After attending a lecture on "out of body experiences," a 24-year-old student from the University of Ottawa approached her professor saying, "I thought everybody could do that." She can apparently do this at will — making her the first person with this condition to be studied.
The resulting paper, which now appears in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, describes the condition as something of an illusion, where a person's ability to track their body's position in space and time has somehow become externalized. In this extraordinary case, the university student claims she can do this whenever she wants — to induce the feeling that she can experience her body moving outside the boundaries of her physical body, while remaining aware of her unmoving physical body.
