Focal electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus repeatedly induced out-of-body experiences in an epilepsy patient

During pre-surgical electrical mapping of a patient with drug-resistant epilepsy, Blanke, Ortigue, Landis & Seeck found that focal stimulation at a single site in the right angular gyrus (at the temporo-parietal junction) repeatedly and reproducibly evoked an out-of-body experience (OBE) — the sensation of seeing one's own body from an external, elevated vantage point. The same site also "elicited illusory transformations of the patient's arm and legs (complex somatosensory responses) and whole-body displacements (vestibular responses)." The authors read this convergence as evidence that "out-of-body experiences may reflect a failure by the brain to integrate complex somatosensory and vestibular information."

The finding matters here because it recasts a region the vault already tracks. claim-insight-conflict-and-restructuring-distinct-networks names the angular gyrus as one of the few phase-general regions active across both the conflict and restructuring phases of insight — a mundane-sounding cognitive bookkeeping role. The same region, differently perturbed, generates one of the more bizarre subjective states in the clinical literature. Same switch, two very different tricks: multimodal integration when it works, a phantom vantage point on the self when it fails.

Scope and caveat: this is a single-patient case report, not a population-level result, and its weight rests on reproducibility within that one patient's stimulation mapping rather than on replication. The engineered, healthy-subject analogue of this integration-failure mechanism is claim-robot-induced-feeling-of-a-presence-models-patient-hallucination, from the same lab a decade later.