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Out of the Body and Into the Lab
by Bryan Williams
FATE :: April 2008
Laboratory studies, old and new, may reveal some intriguing hints about the psychological workings behind some aspects of the out-of-body experience.
For as long as she could remember, Miss Z had experienced brief moments during the night in which she would wake up and find herself floating near her bedroom ceiling, looking down upon her still-sleeping body. And on this night, for the sake of science, she was apparently determined to try and have this same kind of out-of-body experience (OBE) again.
It was to be her fourth and last overnight stay in the sleep laboratory of her friend Dr. Charles Tart, who was interested in her reported OBEs and wanted to study their possible physiological components. To do that, Tart had carefully monitored Miss Z’s brainwave activity using an EEG machine on each of the three previous nights while she slept, looking for any notable patterns in her activity that might coincide with her having an OBE.
In addition, to test her perceptual ability while out of body, Tart had selected a five-digit number from a table of random numbers and had written it down in large print on a sheet of paper. Then, he quietly slipped into the adjacent room where Miss Z was sleeping and placed the sheet (with the number face up) on a small shelf hanging on the wall next to the door, about five and a half feet above the bed Miss Z was lying in. Whenever she had an OBE, Miss Z was to try and float up high enough to look down and read the number. She would then try to wake up as quickly as possible and recall as much of the number as she could.
Over the course of the three previous nights, Miss Z reported several instances in which she had felt that she had left her sleeping body, but apparently she was not able to float herself high enough to see the number. These instances were very fleeting; Miss Z usually woke up within a minute or two. This allowed Tart to mark when they had occurred on her EEG readings, but it complicated her attempts to succeed. Although Tart assured her that he was satisfied with her attempts up to that point, Miss Z became angry with herself over not being able to see the number.
Finally, Miss Z went to sleep on her final night in the sleep lab. Most of it had passed uneventfully. But then, at 6:04 in the morning, Miss Z suddenly awoke and stated that she had been able to see the number.
“I woke up; it was stifling in the room. Awake for about five minutes, I kept waking up and drifting off, having floating feelings over and over. I needed to go higher because the number was lying down. Between 5:50 and 6:00 a.m., that did it.”
The number that Miss Z recalled seeing was 25132, which turned out to be the correct one. The odds of her guessing this number by chance are about 100,000 to 1. It is also unlikely that she learned the number by standing up on the bed to look onto the shelf because the electrode wires sending her brainwave signals to the EEG restricted her movement.
Analysis of Miss Z’s EEG data later indicated that her OBEs tended to coincide with a unique, slow brainwave pattern falling within the alpha range (8 to 12 cycles per second), with a lack of rapid eye movement (REM). Typically, alpha waves occur when we are awake and relaxed, but they can also occur in the transition between wakefulness and sleep. REM is most often associated with the dream state, and the lack of it suggests that Miss Z’s OBEs were not dream-related.
This intriguing study by Tart, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, was first reported in the January 1968 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. It represents one of the earliest experimental attempts to shed light on the puzzling nature of OBEs and the human brain’s role in them. Four decades later, with the advent of brain-imaging technology, such attempts are continuing with greater promise for knowledge...Read the rest of this article exclusively in the April 2008 issue of FATE. Click here to buy this issue now!
