Autoscopy

:This article excludes paranormal interpretations.

Autoscopy is defined as an experience in which a person while believing to be awake sees her/his body and the world from a location outside her/his physical body. More precisely, autoscopy experiences are characterized by the presence of the following three phenomena:

disembodiment (apparent location of the self outside one's body);
impression of seeing the world from an elevated and distanced visuo-spatial perspective (extracorporeal, but egocentric visuo-spatial perspective); and
impression of seeing one's own body (autoscopy) from this perspective.

Autoscopies have puzzled humankind from time immemorial and are abundant in the folklore, mythology, and spiritual narratives of most ancient and modern societies.

Bunning and Blanke (2005) of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, and Department of Neurology, University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland, have reviewed some of the classical precipitating factors of autoscopies. These are sleep, drug abuse, and general anesthesia as well as their neurobiology. They have compared them with recent findings on neurological and neurocognitive mechanisms of the autoscopies. The reviewed data suggest that autoscopies are due to functional disintegration of lower-level multisensory processing and abnormal higher-level self-processing at the temporo-parietal junction. The researchers argue that the experimental investigation of the interactions between these multisensory and cognitive mechanisms in autoscopies and related illusions in combination with neuroimaging and behavioral techniques might further our understanding of the central mechanisms of corporal awareness and self-consciousness.

Heautoscopy, or experience of a double, is a related phenomenon.

References

Bunning, S., and Blanke, O. (2005). Prog Brain Res. 150:331-50. (PubMed Abstract PMID 16186034) describe the neural correlates of the autoscopic experiences.
PubMed Abstract PMID 16019077 and related articles describe many heautoscopic and autoscopic experiences with their neural correlates.

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