• Eelke M Bos, Spoor Jochem K H JKH Department of Neurosurgery, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands., Marion Smits, Joost W Schouten, and Vincent Arnaud J P E AJPE Department of Neurosurgery, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands..
• Department of Neurosurgery, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Electronic address: e.bos@erasmusmc.nl.
• World Neurosurg. 2016 Aug 1; 92: 586.e9-586.e13.

BackgroundThe out-of-body experience (OBE), during which a person feels as if he or she is spatially removed from the physical body, is a mystical phenomenon because of its association with near-death experiences. Literature implicates the cortex at the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) as the possible anatomic substrate for OBE.Case DescriptionWe present a patient who had an out-of-body experience during an awake craniotomy for resection of low-grade glioma. During surgery, stimulation of subcortical white matter in the left TPJ repetitively induced OBEs, in which the patient felt as if she was floating above the operating table looking down on herself.ConclusionsWe repetitively induced OBE by subcortical stimulation near the left TPJ during awake craniotomy. Diffusion tensor imaging tractography implicated the posterior thalamic radiation as a possible substrate for autoscopic phenomena.Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

29 keywords...

hide…