astral · place cells · grid cells

Astral projection is an old name for traveling without the body. The brain already has a map.

JM Thomas · 21 August 2026

You wanted to leave the bed and still know where you were.

People already have a name for that trip. They still say astral projection when they try to travel while the body stays on the bed. Researchers later found a place map you can run with your eyes shut. Keep the old name and listen to what they found.

These two pictures are drawings. Skip the numbers on them if you want a lab count.

What is astral projection?

People who do that work say you can leave the bed and still know where you are. They talk about a second body, sometimes called the astral body or the body of light.

Theosophists are people who wrote about spirit and travel in the late 1800s, and they popularized the English phrase astral projection. Egyptians already had a word for a traveler that could leave the body, and they called that traveler the ba. Robert Monroe later popularized the letters OBE. OBE means out-of-body experience, the feeling that you have left your body.

Wikipedia has a page on astral projection. Treat that page as a field note from the tradition. Nobody ran a lab protocol for that page.

If you already use the old maps of space, open the akashic page next.

How does the brain pin a place?

John O'Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovsky watched rats walk in 1971 and wrote it up in the journal Brain Research. They found brain cells in the hippocampus that fire when you are in a particular place. A neuron is a brain cell. The hippocampus is a part of the brain that helps with memory and place. People call those cells place cells. A place cell is a you-are-here pin.

In 2014, O'Keefe shared a Nobel Prize, the big science prize, with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser for that positioning system. The Nobel writers call it the brain's way of knowing where you are.

How does the brain draw a grid?

Torkel Hafting, Marianne Fyhn, Sturla Molden, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard Moser wrote in the journal Nature in 2005 about a second kind of cell. They found those cells in the medial entorhinal cortex. The entorhinal cortex is a map area next to the hippocampus. Medial means the inner side of that map area.

People call those cells grid cells. A grid cell is a brain cell that fires at the corners of a repeating triangle grid that covers the room. The cells kept firing in that same pattern when the lights went out. The group talked about path integration. Path integration means you update where you are from your own motion when the landmarks go dark.

Christian Doeller, Caswell Barry, and Neil Burgess put people in an fMRI scanner in 2010. fMRI is a scan that watches blood flow in the brain. People walked through a virtual world, a computer world, while the scan ran. The group saw a six-fold signal, a repeating pattern that matches a triangle grid, and that signal was strongest in the right entorhinal cortex. You can read that paper in Nature.

Joshua Jacobs and colleagues recorded from people being treated for epilepsy, a seizure illness, in 2013. Those people moved through a computer world from bed. The group saw grid-like firing in human brain cells. You can read that paper in Nature Neuroscience.

Did anyone scan a person who left the body?

Nobody put an astral traveler in a scanner. Aidan Horner, James Bisby, Ewa Zotow, Daniel Bush, and Neil Burgess had twenty-six people learn where objects sat in a circular computer world, then close their eyes and imagine walking the path, then actually walk it.

They saw a six-fold signal in the entorhinal cortex during the imagined path, close to the signal during the computer walk. They published that in the journal Current Biology in 2016. Horner's group watched people imagine a path. They did not watch a person leave the body.

In 2025, Andrea Vollan, Richard Gardner, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard Moser reported looking-ahead sweeps. Those cells fire a little ahead of the body, about ten times a second. They named those sweeps looking ahead. You can read that paper in Nature.

How did Blanke move the feeling of leaving?

Olaf Blanke, Stephanie Ortigue, Theodor Landis, and Margitta Seeck sent a small electrical pulse into the right angular gyrus in a person being checked for epilepsy. The angular gyrus is where body, vision, and balance meet. Vestibular is the name for that balance sense. The person said they floated about two meters above the bed, close to the ceiling. They published that paper in the journal Nature in 2002.

Blanke and Shahar Arzy later put that meeting point at the temporoparietal junction, or TPJ. The TPJ is that same meeting place for body, vision, and balance. They said you get your sense of where you are at that junction. You can read that paper in The Neuroscientist.

Henrik Ehrsson gave healthy people an out-of-body feeling in 2007 by putting cameras behind them, showing that view in goggles, and touching their chest with a stick while he touched the chest they could see with a matching stick. They reported sitting in the corner watching themselves. You can read that paper in Science.

If a leaving-the-body feeling shows up on its own and it scares you, talk to a clinician.

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