Stimulating Illusory Own-Body Perceptions

This is Olaf Blanke, Stephanie Ortigue, Theodor Landis and Margitta Seeck's paper in Nature, one of the two or three most rigorously reviewed general science journals in the world, reporting that electrical stimulation of a specific brain region, the temporoparietal junction, repeatedly induced an out of body sensation in a patient undergoing routine epilepsy surgery mapping. As a peer reviewed clinical finding published in Nature, it carries strong authority for the specific result it reports, a reproducible link between stimulation of that brain region and the sensation of leaving one's own body. Its limit is that it is a single patient case report rather than a large scale study, a genre limit the paper itself is explicit about, so its finding is properly cited as an important documented case supporting a neurological account of the experience rather than as a complete explanation covering every reported instance.