Olaf Blanke

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Olaf Blanke (born 1969) is a Swiss-German physician, neurologist, and neuroscientist who studies how the brain creates self-awareness. He holds the Bertarelli Foundation Chair in Cognitive Neuroprosthetics at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and leads the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain Mind Institute. He is also a professor of Neurology at Geneva University Hospitals. Blanke is best known for research on the neural basis of self-consciousness and out-of-body experiences.

Blanke trained in medicine at several universities, including Münster, the Free University of Berlin, and Sorbonne University, from 1989 to 1996. He earned his doctoral degree in neuroscience under Otto-Joachim Grüsser at the Free University of Berlin, studying multisensory control of eye movements. He then worked in Geneva on presurgical epilepsy research, Epileptology, cognitive neuroscience, and brain imaging, with Margitta Seeck and Nicolas de Tribolet. He joined EPFL in 2004 as an assistant professor and became a full professor in 2012. Since 2004 he has directed the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain Mind Institute, focusing on robotics and virtual reality. In 2013 he was named a full professor at the University of Geneva, and in 2018 he became the founding director of EPFL’s Center for Neuroprosthetics, with research activities in Geneva, Fribourg, Sion, and Lausanne.

Blanke also contributes to the field beyond academia as a board member of the neuroscience company Mindmaze and co-founder of Metaphysiks. His work uses virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality, along with MRI and robotics, to study and induce altered states of bodily self-consciousness. His research has mapped a cortical network underlying bodily self-consciousness, supported by data from patients experiencing out-of-body experiences, presence hallucinations, and Doppelgänger experiences. In medicine, his focus is on cognitive neuroprosthetics—developing VR and robotics-based tools for diagnosis and therapy in conditions such as chronic pain (including complex regional pain syndrome), phantom limb pain after amputation, and spinal cord injury. He has recently explored new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies.

Blanke’s work also explores broader questions about conscious experiences, personal identity, and related topics such as astral travel, the sense of presence, free will, and thought insertion. He has received several awards, including the Cloëtta Prize (2012), the Robert Bing Prize (2006), and the Pfizer Prize (2005).