This guys brain is sorta having an out of body experience...
In any case, The March 6 issue of the journal Neurology has an article in it entitled, Out-of-body experience and arousal. where they found
that some people's brains already may be predisposed to these sorts of experiences. They found that an out-of-body experience is statistically as likely to occur during a near death experience as it is to occur during the transition between wakefulness and sleep. Nelson suggests that phenomena in the brain's arousal system, which regulates different states of consciousness including REM sleep and wakefulness, may be the cause for these types of out-of-body displays.
Of course this research was done by surveying people who had out of body experiences, so who really knows.
Here's a more in depth article
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Here's a juicy one from the Aug 24 Science.
Labs in Switzerland and the UK have independently used visual tricks to induce "out-of-body" experiences in healthy lab volunteers. At the UK lab -- the ever-productive Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London -- they seem to have combined some…
This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
The idea of an out-of-body experiences seems strange and hokey - certainly not one that would grace one of the world's top scientific journals. So it may seem surprising that two years ago, Science…
>Of course this research was done by surveying people who had out of body experiences, so who really knows.
Meaning that these people are inherently untrustworthy? I don't quite understand this comment...
Meaning conclusions drawn from survey research are inherently limited. One of the reasons (among many others) being people are not trustworthy
Fair enough - I couldn't figure out if you were saying that or whether people claiming to have had OBEs were especially untrustworthy.
The thought had crossed my mind - but that's only a gut reaction ;)