The research also found that most patients reported they had out-of-body sensations only after they had experienced dizziness for the first time. This suggests, Lopez said, that problems with the vestibular system were a factor in creating the odd sensations. Out-of-body experiences have been documented for centuries, at least since the late s. Then, the two somatic individuals approached each other, merged, and the vertigo disappeared.
When do OBEs occur?
But the new study builds on other recent research that links the feeling, at least in some cases, to faulty wiring in the vestibular system, he said. Terence Hines, a professor of psychology at Pace University in New York and author of the book "Pseudoscience and the Paranormal" Prometheus Books, , told Live Science that the new study makes sense given the role of the vestibular system in the human body.
It's one reasonable explanation. Other factors have indeed been linked to out-of-body sensations. Also, Lopez said it is common to experience "floating" or "sinking" sensations while falling asleep, dreaming or waking. He excluded occurrences around sleep from his study, because they're not necessarily associated with a faulty vestibular system.
He also excluded any sensations associated with drug or alcohol use. Transcranial magnetic stimulation in the same subjects impaired mental transformation of the participant's own body. No such effects were found with stimulation of another site or for imagined spatial transformations of external objects, suggesting the selective implication of the TPJ in mental imagery of one's own body.
In a follow up study, Arzy et al. When subjects performed mental imagery with an embodied location, there was increased activation of a region called the "extrastriate body area" EBA , but when subjects performed mental imagery with a disembodied location, as reported in OBEs, there was increased activation in the region of the TPJ.
This leads Arzy et al.
Blanke and colleagues thus propose that the right temporal-parietal junction is important for the sense of spatial location of the self, and that when these normal processes go awry, an OBE arises. In August Blanke's lab published research in Science demonstrating that conflicting visual-somatosensory input in virtual reality could disrupt the spatial unity between the self and the body.
During multisensory conflict, participants felt as if a virtual body seen in front of them was their own body and mislocalized themselves toward the virtual body, to a position outside their bodily borders. This indicates that spatial unity and bodily self-consciousness can be studied experimentally and is based on multisensory and cognitive processing of bodily information. In August , Henrik Ehrsson, then at the Institute of Neurology at University College of London now at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden , published research in Science demonstrating the first experimental method that, according to the scientist's claims in the publication, induced an out-of-body experience in healthy participants.
The study participant sits in a chair wearing a pair of head-mounted video displays. These have two small screens over each eye, which show a live film recorded by two video cameras placed beside each other two metres behind the participant's head. The image from the left video camera is presented on the left-eye display and the image from the right camera on the right-eye display. The participant sees these as one " stereoscopic " 3D image, so they see their own back displayed from the perspective of someone sitting behind them. The researcher then stands just beside the participant in their view and uses two plastic rods to simultaneously touch the participant's actual chest out-of-view and the chest of the illusory body, moving this second rod towards where the illusory chest would be located, just below the camera's view.
The participants confirmed that they had experienced sitting behind their physical body and looking at it from that location. Both critics and the experimenter himself note that the study fell short of replicating "full-blown" OBEs. As with previous experiments which induced sensations of floating outside of the body, Ehrsson's work does not explain how a brain malfunction might cause an OBE. Essentially, Ehrsson created an illusion that fits a definition of an OBE in which "a person who is awake sees his or her body from a location outside the physical body.
In , Sam Parnia and colleagues investigated out of body claims by placing figures on suspended boards facing the ceiling, not visible from the floor. Parnia wrote "anybody who claimed to have left their body and be near the ceiling during resuscitation attempts would be expected to identify those targets. If, however, such perceptions are psychological, then one would obviously not expect the targets to be identified.
Out-of-body experience
Following on from the work of Pim van Lommel in the Netherlands, the study aims to examine near-death experiences in 1, cardiac arrest survivors and so determine whether people without a heartbeat or brain activity can have documentable out-of-body experiences. In Parnia issued a statement indicating that the first phase of the project has been completed and the results are undergoing peer review for publication in a medical journal.
Only two out of the patients reported any visual experiences, and one of them described events that could be verified. On October 6, , the results of the study were published in the journal Resuscitation. Among those who reported a perception of awareness and completed further interviews, 46 per cent experienced a broad range of mental recollections in relation to death that were not compatible with the commonly used term of NDEs.
These included fearful and persecutory experiences. Only 9 per cent had experiences compatible with NDEs and 2 per cent exhibited full awareness compatible with OBEs with explicit recall of 'seeing' and 'hearing' events. One case was validated and timed using auditory stimuli during cardiac arrest. Rather, it was a patient giving a supposedly accurate report of events during his resuscitation. He didn't identify the pictures, he described the defibrillator machine noise. But that's not very impressive since many people know what goes on in an emergency room setting from seeing recreations on television.
As of May , a posting at the UK Clinical Trials Gateway website describes plans for AWARE II, a two-year multicenter observational study of patients experiencing cardiac arrest, with subjects being recruited as August 1, and a trial end date of May 31, A recent functional imaging study reported the case of a woman who could experience out of body experience at will.
She reported developing the ability as a child and associated it with difficulties in falling sleep. Her OBEs continued into adulthood but became less frequent.
She was able to see herself rotating in the air above her body, lying flat, and rolling in the horizontal plane. She reported sometimes watching herself move from above but remained aware of her unmoving "real" body. The participant reported no particular emotions linked to the experience. Activations were mainly left-sided and involved the left supplementary motor area and supramarginal and posterior superior temporal gyri, the last two overlapping with the temporal parietal junction that has been associated with out-of-body experiences.
The cerebellum also showed activation that is consistent with the participant's report of the impression of movement during the ECE. There was also left middle and superior orbital frontal gyri activity, regions often associated with action monitoring. The Monroe Institute 's Nancy Penn Center is a facility specializing in or out-of-body experience induction. The International Academy of Consciousness in southern Portugal features the Projectarium, a spherical structure dedicated exclusively for practice and research on out-of-body experience. Astral projection is a paranormal interpretation of out-of-body experiences that assumes the existence of one or more non-physical planes of existence and an associated body beyond the physical.
Commonly such planes are called astral , etheric , or spiritual. Astral projection is often experienced as the spirit or astral body leaving the physical body to travel in the spirit world or astral plane. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Tyrrell, Apparitions , Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd, London, , pp. Deliberately induced, premortem, out-of-body experiences: An experimental and theoretical approach. With the eyes of the mind: An empirical analysis of out-of-body states. A Study of Magical Thinking. Implications for mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self consciousness".
American Journal of Psychotherapy. The reviewed evidence from neurological patients experiencing this striking dissociation between self and body shows that out of body experiences are culturally invariant phenomena that can be investigated scientifically. Bright lights, big Mystery.
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What Causes Spooky Out-of-Body Experiences?
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What Causes Spooky Out-of-Body Experiences? - Scientific American
Where Are the Letters? A Cross-Examination of Certain Phantasms. Astral Body and Other Astral Phenomena.
The Case for Astral Projection. Discarnate Influences in Human Life. The Mystery of the Human Double: Human Double and the Astral Planes. Practical Techniques of Astral Projection. The exteriorization of the mental body: The Mysteries of the Redemption: The Study and Practice of Astral Projection.
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