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Liv Perez
Then I thought, what if I've scaled businesses? What if I scaled my philanthropy? What if I did as much in one year as I've done in my whole life? See how your wealth could have even Greater meaning@creativeplanning.com impact hi, I'm Liv Perez
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Dr. Samantha Amin
Hello listeners. Greetings from Curiosity Weekly headquarters. Before we get into the show, I wanted to thank you all for the love, lovely feedback we've been receiving the past few weeks. It honestly really helps us shape the podcast behind the scenes and tailor our content to what you all are curious about. Not to sound greedy here, but we want more science too. Okay? So leave us a rating or review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and let us know what you think or what you want us to cover next. Thanks. As a neuroscientist, there's one thing I know for certain. There's so much about the brain that we just don't understand. From deja vu to astral projection to near death experiences, science has been finding ways to explain the unexplainable for a long time, particularly out of body experiences. But with the technology and knowledge base available to us today, it seems like we have a little more understanding about what's really going on there when we feel ourselves existing outside of our bodies. Here to explain more is Dr. Marina Weiler, a neuroscientist and assistant professor in the Division of Perceptual Studies and at the University of Virginia. Before we talk to Dr. Weiler, I'll look into a new study that explores when crabs started walking sideways. And later, we'll dig into research exposing a Korean skincare ingredient that might be a new ally against antibiotic resistance. Welcome to Curiosity Weekly. I'm your host, Dr. Samantha Amin. Let's get started. There's a saying in some nerd circles that eventually everything becomes crab. It's one of my favorite old memes, and there's actually some truth to it. The flat, wide shell with the tail tucked underneath and legs splayed out to the sides. That crab like body plan has evolved at least five times independently. Evolution keeps making crab shapes across totally different lineages over and over. For example, king crabs evolved from hermit crabs, which are not considered true crabs. And porcelain crabs evolved from a type of lobster. Different lineages, same crab shape, but only those true crabs walk sideways. An international team led by researchers from Nagasaki University in Japan wanted to find out if that sideways shuffle is also part of the crab's evolutionary success story. The researchers built a variety of crab like environment tanks filled with seawater, freshwater, brackish water, or kept dry with or without sand, whatever mimicked their natural environment. Then they put one of 50 different species of true crabs in the tanks in circular plastic arenas about the size of a Hula hoop and recorded their movement for 10 minutes. Of the 50 species, they found that 35 were sideways movers and 15 walked forwards. Now what was really interesting, there was almost no middle ground, no diagonal walkers. They mapped the data onto an evolutionary tree of crab lineages. And from the base of the tree, all early lineages were forward walkers. But then there's this one branch point about 200 million years ago. After that ancestor, almost all sublineages became sideways walkers. Now, there are a few exceptions. Lineages that reverted back to forward walking. And remember, evolution doesn't happen with purpose. It's just random mutations being selected for if they keep animals alive. The team who shared their work in a preprint in the journal Elife noticed these reversions tend to show up in groups who had other ways of avoiding predators, like spider crabs that camouflage themselves or pea crabs that hide inside clams. So maybe the need to move sideways was less important in those groups. And the skill was gradually lost. But the big surprise here is that the iconic sideways lick emotion of true crabs is a rare event in evolution. It happened once in a branch of true crabs and was pretty stable in descendants. It may have also happened a few other times in like crab spiders and leafhopper nymphs, but that's for another paper. Thinking back to the meme that everything becomes crab, it seems the crab body is easier to evolve and reinvent than crabby behaviors.
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Dr. Samantha Amin
How do I know this is my body? I remember being nine Years old and staying up late contemplating why I could only hear my thoughts and no one else's. Your brain's constantly stitching together signals from your eyes, ears, skin and muscles to construct this like seamless sense of awareness of our bodies. It feels effortless, but for some people, that feeling just slips spontaneously. They describe floating above themselves, watching from the outside, fully conscious, just elsewhere. Out of body experiences are part of what researchers call psi phenomena. These are extraordinary experiences, like psychic dreams, telepathic impressions, or sensing something before it happens. We're going to chat with the researcher who rigorously puts these experiences to the test to learn more about consciousness itself. Welcome to the show, Marina.
Dr. Marina Weiler
Hello, thanks for having me.
Dr. Samantha Amin
Thrilled to chat and get to learn more about this topic. And I wanted to start by asking how common are out of body experiences and how do you define them? As a scientist, out of body experiences
Dr. Marina Weiler
are actually more common than many people think. Some studies point out that they can occur in even 20% of the population. So anything between 10, 15 and 20% of the general population. And in terms of definition, out of body experiences are usually defined as the feeling that we are experiencing the road and reality outside our physical bodies. So it's usually short. Some of them can be longer, but usually just minutes of experience that you know you are not inside your physical body. And we also call that that disembodiment.
Dr. Samantha Amin
Interesting. So 20% of people, is it like always in a dream scenario? Is it more likely with anesthesia? Like, is there. What's the most common type or way that people experience that?
Dr. Marina Weiler
The most common type would be during sleep, so throughout the night. But they can happen throughout many other circumstances. So many people have out of body experiences spontaneously when they are awake. Meditating is a very common circumstance that people are just sitting quietly meditating, and then suddenly they find themselves out of their bodies. They can be induced to, which is very interesting. People engage into courses and techniques to have out of body experiences on demand. And these ingesting techniques are mostly based on visualization and meditation techniques. They can also happen during psychedelic experiences, so they are commonly reported. Many out of body experiences happen during cardiac arrest, so they're called near death experiences. And they can also be induced by hypnosis.
Dr. Samantha Amin
I was going to ask you about all these things and I wasn't sure if they would count. In fact, I've had a lot of dreams where I feel like I'm floating and looking down at myself playing at a scene. But I wouldn't have if you had asked me, have I ever had an out of body experience. I would have said no because I didn't realize that that counted. So I wanted to ask, have you experienced this as well?
Dr. Marina Weiler
It's interesting what you just said that because to me you just described an out of body experience like you're flying, you're floating and you see your physical body. But many people call them dreams because it's a word, is a concept that when you are not awake, whatever you experience is a dream. But out of body experiences, they feel a little different compared to dreams. They are more real compared to normal dreams, so they're more vivid. And the sense of reality is also a little bit different compared to dreams. But you just described to me a very common mundane, what I would say people are just sleeping and then they find themselves floating in their bedrooms and they look down and they see their physical body. So this is a very commonly reported out of body experience. And I've had many dreams that I'm flying. I wouldn't call them out of body experiences because I never had the questioning, the metacognitive aspect that I am not in my physical body, which is also different from a dream, from a lucid dream, for example, where the person doesn't necessarily feel disembodied. So. But I had, I would say out of body experiences during psychedelic experiences, but not as spontaneously as most people report.
Dr. Samantha Amin
How do you describe the baseline sense of self and what that typically looks like in the brain? What does it mean for us to feel in our body most moments? And what do we know so far about how it differs during this disembodiment experience?
Dr. Marina Weiler
So our normal sense of embodiment is we are always embodied, right? You are experiencing the world and reality inside your physical body and you can feel your limbs and you can feel and you have visual experiences, you have auditory experiences, you have your vestibular processing. So you have a sense that you are inside your physical body and you are Samantha, I am Marina. I'm separated from my peers, I'm separated from everyone else. So I have a cohesive and coherent sense of embodiment. And that makes sense to me. Understanding space and time during an out of body experience. Some experiences can be very similar to that, but they are just not in their physical bodies. And the OB body, how I like to call they usually feel lighter. Some people describe feeling transparent. Some people describe that they can pass through objects and walls and the ceiling and go flying and floating across the city or the universe. Some people describe that the OB body is more elastic and more like a rubber band. The Modes of locomotion, as I mentioned, people are just flying and floating and many times they're just teleporting. As soon as they think about something, they're just suddenly at that place without actually moving with their legs, like we have to do across space. So the OBE place, the OBE body, seems like that there is no time and space. There are no physical constraints. Everything is possible there. They're able to perceive things that they are not usually perceiving in this physical reality. So for example, people can communicate, communicate in different forms, like telepathically with other beings. People are encountering entities that they don't usually encounter when they are awake in this physical reality. They can go to travel across galaxies and space and time and go visit somewhere else in another city, go visit some. Another friend in another room. So the OB space, space and the OB time is somehow different and everything's possible there.
Dr. Samantha Amin
An OB is out of body, right?
Dr. Marina Weiler
Yes. I'm sorry. Yes.
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Dr. Samantha Amin
No, that's okay. I want to make sure. I want to make sure. So I appreciate that this is a newer area of research, so maybe we don't know. But do you have a hypothesis of what the brain would look like during one of these experiences?
Dr. Marina Weiler
There has been some evidence that there is a specific area of the brain called temporoparactal junction, TPJ for short, which is a region localized here at the back of our head, especially the right hemisphere. There are some studies showing that the temporal parietal junction is involved in out of body experiences. And the temporal parietal junction is a very interesting area in the brain because it integrates many sensory modalities like vision, audition, the vestibular processing. So everything combines into that region of the brain. And the temporal parietal junction is that region responsible for our sense of embodiment. So I understand that I am Marina now. I am located inside my physical body and I understand my boundaries and my separation from other people because of the temporal parietal junction. And there has been some study that the researchers, the neurologists, they either stimulated the temporal parietal junction or even patients that have lesions in the temporal parietal junction and they have experiences that are similar to out of body experiences. So this is very important to what I said. They are similar to out of body experiences, but they are not what I really call a true out of body experience. So in those experiments where people are stimulating the temporal parietal junction, or patients that have lesions in the temporal parietal junction, they have something called alterations in their Bodily consciousness. So they might have the experience that they are floating, but those experiences, they tend to be very fragmented and illusory compared to real out of body experiences. And when they see their physical bodies, they're usually distorted. So the arms are larger, the hands are moving, which again is very different compared to, to reports of out of body experiences. So we don't usually, we don't completely know what is happening in the brain during an out of body experience. And the reason for those challenges is that out of body experiences, they tend to be spontaneous. So it's really hard to capture what's happening in the brain during an out of body experience. And for that reason, we tend to work with people that can induce individuals that can induce obs at will. So then we can either put an EEG or in the scanner and measure what's happening in the brain.
Dr. Samantha Amin
And you did a study with 40 participants trying to do that. Can you tell us more about what you found and in general, the approach to studying out of body experiences in a lab?
Dr. Marina Weiler
Yeah, so for that study we screened 40 participants, but then we ended up with 21 were eligible for the experiment, meaning that they could induce with some reliability and success in the lab. And for those studies, we were asking individuals to induce their OBEs while they were using the EEG cap. So we were measuring brain activity during the out of body experience and we also placed a target in another room and we asked the individuals to go see the target while they were having their ob. So we were testing something called extrasensory perception. We were just randomly choosing a target from a pool of 100 objects and that object was being displayed on a laptop. No one was in the other room. The researchers didn't know what the target was. We were completely blind and the doors were shut and the researchers were in a third room monitoring the EEG and eye movements as participants were inducing out of body experiences.
Dr. Samantha Amin
What did you find?
Dr. Marina Weiler
Well, we are still analyzing the EEG finding. I have a student right now trying to figure out brain signatures of eeg. The hypothesis is that probably individuals were EED in a theta state like hypnagogic, something compared to a hypnagogic state. But again, these are not definitive results. But for the targets, none of my participants was able to hit exactly what target was being displayed in another room. However, I had two participants that gave me spontaneous account and they were able to describe in details what was happening in the researcher's room that was in between their room and the target room. So they told me that as they were flying to go to the target room, they passed through the researcher's room and they were able to tell me what we were doing, where we were sitting. And it's interesting because the configuration actually changed in both of these experiences and they will change across participants. But they were able to tell me specifically what was happening during their experience and where we were sitting and what we were doing.
Dr. Samantha Amin
Now when I hear this, my assumption, based on my training in neuroscience is always, okay, perhaps there's some trick of perception here, or false memory. They're maybe hearing something and constructing a hypothesis of what's going on based on what they're hearing. Or maybe they're remembering something that they've built out and not all of it happened. That's how I assume and interpret. And I'm wondering, that's me using the framework that I understand and that I was trained in neuroscience. So I'm curious, do you interpret it the same way? And if not, have you had to come up with a new framework for understanding what's happening in the brain during these experiences?
Dr. Marina Weiler
It's interesting because many scientists, they have the same interpretation as you have. It's like a memory reconstruction. And there is some evidence that actually defies and challenges that interpretation of OBEs. And the evidence that I'm talking about is like those instances that people are able to tell what's happening in a completely different scenario than what their physical bodies is located. Sometimes they can visit places and locations that they've never heard about, they've never been about, they've never been to. So it's really hard to reconstruct from memory a place that you've never been to, or talk about people visiting people and getting information that you've never been exposed to. So that would be a challenge. So for example, during cardiac arrest, people have out of body experiences and they are able to describe exactly what is happening during their surgeries. And they see the medical personnel and they know what they're talking about, and they know where the instruments and the tools are placed, exactly what drawer, what did this person do, how they clean their hands. So all of these details are really hard to be captured just by memory reconstruction because people have never been exposed to this. And I have a different framework to understand. And the framework would be that consciousness is actually non local and it's not being produced by the brain. We call this the brain filter theory, that the brain is just filtering out information that is already there, that is non local and doing out of body experiences. We are having access to this known Local consciousness.
Dr. Samantha Amin
That's really interesting. I was raised in the school of thought that everything happens in the brain. The brain's the organ, and the mind is kind of what it produces. And the psychological aspect and awareness of what the organ is doing is the mind. So do you have kind of a different definition for brain versus mind?
Dr. Marina Weiler
Correct. And you are not alone. I was trained like that. Everyone's trained like that. This is what we learn during school, during college, especially if you go to neuroscience. That the mind is produced by the brain. Correct. And that's called physicalism or materialism. So the mind can be reduced to the brain. And in this other framework that we called post materialistic, we are actually hypothesizing that the mind is not produced by the brain, that the mind is a fundamental aspect of reality, and the brain is just a filter. And through this filter, the brain is constructing space and time and making sense of our reality and building these 3D reality. So again, we go back to the sense of embodiment. The sense of embodiment that I am here located within the physical constraints of my body, and I am separated from everyone else is just a cognitive construct of the brain to make sense of our reality, to make sense of our physical reality. But that is not a fundamental aspect of reality. Space and time are not fundamental aspects of reality. Consciousness is. So in this framework, consciousness or mind or information, and some people give other names to it, some people can call God, larger consciousness system. It's a fundamental aspect of reality, and that is all there is. And the physical reality comes after that. The physical reality is just a. Is just a place that we are here embodied. And you are Samantha and I am Marina to experience a reality. And then we have a physical body, and then we have a brain that construct space and time. So then we can make sense of this physical reality. And a good way to think about it. A good analogy. So the television or the radio is not creating the information. It's just a device. It's just a hardware. So the radio waves, the television waves, they already exist, regardless of the device. They are everywhere and we don't see them. So consciousness would be the same analogy. So consciousness is everywhere, and it exists regardless of the brain, but the brain is just capturing those waves that are out there, transducing the signal, translating the signal into something meaningful. And during that translation, it is constructing space and time so we can make sense of this physical reality that is based on sense on space and time. So it's a very similar. Or the Internet. So the waves the information is all out there. But once we go to and we open a browser and we type www.whateverwebsite, you are channeling into one of these waves and you are capturing that information. But the signals and the waves, they are there regardless of the hardware.
Dr. Samantha Amin
So if it's about 20% of the population who experiences these, is there anything different about those people? Do they have certain personality or psychological traits that maybe predict the likelihood of being someone who experiences these things?
Dr. Marina Weiler
Yes, there are studies showing that out of body experiencers they might have a higher level of absorption, which is just this ability that some individuals have to be more absorbed into their environment and what is happening to them. So for example, if you're watching a movie, some people are really absorbed into the story while others tend to be more distracted. So absorption might be a trait associated with out of body experiences. And old studies have also showed have also found that fantasy proneness might also be associated with out of body experiences.
Dr. Samantha Amin
I also read that you were saying people who experience out of body experiences report having higher empathy. What's the connection there?
Dr. Marina Weiler
The connection is that out of body experiences can lead to increased empathy. So one of the mechanisms that that would happen would be through ego dissolution. That is also, it's very well known in the psychedelic field, out of body experiences can also lead to ego dissolution, the disembodiment feeling. So once you are disembodied and you lose the sense of self, it's going to be easier for someone to step into someone else's shoes and to understand the perspective through someone else's eyes, thus increasing empathy.
Dr. Samantha Amin
Thank you so much, Marina, for being on our show.
Dr. Marina Weiler
Thank you, Sam.
Dr. Samantha Amin
That's Dr. Marina Weiler, a neuroscientist and assistant professor in the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia.
Liv Perez
Then I thought, what if I've scaled businesses? What if I scaled my philanthropy? What if I did as much in one year as I've done in my whole life? See how your wealth could have even greater meaning@creativeplanning.com impact.
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Dr. Marina Weiler
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I just sold a pair like that on ebay.
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Dr. Samantha Amin
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Dr. Samantha Amin
Find what you love, sell what you don't. Ebay Things People Love. A popular K beauty ingredient may help inspire a new antibiotic. Now, if you're a fan of Korean skincare or even just casually bought stuff off of Hudson Williams viral skincare routine, then you may have seen the words cica or centella on a few labels. These aliases describe the small leafy herb Centella asiatica, which has been long used across Asia, but it's become more globally recognized through its use in Korean skincare. In skincare, it's usually used for soothing irritation and barrier repair, but the plant also contains a whole family of bioactive compounds. A new study zeroed in on one of those compounds and found it may also help slow the growth of certain bacteria. That's pretty swell, given the rise of antimicrobial resistance. More than a million people already die each year from antibiotic resistant infections, and it's getting worse. Over the next 25 years, deaths are projected to add up to roughly three deaths every minute. Meanwhile, the drug discovery pipeline is notoriously thin. The WHO continues to call for a new generation of antibiotics that target bacteria in new ways, instead of more variations on drugs that we already have. And that is where this team, led by researchers from the University of Kent, comes right in. They were interested in a bioactive compound in centella called madecassic acid. Now, not because it's in skincare, that's just a coincidence, but because it's known to be antibacterial. Previous research just hadn't figured out how yet. Madecassic acid happens to look pretty similar to a steroid that blocks an enzyme found in bacteria. So they put bacterial cell membranes in a dish and added madecassic acid to see if it affected the enzyme. And it did. So next, they tested it on live drug resistant E. Coli in a dish, specifically a strain that's a major cause of antibiotic resistant UTIs and bloodstream infections around the world. They wanted to see if madecassic acid could slow the bacteria's growth. And it worked again, slowing growth by more than 60%. Now, it didn't actually kill the E. Coli the way you'd want an actual medicine to, but that's where the biochemistry comes in. The researchers made three chemically modified versions of the acid to see if that could improve its activity. Now, the results were mixed, but one variant with an added chemical tail actually killed the E. Coli when it was at really high doses, something that the natural version couldn't do. The enzyme that madecassic acid attacks helps bacteria generate energy, and it's not found in humans, which is great for specificity when it comes to making a drug. It's also not the target of any antibiotics on the market today, making it really promising for future medicines. Now, this isn't at all ready to hit the shelves and definitely don't go using your skincare for a uti. Ooh, that would not be great. They still have a lot of testing to do to figure out more potent versions of the molecule that work at lower doses before they can even start testing in actual humans. But it's a reminder of how much science is hiding in everyday places and how an ingredient from the back of your skincare bottle can do wildly different things in the hands of a chemistry for Warner Bros. Discovery. Curiosity Weekly is produced by the team at Wheelhouse DNA. The senior producer and editorial correspondent is Teresa Carey. Our producer is Chiara Noni. Our audio engineer is Nick Kharisimi, and head of production for Wheelhouse DNA is Cassie berman. And I'm Dr. Samantha Yuimeen thanks for listening. Marketers. You know that feeling when your creative
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Curiosity Weekly – Episode Summary
Podcast: Curiosity Weekly by Discovery
Host: Dr. Samantha Yammine
Episode Title: What Out-of-Body Experiences Reveal About Consciousness
Date: May 27, 2026
Guest: Dr. Marina Weiler, neuroscientist, Division of Perceptual Studies, University of Virginia
This episode delves into out-of-body experiences (OBEs): those uncanny moments when people report feeling like they’ve left their physical bodies, observing themselves from an external perspective. Dr. Samantha Yammine hosts Dr. Marina Weiler, an expert in the neuroscience of extraordinary experiences, to unpack the science behind OBEs, what they suggest about consciousness, and why they're more common than you might think. The episode also touches on evolution in crabs and a discovery in Korean skincare that hints at new antibiotic strategies.
"OBEs are actually more common than many people think. Some studies point out that they can occur in even 20% of the population."
— Dr. Marina Weiler (08:23)
"...the TPJ is responsible for our sense of embodiment ... when stimulated or lesioned, it can lead to alterations in bodily consciousness, including floating sensations ... but often not typical 'full' OBEs."
— Dr. Marina Weiler (15:09)
“Once you are disembodied and you lose the sense of self, it's going to be easier for someone to step into someone else's shoes and to understand the perspective through someone else's eyes, thus increasing empathy.”
— Dr. Marina Weiler (28:08)
| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |------------|----------------------------------------------------| | 01:24 | Host introduction and episode overview | | 07:18 | Introduction to out-of-body experiences | | 08:08 | Start of interview with Dr. Marina Weiler | | 08:23 | Definition and prevalence of OBEs | | 09:18 | Triggers: sleep, meditation, psychedelics, NDEs | | 10:41 | Discussion: dreams vs. out-of-body experiences | | 12:06 | Description of the embodied self and OB state | | 15:09 | Neuroscience—temporo-parietal junction | | 18:09 | Research: Lab study, methods, and findings | | 19:24 | Reports of information acquisition during OBEs | | 21:27 | Interpreting OBE information, "brain filter" theory| | 23:38 | Brain vs. mind, physicalism vs. post-materialism | | 27:12 | Personality traits linked to OBE | | 28:08 | OBEs, ego dissolution, and increased empathy | | 28:51 | End of main interview |
For listeners seeking accessible science and new perspectives on consciousness, this episode provides clear explanations and challenges traditional materialist views—backed by real research and fascinating conversation.