---
title: "Focal electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus repeatedly induced out-of-body experiences in an epilepsy patient"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (Blanke et al. 2002 Nature; quote read at capture time from the PubMed abstract record, independent re-check of the full paper blocked by paywall — see [[question-verify-blanke-2002-2014-primary-quotes]])"
source_url: "https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12239558/"
source_title: "Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions"
source_author: "Olaf Blanke, Stéphanie Ortigue, Theodor Landis, Margitta Seeck"
source_date: "2002-09-19T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "Nature 419:269–270 (2002)"
source_tier: 1
source_quote: "Stimulation at this site also elicited illusory transformations of the patient's arm and legs (complex somatosensory responses) and whole-body displacements (vestibular responses), indicating that out-of-body experiences may reflect a failure by the brain to integrate complex somatosensory and vestibular information."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-third-man-factor.md, 2026-07-11"
origin: "batch"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-third-man-factor.md"
date_created: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["neuroscience","hallucination","embodiment","angular-gyrus","out-of-body-experience"]
audits: ["2026-07-12 claude-opus-4-8"]
drafted_in: ["2026-07-13-four-not-three","four-not-three"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-07-31 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


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.