out of body experiences

[Scott Alister McKinley]

And now for something completely different:

The more I talk to psychology and neuroscience people the more I feel
like we're on the cusp of a genuine philosophical revolution when it
comes to what it means to be alive. The catalyst will be a deluge of
studies like the one reported below where scientists are able to
reproduce a sensation popularly believed to be paranormal,
supernatural or hallucinogenic in origin.

A systematic scientific study of these phenomena can completely change
the conversation about what human consciousness is, and how the sense
of "self" is continually constructed by brain.

Naturalistically yours,
Scott

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Scientists Induce Out-of-Body Sensation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/science/23cnd-body.html?hp

Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have
induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of
one's own body — - in healthy people, according to experiments being
published in the journal Science.

A reprensentation of one of the scenarios scientists used to study
out-of-body experiences.

When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the
goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they
feel as if they have left their bodies.

The research reveals that "the sense of having a body, of being in a
bodily self," is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams,
said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at
Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved
in the experiments.

Usually these sensory streams, which include including vision, touch,
balance and the sense of where one's body is positioned in space, work
together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information
coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are
thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes
apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as
the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different
body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually
ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a
neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. After
severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of
floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and
then, just as suddenly, find themselves back inside their body.
Out-of-body experiences have also been reported to occur during sleep
paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports and intense meditation
practices.

The new research is a first step in figuring out exactly how the brain
creates this sensation, he said.

The out-of-body experiments were conducted by two research groups
using slightly different methods intended to expand the so-called
rubber hand illusion.

In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a
rubber hand set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes
the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people
have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own.

When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, people wince and
sometimes cry out.

The illusion shows that body parts can be separated from the whole
body by manipulating a mismatch between touch and vision. That is,
when a person's brain sees the fake hand being stroked and feels the
same sensation, the sense of being touched is misattributed to the
fake.

The new experiments were designed to create a whole body illusion with
similar manipulations.

In Switzerland, Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at the École
Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, asked people to don
virtual reality goggles while standing in an empty room. A camera
projected an image of each person taken from the back and displayed 6
feet away. The subjects thus saw an illusory image of themselves
standing in the distance.

Then Dr. Blanke stroked each person's back for one minute with a stick
while simultaneously projecting the image of the stick onto the
illusory image of the person's body.

When the strokes were synchronous, people reported the sensation of
being momentarily within the illusory body. When the strokes were not
synchronous, the illusion did not occur.

In another variation, Dr. Blanke projected a "rubber body" — a cheap
mannequin bought on eBay and dressed in the same clothes as the
subject — into the virtual reality goggles. With synchronous strokes
of the stick, people's sense of self drifted into the mannequin.

A separate set of experiments were carried out by Dr. Henrik Ehrsson,
an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in
Helsinki.

Last year, when Dr. Ehrsson was, as he says, "a bored medical student
at University College London", he wondered, he said, "what would
happen if you 'took' your eyes and moved them to a different part of a
room? Would you see yourself where you eyes were placed? Or from where
your body was placed?"

To find out, Dr. Ehrsson asked people to sit on a chair and wear
goggles connected to two video cameras placed 6 feet behind them. The
left camera projected to the left eye. The right camera projected to
the right eye. As a result, people saw their own backs from the
perspective of a virtual person sitting behind them.

Using two sticks, Dr. Ehrsson stroked each person's chest for two
minutes with one stick while moving a second stick just under the
camera lenses — as if it were touching the virtual body.

Again, when the stroking was synchronous people reported the sense of
being outside their own bodies — in this case looking at themselves
from a distance where their "eyes" were located.

Then Dr. Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the
illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer
just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat
response as measured by sensors on their skin. They sweated and their
pulses raced.

They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get
hurt, Dr. Ehrsson said.

People who participated in the experiments said that they felt a sense
of drifting out of their bodies but not a strong sense of floating or
rotating, as is common in full-blown out of body experiences, the
researchers said.

The next set of experiments will involve decoupling not just touch and
vision but other aspects of sensory embodiment, including the felt
sense of the body position in space and balance, they said.

[Randy Cresap]

That is a little messed up -- deconstructing the sense of self like
that, and where is the ending point? That the self is an illusion,
there is no "center," and welcome to the world of paranoid
schizophrenia.

Of course I'm being overblown. But from a humanistic standpoint look
at how ideas such as "everything is genetically determined" have
influenced our society.

On another note, they broke the speed of light (I know, technically
not). They sent a particle through a quantum tunnel, and the
displacement per time exceeded the speed of light constant.

That particle's name was Trindon Holliday. And he returns kicks for
the LSU Tigers.

[Tro...@aol.com]

i was trying to decide whether or not to post back to this, b/c i'm not sure it's really relevant, but here goes anyway...

 

some of you probably know that when my son was born in january, i was injured during the delivery (he was a 10 lb. kid who came out the old-fashioned way), and i tore three cerebral arteries (both carotids and the left vertebral) and had vast areas of inflammation and stenosis (narrowing and beading) throughout my cerebrovascular blood vessels. they believe this was due to increased blood volume and the intense force required to push out a baby of that size. three to four weeks after his birth, despite the fact that they'd caught the injury and i was on stroke prevention medication and had been monitored in the ICU for two weeks, i had a stroke. i was lucky because it happened in the right occipital parietal, which as i understand it is a relatively "silent" area of the brain, i.e. doesn't control motor function, speech, etc. so i'm not drooling, can feed myself, and can perform to the outside world much like i did before...most of the effects are ones only i and those who are very close to me would notice.

 

however, i write this because i have the unique experience of having lived thru a stroke and having recognized it when it was happening...and much of this article that scott sent is similar to the sensations i experienced. i've since heard that a stroke is a "sensory experience," whatever that means. but i will tell you that as it happened, i had the oddest sensation of things around me physically slipping away, or of me slipping away from them. it was incredibly vivid, and at the same time i've never felt more detached from my physical self. it's incredibly difficult to articulate, but i described it at the time as an out of body experience...things like, i saw one foot moving in front of the other, or saw someone touch my arm, but had no sense of me experiencing those actions physically. it was incredibly bizarre.

 

in any case, if it hadn't been a stroke, i probably would have described the feeling as sort of cool, albeit scary. (i have to imagine this is what hardcore psychoactive drugs feel like, and it's probably why addiction to them happens) i write it because this was obviously a trick of my injured brain, and not some supernatural experience, altho i can imagine someone believing it was some sort of spiritual experience had i not been sick at the time.

 

not really sure what that contributes, but the article sparked me, so i wanted to post.

 

brittany

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