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Out-of-Body Experience During Awake Craniotomy
Identifier
023094
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A glioma is a type of tumor that starts in the brain or spine. It is called a glioma because it arises from glial cells. The most common site of gliomas is the brain. Gliomas make up about 30% of all brain and central nervous system tumors and 80% of all malignant brain tumors
A craniotomy is a surgical operation in which a bone flap is temporarily removed from the skull to access the brain. Craniotomies are often critical operations, performed on patients who are suffering from brain lesions or traumatic brain injury (TBI).
A description of the experience
World Neurosurg. 2016 Aug;92:586.e9-586.e13. doi: 10.1016/j.wneu.2016.05.002. Epub 2016 May 10. Out-of-Body Experience During Awake Craniotomy. Bos EM1, Spoor JK2, Smits M3, Schouten JW2, Vincent AJ2.
1Department of Neurosurgery, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Electronic address: e.bos@erasmusmc.nl.
2Department of Neurosurgery, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
3Department of Radiology, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
BACKGROUND:
The 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 DESCRIPTION:
We 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.
CONCLUSIONS:
We 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.
KEYWORDS:
Autoscopy; Awake craniotomy; Diffusion tensor imaging; Low-grade glioma; Out-of-body experience; Posterior thalamic radiation; Temporoparietal junction
PMID: 27178238