As he reports in Nature this week, Dr Blanke then systematically applied additional electric currents to the woman's right angular gyrus.

ECONOMIST: Out-of-body experiences

Dr Blanke concludes that a person can be tricked into subconsciously relocating their sense of self away from where it should have been.

CNN: Scientists recreate out-of-body experience

With these results in mind, both Dr Ehrsson and Dr Blanke wondered if they could design experiments that would induce complete out-of-body experiences in healthy volunteers.

ECONOMIST: Consciousness

Dr Blanke also asked his volunteers to wear virtual-reality goggles.

ECONOMIST: Consciousness

And, who knows, it may one day lead Dr Ehrsson, Dr Blanke, or someone else whom they have inspired, to having one of those Nobel medals hung around his own neck.

ECONOMIST: Consciousness

For, if the methods Dr Ehrsson and Dr Blanke have come up with can be reproduced on volunteers inside a brain-scanner, then it might be possible to study the neurological network involved.

ECONOMIST: Consciousness

Dr Blanke, by contrast, works with epileptics.

ECONOMIST: Consciousness

While probing the brain of a woman who suffered from epilepsy, Olaf Blanke and his colleagues at the University Hospital of Geneva found that stimulating the right angular gyrus (a point about an inch above and slightly behind the right ear, and just inside the skull) caused her to feel that she was travelling out of her own body.

ECONOMIST: Out-of-body experiences