Publications related to Out-of-Body Experiences and Other Complex Dissociation Experiences in a Patient with Unilateral Peripheral Vestibular Damage and Deficient Multisensory Integration

Robotically-induced auditory-verbal hallucinations: combining self-monitoring and strong perceptual priors

Olaf Blanke, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Fosco Bernasconi, Pavo Orepic, Melissa Faggella

Background. Inducing hallucinations under controlled experimental conditions in nonhallucinating individuals represents a novel research avenue oriented toward understanding complex hallucinatory phenomena, avoiding confounds observed in patients. Audito ...

2024

Out-of-body illusion induced by visual-vestibular stimulation

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Florian Lance, Sophie Jacqueline Andrée Betka, Hsin-Ping Wu, Estelle Nakul

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are characterized by the subjective feeling of being located outside one's physical body and perceiving one's own body from an elevated perspective looking downwards. OBEs have been correlated with abnormal integration of bod ...

Cell Press2023

How I became myself after merging with a computer: Does human-machine symbiosis raise human rights issues?

Marcello Ienca

Novel usages of brain stimulation combined with artificially intelligent (AI) systems promise to address a large range of diseases. These new conjoined technologies, such as brain-computer interfaces (BCI), are increasingly used in experimental and clinica ...

ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC2023

Long-Term Hearing Outcome After Radiosurgery for Vestibular Schwannoma: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Constantin Tuleasca, Adrien Jean Régis Maurice Hilaire

BACKGROUND: Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) is one of the main treatment options in the management of small to medium size vestibular schwannomas (VSs), because of high tumor control rate and low cranial nerves morbidity. Series reporting long-term hearing ...

LIPPINCOTT WILLIAMS & WILKINS2023

Temporal windows of unconscious processing cannot easily be disrupted

Michael Herzog, Leila Drissi Daoudi - Kleinbauer, Lukas Vogelsang

Conscious perception is preceded by long periods of unconscious processing. These periods are crucial for analyzing temporal information and for solving the many ill-posed problems of vision. An important question is what starts and ends these windows and ...

Assoc Research Vision Ophthalmology Inc2024

Changing Finger Movement Perception: Influence of Active Haptics on Visual Dominance

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Loën Boban

The perception of one’s own body is a complex mechanism that can be disturbed by conflicting sensory information and lead to illusory (mis-) perceptions. Prominent models of multisensory integration propose that sensory streams are integrated according to ...

2022

Repeat stereotactic radiosurgery for progressive vestibular schwannomas after previous radiosurgery: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Constantin Tuleasca, Adrien Jean Régis Maurice Hilaire

Vestibular schwannomas (VS) are slow-growing intracranial extraaxial benign tumors, developing from the vestibular part of the eight cranial nerves. Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) has now a long-term scientific track record as first intention treatment fo ...

SPRINGER2021

Wearable Haptics for Somatosensory Perception and Self-consciousness

Atena Fadaeijouybari

Recent research has highlighted the crucial role of the processing of somatosensory signals involving the torso for global aspects of Bodily Self Consciousness (BSC), i.e., the experience of the conscious "I" as embodied and localized within bodily space. ...

EPFL2021

Common and distinct brain networks of autoscopic phenomena

Olaf Blanke, Lukas Heydrich, Eva Blondiaux

Objective Autoscopic phenomena (AP) are illusory own body reduplications characterized by the visual perception of a second own body in extrapersonal space, and include three main forms: autoscopic hallucination (AH), heautoscopy (HAS) and out-of-body-expe ...

2021

Sensorimotor conflicts induce somatic passivity and louden quiet voices in healthy listeners

Olaf Blanke, Oliver Alan Kannape, Giulio Rognini, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Pavo Orepic

Sensorimotor conflicts are known to alter the perception of accompanying sensory signals, and deficits in sensory attenuation have been observed in schizophrenia. In the auditory domain, self-generated tones or voices (compared to tones or voices presented ...

2021

Modulation of Bodily Self-Consciousness by Self and External Touch

Olaf Blanke, Masayuki Hara, Roy Salomon, Noriaki Kanayama

The full body illusion (FBI) is a bodily illusion based on the application of multisensory conflicts inducing changes in bodily self-consciousness (BSC), which has been used to study cognitive brain mechanisms underlying body ownership and related aspects ...

2021

Flight of mind: Sensorimotor and multisensory embodiment with aviation robotics, flight simulator, and virtual reality

Myeong Seop Song

Normally, humans experience an 'I' as residing in one's body and as the agent of one's actions. In other words, the self is experienced as being inside the body (self-location), as having a body (self-identification), and as being able to control the perso ...

EPFL2020

Imagined paralysis alters somatosensory evoked-potentials

Olaf Blanke, Fred Mast, Christophe Lopez, Estelle Palluel, Silvia Marchesotti

Recent studies employing body illusions have shown that multisensory conflict can alter body representations and modulate low-level sensory processing. One defining feature of these body illusions is that they are sensory driven and thus passive on behalf ...

2020

Method and system for creating an out-of-body experience

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Simon Gallo, Giulio Rognini, Florian Lance

A computer-implemented method for inducing an Out of Body Experience (OBE) in a user through an augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) system, the OBE including an exit state and a disembodiment state, the method comprising the steps of (a) changing the user vi ...

2020

Efficient viral transduction in mouse inner ear hair cells with utricle injection and AAV9-PHP.B

Bernard Schneider, Paola Andrea Solanes Vega

Viral delivery of exogenous coding sequences into the inner ear has the potential for therapeutic benefit for patients suffering genetic or acquired hearing loss. To devise improved strategies for viral delivery, we investigated two injection techniques, r ...

2020

Autoscopic phenomena as an atypical psychiatric presentation of Huntington's disease: A case report including longitudinal clinical and neuroimaging data

Olaf Blanke

Huntington's disease (HD) is a monogenetic neurodegenerative disease prototypically characterized by the progressive presentation of motor abnormalities, cognitive deterioration and neuropsychiatric symptoms. Even when the disorder is diagnosed based on th ...

2020

Effect of tool-use observation on metric body representation and peripersonal space

Michela Bassolino, Matteo Franza

In everyday life, we constantly act and interact with objects and with others' people through our body. To properly perform actions, the representations of the dimension of body-parts (metric body representation, BR) and of the space surrounding the body ( ...

2020

Hallucination Engineering: From Neuroscience Robotics to Hallucinations in Health and Disease

Eva Blondiaux

My thesis focuses on a psychotic symptom called the presence hallucination (PH). PHs are defined as the false perception that someone is nearby when no one is actually present. PHs can occur in various populations, ranging from healthy subjects (when expos ...

EPFL2020

One the effect of the Vertical Axis Alignment on Cybersickness and Game Experience in Supine Posture

Ronan Boulic, Nana Tian, Louis Philippe Simoes Lopes

Cybersickness is still an inevitable adverse effect when using VR systems, resulting in different levels of discomfort, and potentially breaking the immersive experience. To date, few studies have focused on exploring VR experience in the supine posture. R ...

IEEE2020

Postural Control and Consciousness and Their Applications to Lower-Limb Exoskeletons

Jemina Fasola

Human postural control requires high coordination and is distributed over the whole musculoskeletal and nervous systems. Hence, postural balance can be impaired due to various pathologies. Efficient rehabilitation programs and technological solutions are t ...

EPFL2020