In an international research program conducted in Brazil through a collaboration between the University of Virginia and the University of Campinas, 21 an experienced participant, able to voluntarily induce out-of-body experiences, lay in the first room, connected to an electroencephalograph (EEG), and attempted to "leave" the body in order to perceive an image on a laptop screen in the third room, at a distance of approximately seven meters and behind closed doors.
The image was chosen at random from one hundred possible options, and even the experimenters did not know it in advance — one of them launched the program and left the room.
The study, published in a peer-reviewed journal Explore The study, led by Dr. Marina Weiler, assistant professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, set itself a specific goal: to test whether participants were able to identify the hidden object better than a chance level would allow.
The results were discouraging: out of 21 participants, 13 provided descriptions, yet eight of them reported no sensations of leaving the body at all. An artificial intelligence that compared the written descriptions with the actual images showed that the correct options occupied places from 16 to 92 in the accuracy ranking list — a result mathematically indistinguishable from mere guessing.
The real intrigue arose quite unexpectedly, beyond the planned protocol. Two participants spontaneously and with an accuracy that astonished the researchers themselves described details of the scientists' activity in the second room, where they were at the moment of the session: one was sitting on the left at a computer, the other in the corner of the room with a book; for the second volunteer the picture was mirrored — everything matched the actual arrangement at the time of the experiment.
These observations were not part of the target test and occurred independently of it. The research team itself emphasizes a critical point in the publication: these spontaneous coincidences did not undergo the official statistical test intended for the target images, and they require verification in a new study with a prospective design — that is, with hypotheses formulated in advance.
Such findings touch upon the central question of contemporary theories of consciousness. The global workspace theory (developed by Bernard Baars) and higher-order theories (HOT) assume that phenomenal consciousness is tied exclusively to the neural mechanisms of access and meta-representation within the brain — that is, consciousness arises only from the processing of information in neural networks. If the participants' descriptions did indeed turn out to be accurate, this could call that fundamental premise into question.
The integrated information theory (IIT), proposed by the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, by contrast, allows for the possibility of an extended structure of causality and a more flexible understanding of the integration of information, yet even it does not predict the spontaneous acquisition of information about external events without a physical carrier in the form of sensory receptors.
Imagine a radio receiver tuned to one frequency. Suddenly it begins to pick up clearly the signal of a neighboring radio station, even though the antenna and the electronics are clearly not designed for that range. A single coincidence could be explained by chance or a malfunction, but if such a phenomenon were to reproduce systematically, one would have to completely reconsider the very model of the receiver's design.
The study does not prove the immateriality of consciousness and does not refute materialist models, yet it demonstrates a critical limitation of our instruments of measurement and study: participants' behavioral reports and even modern neuroimaging remain fundamentally indirect methods — we never observe subjective experience immediately and directly.
If such spontaneous coincidences prove reproducible in future studies, this will force scientists not merely to refine the boundaries of the neural correlates of consciousness, but to reconsider the very methodology of studying phenomena that go beyond controlled laboratory stimuli and require new, more creative approaches to verifying unusual human abilities.
