Out -of-body experiences explained

By hrynyshyn on August 24, 2007.

The New York Times' Sandra Blakeslee reports today that a group of researchers has managed to induce the famous "out-of-body" feeling that sometimes accompanies near-death experiences. So goes another piece of evidence for the "soul." They employed virtual reality gear to play havoc the senses:

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one's body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Dr. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, 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.

Other scientists have in the past used electrical stimulation to duplicate the feeling that many religious devotees describe as a spiritual connection to god. Disembodied voices in the head are now known to be symptomatic of neurological imbalances (schizophrenia, for example). So what's left?

And here's the Nature report on same.

Such experiences have been claimed by spiritualists to represent evidence of a soul. But the new research shows that it is possible to create a similar sensation simply by tricking the mind.

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So what's left?

With respect, there hasn't been anything left since long before either of us were born. Out-of-body experiences have never constituted evidence for souls, because Occam's Razor didn't permit 'soul' to be a valid explanation - at best, it was an explanation that we might one day be forced to resort to one day in the future if simpler explanations didn't hold up.

At present, we don't need to resort to souls to explain any aspect of reality. We have no reason to presume that they're there, and existing formulations of what souls might be have been shown to be incoherent.

There are always more gaps that some people will insist contain gods, but that doesn't mean that god-belief has any support. Same deal with souls.

By Caledonian (not verified) on 24 Aug 2007 #permalink