Out of Body VR

You can be deceived into believing that you are outside of your body by using virtual reality. Similar to the rubber hand illusion, but with total body absorption. All it takes to make you feel uncomfortable in a virtual reality setting is for someone to poke you with a stick.

Your sense of self and body are built using a variety of sensory data, according to one neuroscientist. While sight plays a significant role, other factors include what you can physically feel and how you perceive your body to be situated. The brain freaks out a little bit when you fool it by presenting it with new information that doesn't line up. In tests, researchers were able to make individuals feel their own bodies when they looked at virtual ones that were being touched and whose sensations matched their own. The participants experienced terror responses, such as increased sweating and heart rate, as though they were actually experiencing the assault at one point when the virtual body was shattered with a hammer.

In a different experiment, subjects were asked to enter a virtual body and virtually wear it. Then, instead of being within the corpse, they found themselves staring at it. Afterward, everyone who had visited the body and gazed at it saw that their dread of dying had significantly decreased. In this instance, researchers hypothesized that leaving the body helped individuals detach their bodies from their mind and let go of some of their traditional fears associated with passing away.