Olaf Blanke

Swiss-based cognitive neuroscientist (EPFL / University of Geneva; founder of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, LNCO) whose experimental work is the spine of the vault's embodiment-and-hallucination cluster. He is the corresponding author on both of the two findings the vault tracks in this domain: the 2002 Nature single-patient result that focal stimulation of the right angular gyrus repeatedly induced out-of-body experiences, and the 2014 Current Biology result that a master–slave robot delivering spatiotemporally mismatched touch reproduced the "feeling of a presence" in healthy volunteers. The through-line across the two papers — an integration failure in the brain's handling of one's own sensorimotor signals, whether forced on a patient's cortex by an electrode or manufactured on demand in anyone by a robot — is the mechanism his lab is best known in this vault for establishing.

References

• claim-angular-gyrus-stimulation-induced-out-of-body-experience — Blanke, Ortigue, Landis & Seeck, Nature 419:269–270 (2002); lead/corresponding author.

• claim-robot-induced-feeling-of-a-presence-models-patient-hallucination — Blanke et al., Current Biology 24(22):2681–2686 (2014); senior author.

• claim-third-man-factor-name-descends-from-eliot-waste-land — the literary/etymological companion to the FoP mechanism his lab reproduced.

• question-verify-blanke-2002-2014-primary-quotes (answered) — the verification thread that re-checked both his papers' grounding quotes against primary text.

• 2026-08-01: Hub created during promotion of 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-25-verify-the-blanke-2002-nature-and-2014-current.md. first_seen set to 2026-07-11 — the date the vault first recorded him, via the two claim-notes above — rather than today, since that date is recoverable and not invented.