© 2025 WMRA and WEMC
NPR News & NPR Talk in Central Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

UVA scientists discover out of body experiences create empathy

The soul leaving the body, 1808.
Chroma Collection
The soul leaving the body, 1808.

The Division of Perceptual Studies is an academic group from the University of Virginia that is devoted to the evidence for extraordinary human experiences. Founded in 1967, the group investigates the mind’s relationship to the body and the possibility of consciousness surviving physical death. New research from the group suggests that out-of-body experiences can have a “transformative” effect on people’s ability to experience empathy and connect with others. Dr. Marina Weiler is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at UVA and part of this research collective. WMRA’s Chris Boros asked her to describe the organizations’ work.

Marina Weiler
University of Virginia
Marina Weiler

Marina Weiler: The Division of Perceptual Studies, or DOPS, how we call it for short, is a division inside the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences in the School of Medicine at University of Virginia, and it was founded in 1967 by Ian Stevenson. Who, at the time, was the chair of the psychiatry, and he stepped down his position to investigate children who were reporting memories of past lives. So he started the division, and then eventually we expanded, and now almost 60 years later, we are studying a lot of other types of phenomena. Like near death experiences, out of body experiences. We continue with the children who report memories of past lives, but also mediumship, remote viewing, all these types of phenomena.

WMRA: How did you find yourself working in this field and studying these amazing concepts?

MW: Since my youth, I've had amazing experiences that I couldn't explain. Like we couldn't explain by the physicalism definitions that we have of the world. I would have dreams with the deceased, received messages and things happening to me that at the time I couldn't explain. So I had my personal beliefs at the time. And then when I started my undergrad in sciences, I learned that the world is physical, so everything and only physical. So everything that I believed and all my personal experiences, I had to put inside this drawer and label hallucination, you know. So there was a world shift to me during my early 20s, which was very hard. But then when I started my grad school, I had a very good friend who is a physicist, and he will talk a lot about the spiritual world and how he believed in everything. And to me, I was shocked to see that he was such an intelligent person, a physicist, and he would still believe in the invisible world. But then slowly, he held my hand, and he said, you know, we should read about this. We should read about the evidence. We should read this book. And then I started reading it, Irreducible Mind, which is one of the best books written in the field, written by Edward Kelly, my now colleague, at DOPS. And after I started reading the evidence, it was an intellectual choice to be in this field again, because once you open up and you study and you see the evidence, you can't unsee it anymore. So it's just, the evidence is just so overwhelming. And then again, I had to reframe my world view, and like all my experiences, made sense again. Once I found out about DOPS, I got introduced to the book Irreducible Mind, and I was just fascinated about their work. I had no idea this type of research could be done scientifically. I had no idea this could be done at all, like, how can we study the afterlife and things like that? And I was so fascinated about the topic, I just knew I wanted to work with this. And I was in love for DOPS. And then eventually they opened the position, I got hired.

WMRA: Did you struggle with you know, on one hand, you had these experiences, and you believe in your heart that these were real, and then the other hand, you are a scientist. A lot of people I would imagine in that world are going to foofoo it and say, no, no, no. How hard was that for you to kind of balance what was real and what wasn't?

MW: It was very hard. So the first shift that I had, which is from believing to not believing and becoming a physicalist. I was in my early 20s, and I had to reframe my entire world, you know, I had to, as I said, like, put everything inside a drawer and label it hallucination. It's not something that you do in one day. It took me a couple years to reframe all my beliefs and everything and try to be in peace with that. But at the same time, it was a little, it brought me down a little bit, because I was like, so, why are we here? What's, what's the meaning? You know, like, and I did understand. I thought that I understood life before, and I had meaning. And then, like, suddenly everything disappeared, and I had nothing, and I was like, so what's the meaning? Why am I here? Why are we here? That was a hard time, I would say. But then when I shift back, because of like, I started reading the evidence and everything it was again, it requires a lot of cognitive accommodation, everything that you believe, everything that you constructed in your life, and you had to reframe it again. So it was a lot easier than the previous shift, because I don't know, to me, just finding meaning in our existence brought me peace.

UVA Division of Perceptual Studies
University of Virginia
UVA Division of Perceptual Studies

WMRA: Let's talk about some of the evidence. What happens typically when someone has an out of body experience?

MW: So a very classic, not all of them are like this, but a classic out of body experience, or OBE, how I'm going to call them, a person has a feeling that they are not in their physical bodies anymore. Usually they happen when people are sleeping or napping or resting, and then they fall asleep. And suddenly they see themselves floating in the room or in a near room or outside their houses. Sometimes they may see their physical bodies resting or napping or sleeping. And it's a very vivid and a very real experience. So people have no doubt these are real experiences, and they were actually out of their bodies. Some of these experiences can be very short and less seconds, and once people realize that's my body, they, they're very scared, and they suddenly go back to their bodies, and they kind of have the feeling of waking up. Sometimes they last longer, and people kind of enjoy the feeling and go flying around, and they want to see what's outside.

WMRA: That's what I want to happen, I want that!

MW: They want to explore other rooms and see what people are doing. Some other experiences, people go to different realms and different dimensions and see entities, sometimes people meet deceased loved ones and they receive messages. So OBEs are very complex. They're phenomenologically complex. The experiences vary a lot between people.

WMRA: When you're studying this, how do you study it scientifically? How do you find the people to talk to? What type of scientific methods are you using?

MW: So it depends for what. I would say, two categories, two categories of people that I'm working with, and two different recruitment processes. One of them are people that are having these experiences spontaneously, and they usually come to us. They send emails to DOPS, or they send emails to my personal email saying, I've had these experiences, and then they describe them to me. I can conduct surveys trying to investigate a psychological trait that is related to having these experiences, or the psychological outcomes of having these experiences, if they change fear of death or psychological well being. So then I will just distribute surveys on the social media or advertise for them. Another type of experiment that I'm conducting is working with people that can induce these experiences at will. So for example, one of my projects is actually investigating what is happening in the brain while people are having out of body experiences. Because these experiences, they tend to be spontaneous, it's a limitation, you know, how can I understand what's happening in the brain if they are spontaneous and we don't know they're uncontrollable? So we have to reach out to people who are able to induce these experiences at will. And they do exist.

Dr. Ian Stevenson standing near the Rotunda on the grounds of the University of Virginia – circa 1970
University of Virginia
Dr. Ian Stevenson standing near the Rotunda on the grounds of the University of Virginia – circa 1970

WMRA: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because I've read people, there's been books written about, like, teaching people how to do it. How legitimate is some of that? And how do I, how do I do it, Marina, tell me! Step by step I want instruction.

BOTH: [laughs]

MW: Well, there are a few institutes in the world. I'm aware of three of them that actually train people to have out of body experiences. One of them is the Monroe Institute, and they use something, a technology called binaural beats to induce altered states of consciousness, including out of body experiences. I'm working closely with this institute in Brazil that teaches some meditation and visualization techniques to induce people to have control of their experiences. So it's a little different from the Monroe, and there's another one in Portugal that also uses very similar techniques from the institute in Brazil. So reaching out to these people is very important, because then I can hook up the EEG, or ask them to go inside an MRI, a magnetic resonance imaging, or any type of neuroimaging, and ask them to induce these experiences so we can understand what's happening in the brain while people are having these experiences.

WMRA: So you've been in the presence of someone who's having an out of body experience in the room with them?

MW: Yep.

WMRA: What happens to their body?

MW: So their bodies are completely still. They don't move at all. They say that if they move their physical bodies, they're gonna come back and it's gonna disrupt the experiences. What happens during their brain is still an open question. There's been very few studies investigating what's happening in their brains, why people are having out of body experiences. They're very outdated. 40 years ago, and they mainly saw a decrease in alpha activity. For our studies, we collected the data two months ago in Brazil. So it's still pretty new. I haven't had the chance to analyze the data yet. We are hypothesizing that something, we are going to see like a difference in alpha activity and, or something maybe similar to sleep stages.

WMRA: What's the biggest evidence that you've seen that tells you, as a scientist, that this is absolutely real and that these people aren't faking it or lying?

MW: Well, I've come across many reports that people just wrote to me in emails. I haven't seen them directly, but they are very like many compelling reports. Either in books or papers or these stories that just came to me by email. I do have some personal experiences with my participants. When I was in Brazil collecting the data, we were working with 21 participants who claimed who could have out of body experiences at will. Some of them could, according to them, actually had an out of body experience. We have to keep in mind this is a subjective experience, okay? So according to them, they did have an out of body experience. What was interesting was that they were able to tell me what was happening in a room adjacent to where they were actually having the out of body experience. So we were working on three different rooms. One room was where these participants were inducing, and they were hooked to the EEG, and they had wires everywhere. They couldn't move. They were laying down for an hour and 30 minutes, inducing their experiences. And then in another room, I was with my colleague, David Acunzo from DOPS. We were in this other room just monitoring the EEG and everything, all the data that we were, the physiological data that we were collecting and timing the experiences and taking notes of everything that we were watching. And then in another room, a third room, with doors closed and a camera, we placed a target that we asked participants to see the target. And the target was there only when the participant was inside the other room, inducing the experience. So the participant could not see what the target was. It was displayed in a, in a laptop and object. So some of the participants were able to tell me where I was sitting, where my friend David was sitting during their experience, including one chair that we never sat during the experiments, which was a little further away. And none of us ever sat on that chair, but on that very specific experience that this person was having, David, my friend, was sitting on that chair reading a book. And she came to us and said, Yeah, you know, I saw David sitting on that chair, and that was, like, there was no explanation for that.

WMRA: What's that like when you're, when you're receiving that type of feedback? It's got to be a moment of ...wow.

MW: I've come across so many of those stories that are like, wow. Like, there is no way you could have known this information. I kind of got used to them right now. I still, I'm still fascinated. I'm still, like, impressed by this.

WMRA: There's an opening introduction to the paper that you wrote with your colleagues, and it's a woman talking about her experience, and she says that she didn't want to go back to her body. You hear that often with people who have OBEs, right? Like they enjoy the experience so much that they don't want to go back. Is this common?

MW: I would say that that is more common during what we call near death experience. A near death experience is a more profound experience that people have, usually close to death, and they have other features besides the out of body experience. So they have this feeling of love. Some of them report they meet God and deceased people. And in some near death experiences, people don't want to go back, or sometimes they are given the choice to go back or not. But sometimes they don't want to go back, but they're told you have to. During out of body experiences, I haven't come across many reports that people would have that control of going back or not, but it can happen that the experience is just so good that people want to at least have one again and experience that again.

WMRA: Would you want to come back? Would you, Marina, want to come back?

Nov. 1979 – The Dalai Lama toured UVA Grounds with Dr. Ian Stevenson
University of Virginia
Nov. 1979 – The Dalai Lama toured UVA Grounds with Dr. Ian Stevenson

MW: It's a very hard question. I think it depends a lot on how you integrate those experiences in terms of what, what's your life like here? I mean, of course, if you're, you know, if you're miserable and you're suffering and you're like, you find all this love and everything you don't want to go back. But most of the time, people realize from these experiences that they are here for a reason. There's a lesson to be learned, there's something to be done, and once they realize that they're like, yeah, I'm gonna go back and finish what I came here for, and everything is okay. And, I would say most of the time, people that go through these type of experiences, they lose fear of death. And if you lose fear of death, you also lose fear of living. So you come back as a different person. It's a very transformative experience, and you come back differently. Why not come back and live life differently. So I see what you're saying, that it can be hard to come back, but I think people come back more empowered to live a new life. These experiences completely change people, yeah.

WMRA: And a big part of your study is that people come back with much more empathy. What's that about?

MW: One of the facts of having out of body experiences is understanding more interpersonal relationships. So I would say that's not one of the main effects. Like one of the main effects would be decreased fear of death. You know, when people change their beliefs about the afterlife because, you know, they were able to experience what's like to be living without a physical body. But another big effect is how people understand life and how people relate to others, and have a better understanding of interpersonal relationships, including higher empathy towards others. So there is definitely an effect of out of body experiences.

WMRA: What about long term effects? Have you studied people decades after they've had an experience like this? Have they still changed because of the experience?

MW: Yeah, like these experiences, they have long term effect changes. They are not just immediately. I mean, there are immediate changes, but they are persistent changes. I particularly haven't studied in the long term. I've been studying out of body experiences for a few years, but this is something I'm interested in. Studying is like understanding the long term effects of these experiences, but from what I've heard and experienced that I have so far, these experiences, these effects are persistent.

WMRA: Has your perception of reality and the afterlife changed personally through all of your studies?

MW: Yes, a lot, a lot. After I started reading, the evidence for, not only for an afterlife,can consciousness survive bodily death? Can consciousness exist independently of the brain? After I started reading all the evidence, studying out of body experiences, reading about near death experiences, and people who can communicate with the deceased and bring information back that is very, very detailed, and there is no way they could have known about that information. It did change a lot, my world view. And as I told you, it was an intellectual decision to be where I am right now, after you see, you can't unsee anymore. Like to me, this is just part of human living. You know, this is just part of the human experience, is to have those types of experiences. The problem is that people don't talk about them. They're too scared to talk about them. They don't want to be dismissed away. They don't want to say, oh, this is just a dream, this is just a hallucination or you were tired, or you were imagining something.People don't want to be dismissed away, so they don't talk about these experiences.

WMRA: That makes sense.

MW: But if you start talking to people like, you would see, the majority of people have a story to talk. They have something to say. And once they feel safe, once they feel in a safe environment, oh, it's safe to talk to this person, they're going to open up, and they're going to tell something extraordinary that happened to them. And so these pieces, they just bring me a little piece of evidence to my beliefs and my off reality.

WMRA: Is it safe to say that probably most people have had some type of experience to this degree, whether it's out of body or lucid dreaming or near death experience? It seems like it's maybe more common than we want to admit?

MW: It is, yeah. So there was a colleague of mine who just published a study, a survey conducted in Brazil. He was surveying like all types of spiritual experiences of, or emergent experiences or extraordinary experiences, and he found that only 6% of the population studied in Brazil didn't have any experience at all. And these experiences included lucid dreaming, included out of body, seeing deceased or sensing deceased people, or receiving messages, or any type of transformative, or what people call anomalous experiences. Only 6% didn't have them. In terms of after that communication, for example, people that have spontaneous contact with deceased people, it's like 40% of people had these experiences. So I would say most people have had, they just don't want to talk about it. Many of them just dismiss away and they, it doesn't mean that they believe they are true, but these experiences definitely happen to most people.

WMRA: And you hear two stories, though... I just got chills again, people hearing bells ringing, right? Is that typical, these types of experiences?

MW: Yeah, they are too, like, bells ringing, something that happens to me a lot. I have, very often, these experiences that I hear like this whistle, like which is like, kind of far away, I can't describe. And it happens sometimes on this ear, sometimes on this one, it's just at these random moments. Some people do talk about these experiences too.

WMRA:So through all of your research and your personal experiences, would you say 100 percent there's an afterlife?

MW: Never!

WMRA: [laughs] Never?

MW: Never, never! I would never say 10 percent

WMRA: 99 percent! 99 percent, what percentage are we at?

MW: You were not expecting that one!

WMRA: No, I was expecting you to say yes! Oh, that's great.

MW: I'm a scientist, okay? I use the scientific method to study the reality. The scientific method is just one of the methods to understand reality. It's not the only one, but it's the one that our society accepts the most. What is the scientific method? Is to understand the facts. We go after the facts, and then we try to interpret these facts based on hypotheses and then theories. The thing is, our current paradigm, which is physicalists, do not accept the facts that we see, but they are happening. And I think there is enough evidence to say that there is something else. And if you overlook this evidence, it's just ignorance. You know, because there is, you just need to go after the evidence and study it. And anyone that says there is no proof for something beyond physicality, is just because the person hasn't studied enough, because there is evidence. So I don't actually like the word proof. You know, people tend to use the word proof, but we deal with evidence, we can never be 100 percent sure of anything. You know, we don't have proof of anything. We do have pieces of evidence that when they are placed together, they do tell us a story. It's just like going to a court and trying to show that someone committed a crime. Unless you had a camera or something actually telling you, you're just putting evidence to tell a story. The more compelling the evidence is, you're like, yes, this occurred, this didn't occur. And I think the evidence is very compelling to say that there is something.

Former DOPS Staff
University of Virginia
Former DOPS Staff

WMRA: Yeah, I mean, let's say someone has an out of body experience or a near death experience. How do you prove that?

MW: In terms of scientific method, we don't prove anything. We gather evidence. So it's different, but... so proof is a word that comes attached to a belief. So to a person that had an out of body experience or a near death experience, there is proof that something happened to her, that person is absolutely certain that she had an out of body experience, that she had a near death experience, and that was real, and whatever happened to her is real, and that's enough. So if the experience is real to them, that's enough. If these experiences are proof to them that there is something, that's enough, but that's a belief. So at DOPS, we work with scientific evidence for hypotheses or theories that there is something else, we don't work with proofs or beliefs. So what I'm trying to say is that these are different things, like belief and proof are words that are related to what a person believes and how a person makes sense of their experiences. Whereas scientifically, we don't work with proofs or beliefs. We work with facts. There are evidences for a hypothesis or a theory.

WMRA: It must be an interesting life for you that you get to think about this stuff all the time. And not just yourself, but you're also dealing with colleagues who are just as smart as you are, and you are all day long, you're thinking about these big, higher questions about life. And I don't think most people have that experience in life. They go about their day. They don't really think about this stuff, but every day, you're thinking about this. Has that benefited you as a person?

MW: And isn't it the most fascinating question someone can ask? What happens after we die? That's the $1 billion question, and that's sort of like, it's intrinsic to humanity to ask, you know, as long as you are leaving, you're gonna ask, what's gonna happen when I die? I feel so fortunate to be working at DOPS and to be able to scientifically investigate and spend my entire day reading about something that I'm personally fascinated. And what's best to me is I get to hear people's best stories, because when someone comes and tell me I've had an out of body experience, or I saw the ghost of my deceased mother, or I had this crazy dream that my deceased grandfather came to me, and he was so real. You get to perceive so much emotion, and you get to perceive how important these experiences are to people, and they feel really safe to share them. So I feel very fortunate to be in this position that people show themselves vulnerable. And it's the most significant, probably the most significant experiences they've ever had in their lives, and they're there, sharing them with me, and to me, it's just fascinating. I feel very fortunate to be doing this work.

WMRA: What do you ultimately hope happens with this research?

MW: I ultimately hope that people are not scared of talking about them anymore. You know, I want to normalize these experiences. I want to de-pathologize them. Just to make people realize, hey, it's okay. Everyone has these experiences, and it's okay to talk about them. No one's gonna call you crazy, no one's gonna send you to a psychiatric ward. No one is gonna put you into medications because you are having contact with deceased people, or you are having visions, or you are you know... Okay, I have to admit there are some pathological experiences that people, you know, do need to see. I'm not saying people don't have to go and see mental health professionals. I'm talking about healthy experiences that people tend to dismiss away and they're too scared to talk about them. I have two goals with my research. One to normalize these experiences and ultimately to change the paradigm that we live in. And when I say the paradigm, I'm talking about the physicalist paradigm that we currently live on that says that the mind and consciousness is produced by the brain, and after we die, everything dies, and there is nothing else but the physical world. So this is what I'm calling the physicalist paradigm, and we are raised to believe that, and we go to schools, and that's what we learn, correct? But this paradigm does not accommodate the facts. It does not accommodate all the evidence. So what ultimately needs to happen is a change in this paradigm and to a new paradigm that accommodates everything that we are seeing, that accommodates all the evidence and is able to explain that these things are happening.

WMRA: How does DOPS conduct this research and operate within the university?

MW: We are mainly based on private donations. It's still a little hard, unfortunately, to find funding from federal agencies because they mainly fund mainstream science. And what we do is to consider a little woo-woo to the federal agencies. So most of our funding comes from private funding. And I would like to use this opportunity to ask if you would like to support our work at DOPS, please go to our website. If you just Google Division of Perceptual Studies, University of Virginia, there is a button where you can donate, or you can, you can contact our Executive Administrator and just make your donation.

WMRA: And we'll have a link to that Divisions website on our website too, wmra.org, so you can just click that right there, and it'll take you right to that page. If someone has had one of these experiences and they want to contact you to talk about it, how do they get in touch with you?

MW: Well, again, on our website, we have a list of our faculty, and my name is listed there, and we also have everyone, all the other faculties. So depending on the type of experience you've had, if you have a child that is having these experiences that seem to be from a past life, you can contact my colleagues, Dr. Marieta Pehlivanova or Philip Cozzolino. If you are having out-of body experiences, or if you think you can, you are communicating with deceased people, you can contact me. My website is also, my email address is also listed in the, on the website, so everyone's website is listed there. We also have a general email, if you're not sure who to contact.

WMRA: Dr. Marina Weiler. Thank you so much for coming in today. This is really fascinating material, and I wish you all the best at this research.

MW: Thank you.

Campbell Wood is WMRA's 2024-2025 student producer.
Chris Boros is WMRA’s Program Director and local host from 10am-4pm Monday-Friday.