Over at the University Hospital in Geneva, a unique experiment has been going on. Two women have had electrodes implanted in their brains as a preparation for their surgery in order to treat epilepsy. The purpose of the electrodes was to pinpoint the damaged or abnormal tissue which was causing the seizures, while also identifying adjacent areas in the brain to avoid during the operation. The doctors would send electrical signals to their brain via the electrodes, and the women had to say what they were feeling.

This is where the weird things begin to happen.

One of the regions of the brain to get zapped was the angular gyrus which is the region of the brain which combines vision and body sense. While this area was stimulated, one of two things started to happen: the first woman reported a shadowy figure which mimicked her movements and who was always just right behind her or beside her, but always out of view. She noted that the presence was unpleasant and that "he" (since she thinks the presence is male) is out to always get in her way and stop her from doing things. For example, a doctor handed her a card, but she claims that the presence was trying to take it from her as it doesn't want her to read it.

The second woman, on the other hand, noted that the moment the electric signals were sent to her brain, she suddenly found herself floating near the ceiling, and looking down at her legs as well as her "other" physical body. Both women reported that the said sensations ceased at the moment that the electric current was stopped.

Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland was the one who carried out the procedures above, and is also the one who attests to the fact that both patients had sound psychological histories and backgrounds and were both actually very surprised with their experiences.

Hmm...so does this mean that all of those so-called life-changing paranormal experiences, which include souls supposedly leaving the body, are actually nothing more than impulses in the brain? Well, Dr. Blanke along with Peter Brugger, a neuroscientist at University Hospital in Zurich who is an expert on phantom limbs (the sensation of still feeling a limb after it has been amputated) actually think so.

"The research shows that the self can be detached from the body and can live a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experience, or it can be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a presence," Brugger said.

Stressing the fact that different regions of the brain handle different types of information, Blanke further explains that all of the information is eventually merged in order for the body to make sense of its surroundings. However, when the angular gyrus was deliberately stimulated, this caused confusion within the brain itself on how to process the new information and/or sensation, that the resulting "shadowy presence" or "out-of-body experience" is actually the body's attempt to try to make sense of everything. However, this attempt often ends up with the person not being able to recognize that it is their own body that they are sensing, and not another's.

He also thinks that in cases of schizophrenics who have delusions of being followed by someone else, or who cannot distinguish their actions from someone else's, it may be that the sensory processing areas of their brain have some form of abnormality.

Brugger also adds that the same experiences have often been known to occur among people who undergo a period of sensory deprivation, such as trekking in high altitudes, or sailing alone in an ocean, as well as in people who have suffered minor strokes or other cases where the blood flow to the brain is disrupted.