---
title: "Olaf Blanke"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Olaf Blanke"
aliases: ["Olaf Blanke","O. Blanke"]
first_seen: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
connects_to: ["out-of-body experience","feeling of a presence","sensorimotor conflict","angular gyrus","bodily self-consciousness"]
---


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.