5 Ways to Leave Your Body (Discover Magazine)

Want to teleport through space or travel the world 
at will? Out-of-body technology can alter your sense of place and set you free.
[font size="1"]by Sherry Baker[/font]

...The research suggests that our concept of self, along with a related quality called presence (the sense of being immersed in a location or environment), need not be tied to our physical bodies. Although most of the current research is still lab-based, scientists have already imbued test participants with the sense of moving from their own bodies into another form, such as a Barbie doll, or watching themselves from a distance in a willful out-of-body experience. The new body-swapping and teleportation techniques illustrate the incredible imaginative potential of the brain and the malleability of perception.

[font size="1"]1. RAISE YOUR THIRD HAND[/font]
Humans were long assumed to have an unshakable innate body plan, meaning that our brains and hard-wired sense of self could never accept having anything other than one head, two arms, and two legs. But in 1998, University of Pittsburgh psychiatrists Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen conducted the now-classic “rubber-hand illusion,” which showed the brain could feel ownership of a body part that was not truly its own. In that experiment, a research subject’s real hand was stroked while a prosthetic hand was also stroked in exactly the same way. In less than two minutes, most participants felt that the rubber limb was part of their own body, provided their own hand was hidden while the rubber one stayed in view....

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/05-ways-to-leave-your-body