Weird science story of the week has to be the simulated ‘out-of-the-body experience’ (OBE). Scientists at UCL, working with a Swiss team, managed to fool subjects into believing they had left their bodies. News@nature takes up the story.

“Participants wore virtual-reality goggles hooked up to cameras trained on their own bodies…volunteers were then prodded in the chest at precisely the same moment that an object approached the camera. In this scenario, the volunteers identified strongly with the location of the camera, thinking that this is where their true self was — the view of their body was like a view of someone else.”

The study, published in Science, is causing lots of noise because it touches on belief in the soul or spirit. If OBEs can be pinned to a rational, neurological explanation, the invocation of a mysterious soul becomes superfluous.

Deep matters aside, the effect could be harnessed to help perform surgery or explore planets by telepresence. And I imagine the virtual-sex industry must be rubbing its, ahem, hands.