Out-of-body experiences on salvia, what studies recorded

Out-of-body experiences on salvia have been recorded in controlled laboratory studies. At the highest dose in a Barcelona study, volunteers lost contact with their body and some described their mind leaving it; at lower doses the body became more noticeable instead. Below are the main findings, the vocabulary researchers use for them, and one composite account built from published reports.

The Barcelona dose study

Eight healthy volunteers with psychedelic experience inhaled a placebo and three increasing doses of vaporised salvinorin A. The team used the Hallucinogen Rating Scale, the Altered States of Consciousness questionnaire and a scale for body awareness called MAIA (Maqueda et al., 2015).

Three findings matter for the out-of-body question:

• Contact with the outside dropped. Salvinorin A produced a dose-dependent "gating" of sight and sound: the room faded while inner visions and sounds took over.
• The body first got louder. At the two lower doses volunteers reported more bodily sensation: warmth, tingling, vibration, pressure.
• Then it disappeared. At the highest dose, scores for depersonalisation and derealisation rose and volunteers described a near complete loss of body ownership, with out-of-body experiences in the narratives.

What volunteers wrote

The paper prints the narratives per volunteer and dose, which makes it one of the few places where the wording of an out-of-body report on salvinorin A is published with the dose attached. Phrases from it:

• "I had the sensation of my mind rising from behind and going to another place, leaving the envelope that was my body."
• "A detachment between myself and the effects on my body happened."
• "I wasn't feeling that in that world I had a physical body."
• "It cost me some efforts to bring my mind back to my body: first the eyes, then the mouth, then the halves of the face."

All quotes: Maqueda et al., 2015. The last one describes the return: the body comes back in parts.

Pulled, pressed and split

Before the body disappears it often changes shape or position. All eight volunteers at Johns Hopkins described their body moving in space: being dragged, pulled or pushed in one direction (seven of eight), or spinning, flipping, twisting or stretching (five of eight) (MacLean et al., 2013). The first four volunteers had already described "disruptions in vestibular and interoceptive signals", such as a change in spatial orientation and pressure on the body (Johnson et al., 2011).

Vestibular means the balance system of the inner ear; interoceptive means the sense of the body's inside state. Those are the same two channels a neurologist linked to out-of-body experiences in 2002. Electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus in a patient being evaluated before epilepsy surgery repeatedly produced an out-of-body experience, and the authors proposed that out-of-body experiences reflect a failure to integrate body and balance signals (Blanke et al., 2002). The Barcelona authors cite that study when they suggest kappa receptors in parietal cortex as a possible site for the salvia effect. It remains a hypothesis.

Losing the room as well

The out-of-body feeling rarely comes alone. In a 30-person study, thematic analysis of the recorded sessions found three recurring features: a rapid and intense onset, marked changes in sound, sight and inner body signals, and "losing normal awareness of themselves and their surroundings" (Addy et al., 2015). At Johns Hopkins, session monitors rated "distance from usual daily reality" and unresponsiveness, and both rose with dose; five of eight volunteers did not respond to the monitor at all during the peak of at least one session (MacLean et al., 2013).

Memory has gaps too. In that study, the monitor spoke a word aloud at two, four and six minutes. At fifteen minutes, volunteers recalled and recognised fewer of those words the higher the dose. Part of what feels like being "elsewhere" may be time that is not stored.

Composite account: the chair that stayed behind

Composite account, assembled from recurring patterns in the published narratives cited on this page (Maqueda 2015, MacLean 2013, Johnson 2011, Addy 2015). It is not the experience of one person, and no detail belongs to a real individual.

The first seconds after exhaling feel like pressure from the left side, as if a wave is pushing the room and the body along with it. The chair is still there, but it has become part of a flat surface that keeps folding.

Then the weight goes. There is a clear sense of rising from behind the head, while the body stays seated somewhere below. It is not frightening at first; it is simply obvious that the body is a shape that has been left. The room has gone. In its place is a space with no up or down.

The return comes in pieces. The eyes first, then the mouth, then one half of the face and the other. The sitter later says the hands kept moving on the armrest and there was a short laugh. None of that was noticed from the inside. The whole episode, by the clock, lasted a few minutes.

How often it happens

There is no reliable rate. The lab studies are small (4 to 30 people), mostly gave measured amounts of salvinorin A, and screened their volunteers. Recreational users smoke leaf or extract of unknown content. What the studies do agree on is the direction: more salvinorin A means less contact with the surroundings and, at the top of the range, less sense of having a body.

Read on: why the body moves while awareness is elsewhere, salvia compared with ketamine, DXM and psilocybin.

Avalon Magic Plants Salvia Divinorum 20X extract €21.50View product Avalon Magic Plants Salvia Divinorum 30X Extract €19.50View product