise from neural activity,  so anyone talking about a "disturbed self-processing at the tempero-parietal junction" is simply engaging in empty jargon-decorated hand waving. 
•  "Voluntary out-of-body experience: an fMRI study." This 2014 paper documents an fMRI brain scan of a woman who claimed to be able to have an out-of-body experiences at will.  Nothing unusual is reported in the fMRI results.  We have one of those brain scan visuals that show particular parts of the brain in bright colors. But this means nothing, because it is well known that innumerable neuroscientists show such visuals when they do fMRI scans showing only differences of only about 1 part in 200 or 1 part in 500. The authors report no brain pathology in the individual, and don't report getting anything that they don't see from a typical brain scan.  
• "Mind’s Eye: a Case of Out-of-Body Experiences": We have a case report of a woman claiming 3 out-of-body experiences in the past six months during nighttime awakenings. She gives this account: “I see myself as if I was from an airplane and looking down at a distance of about five feet. I feel split and I see myself down. I have my body down, I’m not in my body, I’m out of my body. My mind sees my body, I see the shape of my body. The part of mine that is over…it seems strange to me looks like an angel, an entity. I see the body there but I’m like air…”.  The authors refer to these accounts as "hallucinatory experiences," but do nothing to back up such claims. Their explanation is a feeble one. They state, "The interesting aspect of this case report is the occurrence of OBEs, likely triggered by the frequent night awakenings." There is no reason why waking up at night would cause someone to have an experience of being out of their body.  The authors offer nothing but a little speculative jargon as an explanation, stating this: "It is possible that this situation could facilitate hallucinatory experiences of self as a result of two components: (1) insufficient neurofunctional integration and lack of binding information from different neural networks responsible for the perception of one’s own body as an integral part of psychophysical self-awareness, and (2) the instability of psychophysiological arousal with rebound both on the maintenance of sleep and mental activity."  Such a statement is merely empty hand-waving. They fail to offer any evidence of any pathology or unusual brain state that could explain the reported out-of-body experiences. 
• "Altered neural dynamics in people who report spontaneous out of body experiences."  This 2019 study got 551 paper to fill in a questionnaire about out-of-body experiences, and found that 24% of them reported at least one out-of-body experience. The authors got EEG readings from 19 people who claimed to have an out-of-body experience, and 21 people who did not make such a claim. The paper provides no good evidence of any different neural dynamics in the subjects who had an out-of-body experience, and its title is inaccurate. Referring to some tiny difference involving less than a second, the authors claim "amplitude of the visual P1 ERP deflection and consistency of alpha-band phase locking were significantly reduced in the participants who had had an OBE," but that "we did not find any group differences in resting state power or in visually induced gamma oscillations. "  The reported difference is a minuscule difference that anyone could have found when comparing brain waves between any two random groups of twenty subjects, and trying to find some difference between them. Look at Figure 2 of the paper, which shows the supposed differences. It shows two little one-second blips (one from the OBE group, the other from the control group), and the blips are almost exactly the same shape. The authors should have been ashamed to have passed that off as evidence of "altered neural dynamics." Ditto for figures 3, 4 and 5. No study like this should be taken seriously unless (1) is a pre-registered stating some specific hypothesis to be tested; and (2) is a study that follows a rigorous blinding protocol, so that people analyzing the EEG waves do not know from which group a particular set of waves comes from.  This study was not a pre-registered study, and did not follow any blinding protocol. No robust evidence has been found of brain differences between the two groups.   
• "Astral Projection: A Strange Out-of-Body Experience in Dissociative Disorder." We have here a 2021 paper mentioning a report by a teenager of an out-of-body experience. The paper provides no evidence of any brain pathology. We read that "his medical history was negative for symptoms of epilepsy, migraine, syncope, cerebrovascular accident, neurological deficit." We read that "Electroencephalography (EEG) did not reveal any abnormality," and that a "CT scan of the brain did not show any pathological findings." The teenager was from a troubled family, having no mother and a harsh father, and had run away from home several times. Apparently based on his report of having had an out-of-body experience, some psychiatrist labeled the teenager as having "dissociative identity disorder and dissociative fugue." Excluding a vague one-sentence reference to the patient "assuming the identity" of some 18-year-old electrician (which may or may not be a reference to a mere lie by a runaway), no evidence is given for this diagnosis other than the teenager's report of a very  common psychic experience: an out-of-body experience. A test indicated "no psychotic features." No evidence has been provided for any neural or psychological cause for the reported out-of-body experience. The paper provides no clear and sound-seeming evidence to back up the claim that the teenager had "dissociative identity disorder."
• "Neurophenomenology of Out-of-Body ExperiencesI Induced by Hypnotic Suggestions." In this study 15 people were either asked to imagine having an out-of-body experience, or were hypnotized and told they were having an out-of-body experience. EEG readings were taken of the subject's brain waves while this occurred, but the study reports a "lack of significant EEG differences" between the subjects that were hypnotized and not-hypnotized. Since no convincing evidence is given that any of these people actually had an out-of-body experience, and since no comparison was made between the EEG readings and those of control subjects, no evidence is actually provided of a "neurophenomology of out-of-body experiences." The authors have done nothing to back up their claim that "our results show that OBEs can be easily inducible in hypnosis." It is well-known that people are extremely suggestible under hypnosis, so mere OBE claims of hypnotized subjects told to have an out-of-body experience is no evidence that such experiences occurred to such persons. 
• "Out-of-body experience, heautoscopy, and autoscopic hallucination of neurological originImplications for neurocognitive mechanisms of corporealawareness and self consciousness."  This is a review article case that has a graph (Figure 3B) trying to give you the impression that large fractions of people experiencing out-of-body experiences have brain lesions. The graph is misleading, and the vast majority of people having out-of-body experiences have no such lesions. The graph was made using 11 cases of out-of-body experiences that the authors have cherry-picked, presumably with an interest in finding people with brain lesions who reported out-of-body experiences. This is cherry-picking, because there are many thousands of documented cases of out-of-body experiences reported by people without brain lesions.  
• "Visualizing Out-of-Body Experience in the Brain." The authors claim that they produced an out-of-body experience by zapping someone's brain with electrodes that had been implanted in his brain to treat tinnitus. The claim is not well-established, as the authors have not provided any quotes from the subject which sound like something someone would say when having an out-of-body experience. The authors state, "His perception of disembodiment always involved a location about 50 cm behind his body and off to the left."  50 centimeters is about 19 inches, about an arm's length. In out-of-body experiences, people don't report being an arm's length behind their body, but typically report seeing their body from meters above it, often reporting a viewpoint of being on the ceiling. Since the perceptual experience of this paper's subject was produced through brain zapping of a type not done to people having out-of-body experiences, and since we have no testimony from the subject matching that of typical out-of-body experiences, the paper does nothing to help show a neural basis for out-of-body experiences. 
• "Linking Out-of-Body Experience and Self Processing to Mental Own-Body Imagery at the Temporoparietal Junction."  We hear that eleven subjects "were asked to make right–left judgments about a schematic human figure after having imagined themselves to be in the body position of the figure and to have its visuospatial perspective."  We have the most absurd assertion that the "volunteers’ transformation of their own bodies into the body position of the front-facing figures (as compared with the back-facing figures) mentally simulates the body position and the visuospatial perspective that is experienced during OBEs." No, the weird little exercise described did not do anything to simulate what is experienced during out-of-body experiences. The brain state analytics that follow in the paper are irrelevant, because whatever imagination was occurring in the subjects does not watch the mental experiences of people having out-of-body experiences. 
• "Out of body experiences and their neural basis."  This article presents no original research, and fails to discuss any good evidence for a neural basis for such experiences. The author says "out of body experiences occur in about 10% of the population," and then claims "the importance of vestibular and multisensory mechanisms in out of body experiences was underlined by their occurrence in several patients with such experiences," apparently failing to see the absurdity of trying to explain something occurring to many millions of people by claiming that "several" of such people had some "vestibular" issue (which is like trying to show that space travel is the cause of heart disease by mentioning that "several" astronauts had heart disease). Then we have a reference to the faulty "Out‐of‐body experience and autoscopy of neurological origin" discussed above. 
• "The body unbound: Vestibular–motor hallucinations and out-of-body experiences":  This study merely consisted of gathering and analyzing questionnaire data. The authors then do some elaborate statistical rigmarole (including "a series of stepwise multiple regression analyses") designed to show their data is compatible with speculations about neural causes for out-of-body experiences. Since the study is not a pre-registered study, and did not follow any blinding protocol, it seems yet another case of the extremely wide phenomenon of scientists playing "make up your procedure as you go along" and "keep torturing the data until it confesses." The authors knew nothing about the brain states of the people who answered their questions.  They mainly just claim "consistency" with speculation of other scientists, rather than supporting evidence. 
• "Out-of-Body Experiences in Schizophrenia: A Questionnaire Study." This survey study found "when the OBEs are distinguished on the basis of the descriptions given, into typical OBEs, in which the person seems to leave the body, and pseudo-OBEs, which include all sorts of other experiences, then...it seems that the schizophrenics do not have significantly more OBEs than do control subjects and that having OBEs is not related to either perceptual distortions or to the symptoms of schizophrenia."
• "Cognitive correlates of the spontaneous out-of-body experience (OBE) in the psychologically normal population: Evidence for an increased role of temporal-lobe instability, body-distortion processing, and impairments in own-body transformations."  This was a survey study that asked students about whether they had ever had an out-an-body experience, and also asked questions designed to elicit evidence that the users might be hallucination-prone or have some brain problem. Subjects were given a CAPS survey that can supposedly find evidence of "temporal love instability." The authors claim to have found that those reporting out-of-body experiences scored higher on this CAPS survey than control subjects having no out-of-body experiences, and higher on an LHSH survey designed to find evidence of hallucinations. Unfortunately in section 3.3 we learn that the number of surveyed subjects having real out-of-body experiences was a mere 6. First we are told that "of the 63 participants who took part in this study, 17 of these (26%) claimed to have experienced at least one OBE at some point in their life," but then we are told "Of the OBE group, only six (35%) reported seeing their own body or some form of body representation of the physical self during the OBE, with all the others reporting only the shift in perspective (either visually, as a bodily sensation, or both)." Is six subjects an adequate sample size from which to be judging a greater tendency of any sort? Certainly not. If the authors had done a sample size calculation like good experimental scientists, they would have have found their relevant sample size (six subjects) was way too small to produce any reliable result on a survey of this type; but they failed to do such a calculation. The same shortfall is a problem that occurs in a very large fraction of all neuroscience and psychology studies. Because a way-too-small study group size was used (only six subjects), the authors have not provided any reliable evidence of anything.  
• "Out-of-Body Experiences, Dreams, and REM Sleep." The authors "tested an explanatory model of OBEs as a form of dreaming." Their Study 1 is irrelevant, involving only a tiny sample set from five people. Their Study 2 analyzed questionnaires from 604 subjects, 136 were readers of a newsletter about lucid dreaming research. After statistical fiddling involving multiple regression, the authors report "Subjects in the current study who reported lucid dreams were 158% more likely to report OBEs than subjects who did not report lucid dreams." But since their subject pool had so many people interested in lucid dreaming (those 136 people who were readers of a newsletter on the subject), we did not have a random sample of the public from which anything can be reliably deduced. And what question was asked to judge whether someone had an out-of-body experience? We don't know, because the authors didn't tell us, and didn't publish their questionnaire. As a result, we can't tell whether this research showed anything. The idea that out-of-body experiences can be explained as dreaming is not credible, and cannot explain the most prominent examples of such experiences, occurring during close brushes with death when people are not dreaming.  
• "A putative implication for fronto-parietal connectivity in out-of-body experiences."  We have a study in which some task is given to both people who had an out-of-body experience and those who did not. But the number of subjects who did this task and are claimed as having an out-of-body experience is only eleven subjects,  too small a study group size for any kind of reliable result. The study lists the reports of these eleven people, and several of the reports should have been excluded because their accounts don't sound like typical out-of-body experiences (with no reported perception of the body from outside of the body). But the authors have failed to exclude these subjects from their pool of 11 people supposedly reporting out-of-body experiences. The data gathered from this poorly-designed study does nothing to justify the weak claim of its authors that their data "suggests that OBEs might be mediated by a functional disconnection of information between the PFC and the TPJ." The authors have presented no good evidence that "fronto-parietal connectivity" has anything to do with out-of-body experiences. The authors were looking for some performance difference in some weird task they devised, but do not report any convincing evidence of such a difference (data-dredging their way to some little difference somewhere of only p < .03, which is very unimpressive with a study group size this small). 
• "Out-of-body experiences associated with seizures." The paper does not attempt to suggest seizures are an explanation for out-of-body experiences (which almost all occur in people who do not have epilepsy). The paper finds reports of previous out-of-body experiences in 7 out of 100 people having seizures.  We read, "The finding that 6 of the 7 patients who reported out-of-body experiences associated with seizures described them as occurring only once or twice many years ago raises the question of whether those experiences were truly seizure-related."
• "Surge of neurophysiological coupling and connectivity of gamma oscillations in the dying human brain." Here we have another misleading use of the word "surge" in a science paper headline, a paper co-authored by one of the researchers (Jimo Borjigin) who authored the equally mistitled rat study "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain."  The paper merely describes a little brain activity in two people after a respirator was turned off, with no evidence of brain activity continuing for more than a few seconds after the heart has stopped. The lines on brain waves charts go up and down, and there are seven or so channels of brain waves (including a gamma channel); so at any second you can usually find some little line going up and call that a "surge," although at the same time other lines (representing other brain wave channels) will probably be going down. Using the term "surge" in the title of the paper was misleading, rather like  tracking the price of Microsoft, seeing it go up 2% at 2:00, and calling that a surge. The authors of the study did not even report a surge in gamma waves, one of the brain wave channels. Eager to get something they could call a surge, the authors got their little "surge" after some statistical fiddling with the signals, to get some statistical measure that only shows up after arbitrary analytics. Almost any random ten seconds of brain wave activity can be statistically analyzed to show a little "surge" somewhere, if you're willing to dredge up secondary statistical measures. Keep torturing the data, and it will confess as you wish.  Shamefully, the journal Science has an article on this paper with the misleading headline "Burst of brain activity during dying could explain life passing before your eyes"; and the Smithsonian site has an equally misleading click-bait headline of "Surging Brain Activity in Dying People May Be a Sign of Near-Death Experiences." There is no evidence that either of these two people had an experience of "life passing before their eyes" or anything like near-death experiences. The subjects were unconscious when the respirator was turned off, and there is no evidence of any consciousness. Unconscious people have gamma wave activity (the activity reported), and you have plenty of gamma activity while you are sleeping. No "neural correlates of the NDE" were reported by the paper. As two MDs point out in a commentary on this paper, "The researchers reported no evidence whatsoever that these brain activities were correlated with conscious experiences in those two patients—and no reason to compare these results with prospective NDE studies in patients who have survived a cardiac arrest."  To get the real truth of what was happening here, you need to open up the supplemental information document of the paper. The visuals in that document show the brain waves of the patients all dying off to become a flat line by the time the hearts of the patients stopped.  As I explain in my post here, such visuals contradict claims that the paper does anything to support a neural explanation for near-death experiences.  In that post I discuss some misleading or totally unwarranted claims made by one of the authors of this paper. 
• "Causal evidence for the processing of bodily self in the anterior precuneus." An NPR story has a bogus headline about this study: "Having an out-of-body experience? Blame this sausage-shaped piece of your brain." The study involves people who had some region of their brain called the anterior precuneus zapped by electrodes implanted in their brains. But the abstract of the paywalled study does not mention any out-of-body experiences produced by such artificial manipulations, so the NPR headline is unwarranted. And no such study could ever explain out-of-body experiences arising in people who do not have electrodes implanted inside their brains.  See my post "This Brain-Zapping Bungled Mess Sheds No Light on Out-of-Body Experiences" here for a detailed discussion of the flaws of this study.  The main flaw is that the experimenters repeatedly asked "leading" questions of people who were having their brain zapped, questions that seemed designed to get from them some quote sounding a little like an out-of-body experience, questions such as, "Did you feel any floating?" In a proper study of this type, subjects would only be asked neutral questions such as "tell me how that feels," or maybe "can you tell me more about that" after a subject had given some description. After reviewing all of the observer responses stored in a spreadsheet available with the original paper, I wrote " None of the patients reported anything that can be accurately described as an out-of-body experience." I also list in that post four cases in which the paper authors inaccurately described what their subjects reported. 
• "Out-of-Body Experiences and Hallucinatory Experiences: A Psychological Approach." This study involved having hundreds of students fill out questionnaires. One question was used to judge whether the subjects had ever had an out-of-body experience, and other questions were used to produce scores rating some nebulous concepts such as "fantasy proneness" and "schizotypy" (the latter a notoriously slippery psychological term). The authors claim psychological differences in those having out-of-body experiences. Unfortunately the study is invalid because it failed to use a proper question to judge whether the subjects had ever had an out-of-body question. Asking a question that might have been answered "yes" by anyone having a vivid dream or a vivid travel recollection or a vivid star-gazing experience, the question used was, "Have you ever had an experience in which you felt that 'you' were located 'outside of' or 'away from' your physical body, that is, the feeling that your consciousness, mind or awareness was at a different place from your physical body?" A proper question asking about out-of-body experiences would have asked whether the person had perceived his body from a position outside of his body or had an experience of leaving his body. The authors have not done anything to show any neural basis for out-of-body experiences. Contrary to the insinuations of such a paper, we read the following in another paper:

"Measures of traits and symptoms related to psychosis have failed to differentiate OB [out-of-body] experients from nonexperients (Gabbard & Twemlow, 1984; Irwin, 1980; McCreery & Claridge, 1995). McCreery (1993) found no relationship between the occurrence of OBEs and his participants’ psychiatric histories. Gabbard and Twemlow (1984) concluded that 'the OBE group was significantly healthier than a variety of other normative groups in the population and did not have the constellation of symptoms often equated with character disorders, such as psychosomatic disorders, alcohol and drug abuse, or stimulus seeking' (p. 32)"

It is rather clear from these examples that the body of neuroscience studies attempting to find evidence of a neural explanation for out-of-body experiences is mainly a swamp of junk science, characterized massively by misleading claims,  empty hand-waving, poor study designs, irrelevancies and questionable research practices. Nowhere in such studies can we find any credible neural explanation of why anyone would ever report seeing their body from a position meters above their body, as we so often hear in reports of out-of-body experiences. Nowhere in such studies do we find evidence that out-of-body experiences are hallucinatory, and one of the studies above suggests such experiences are not reported more often in the main group having hallucinations (schizophrenics). In general the  body of neuroscience studies attempting to find evidence of a neural explanation for out-of-body experiences can be described as hand waving decorated by neuroscience jargon and some weak poorly designed experimentation. When experimentation is involved, it is typically irrelevant or having too few subjects to be evidence for anything. The recent claim by a neuroscientist that scientists are starting to understand a neural cause of out-of-body experiences was one of the very many groundless boasts made by scientists. 

If you were to ask someone two hundred years ago to imagine the strongest evidence he could get that his mind is not produced by his brain, such a person might have answered that it would be observing his body from outside of his body. Out-of-body experiences are one of the strongest types of evidence against claims that the mind is the product of the brain (or the same as the brain).  The failure of neuroscientists to even "get to first base" in credibly explaining such experiences as brain activity is a failure that "speaks volumes" against such claims. 

If the authors of the papers mentioned above were to do a deep and thorough study of reports of out-of-body experiences (which they almost all fail to do), they would discover massive evidence further discrediting their speculations: evidence such as very many reports by people during out-of-body experiences of discovering things they never first learned about through normal sensory experience (see here for examples), and very frequent reports of unprecedented perceptual abilities during such out-of-body experiences.  A very big difference between most such authors and myself is that I have very massively studied books and papers written by those holding a materialist or mainstream viewpoint on the brain (as shown by thousands of links to such papers and books on this site), but most such authors have failed to decently study the massive literature documenting evidence for the paranormal, doing no more than a cursory "sometimes briefly wade their feet in the water" kind of looking at such literature. My approach has been to massively study what is claimed to defy my view about the mind and brain (along with the opposite type of evidence), but few neuroscientists take so balanced an investigative approach. Neuroscientists prefer a "don't rock my own boat" approach of not seriously studying evidence that seems to defy their beliefs about brains. In general we should not regard  people taking such an approach as thorough scholars of human mental phenomena.