Science of out of body experience

[Sunnybayes]

The Science of Out-of-Body Experiences - TIME

Get ready to see yourself in a new light. Two papers released this week by the journal Science describe what seem to be the first lab-induced out-of-body experiences in healthy people.

Just stumbled on this. Thought people might find this interesting.

[Erki]

Shouldn't this be in the Psychic/Paranormal forum?

[Blueskied]

An OBE is an altered state of consciousness, so i think it fits in this forum.

[Niki]

I think many people are going to use this to say " See, out of body experiences arent real!" but when you read the article, they admit that they dont know how out of body experiences happen in real life situations. I think its funny because nobody walks around with virtual glasses or what that thing calls. It's just sience trying to beat something they cant beat.


Nice try

[mysterygal]

What is an out of body experience? I know that it's the feeling of being outside of one's body, but could someone please explain it in more depth?

[Mark Lapierre]

Niki: The research papers themselves don't make any claims about the validity of full out of body experiences. It's just a step towards greater understanding. Is that such a bad thing? Are we wrong to try to understand self-awareness?

Mysterygal: That's about it. You feel as if your 'self' is outside your body. In some OBE's during surgery, patients have reported feeling as if they were floating near the ceiling, looking down on their own body, hearing the doctors talking. Others have reported similar experiences in different settings, but the common theme is the very strong perception of being outside your body (though not necessarily being able to see your body).

That's what people experience, but if you're after an explanation of why, well, this is as far as science has gone. There are plenty of ideas to be found, but none that I've come across offers anything to validate them.

[beautyscientist]

I think that the great beauty of science is its ability to explain things that our intuitive brains just can't get. Out of body experiences have bothered me for years because they seem to imply the existance of a soul. If we have a soul than that implies all sorts of other things which are very hard to understand. I didn't think that OBEs would ever be something that could be studied objectively - not in my lifetime at any rate.

But now it turns out that they can be produced at will in the laboratory.

This pleases me immensely. Another area that had seemed beyond the power of reason and rationality has been explored, and found to comply with the rules that apply elsewhere.

[Calculusaurus]

Get ready to see yourself in a new light. Two papers released this week by the journal Science describe what seem to be the first lab-induced out-of-body experiences in healthy people.

This is why journalists shouldn't be trusted. Lab-induced OBE's have been going on in research laboratories for several years now. e.g. read something by Susan Blackmore.

[Calculusaurus]

Originally Posted by beautyscientist

I think that the great beauty of science is its ability to explain things that our intuitive brains just can't get. Out of body experiences have bothered me for years because they seem to imply the existance of a soul.

But saying that OBE's imply the existence of a soul is itself bad science. If science is supposed to transcend human intuition (which is notoriously faulty), then I wouldn't trust your own intuition that OBE = souls.

Lots of research has been done on OBEs. And to date, there has been nothing but inconclusive results regarding whether or not anything actually goes outside the body. Not that any of us really know what goes on during an OBE, but the current research doesn't suggest anything beyond OBE's being experiences created and experienced entirely within the mind, similar to how dreams are experienced.

[beautyscientist]

Yes quite right, that an OBE implies the existance of is not that rigorous. It is just that when you get reports from people near to death saying that they seemed to be floating above their bodies is rather consistent with the completely irrational belief that we have a soul that leaves our body when it dies. I accept that it is a long way from proving it. It is just that for me personally the consistent nature of reports of OBEs was the biggest challenge to my reason based world view. This research has removed that challenge.

[Akashic_Librarian]

OK people are getting confused here. The Scientific method is the only way of objectively verifying anything. If the world as a whole will ever believe in OBE's or Astral Projection, it will be because science proves it. And eventually Science in some form or another will prove it. Science can prove everything, but it nedes to catch up with whatever its trying to prove.

[Calculusaurus]

Originally Posted by Akashic_Librarian

OK people are getting confused here. The Scientific method is the only way of objectively verifying anything. If the world as a whole will ever believe in OBE's or Astral Projection, it will be because science proves it. And eventually Science in some form or another will prove it. Science can prove everything, but it nedes to catch up with whatever its trying to prove.

As far as I know, any well-respected scientist doesn't deny occurance of OBE's. It's like lucid dreaming. A few decades ago, scientists were skeptical of lucid dreaming, but now it's common knowledge that they do, in fact, occur.

If you brush up on your definitions, though, you'll understand that "Astral Projection" is an outdated, verifiably false interpretation of the OBE. Using Astral Projection as a theory for OBE's is now like using Zeus's thunderbolts as a theory for lightning. It was a theory developed based on one person's subjective experiences, using poor dedutive reasoning for why things occurred as they did in her own experiences. Now, we understand that OBE's occur in such a variety of ways, and Astral Projection simply fails to explain most of them.

However, that's the "official" definition of Astral Projection. The casual usage of "Astral Projection" is more lenient. Most people use the term now in place of "OBE" (probably because it sounds more fantastical) without regard to the specifics of the original crackpot theory.

[Anagogy]

Originally Posted by beautyscientist

Yes quite right, that an OBE implies the existance of is not that rigorous. It is just that when you get reports from people near to death saying that they seemed to be floating above their bodies is rather consistent with the completely irrational belief that we have a soul that leaves our body when it dies. I accept that it is a long way from proving it. It is just that for me personally the consistent nature of reports of OBEs was the biggest challenge to my reason based world view. This research has removed that challenge.

......Um, what research? All that article says is that they created a virtual reality simulation of what it would be like to be out of body and people said it felt like they were really outside their bodies..... I could be way off base here, but that doesn't tell me very much. Basically all it told me was that if you screw with your brains visual perspective of where your body is, it screws with your mind/brain's ability to determine its physically relative location. For some reason that doesn't seem very profound to me. OBE's may not be real, but this article doesn't provide much evidence to refute their "realness". It doesn't refute the hundreds of documented cases where NDE'ers observe physical phenomena clearly outside the range of the scientifically categorized 5 senses.

Originally Posted by beautyscientist

I think that the great beauty of science is its ability to explain things that our intuitive brains just can't get. Out of body experiences have bothered me for years because they seem to imply the existance of a soul. If we have a soul than that implies all sorts of other things which are very hard to understand. I didn't think that OBEs would ever be something that could be studied objectively - not in my lifetime at any rate.

But now it turns out that they can be produced at will in the laboratory.

This pleases me immensely. Another area that had seemed beyond the power of reason and rationality has been explored, and found to comply with the rules that apply elsewhere.

I'm curious as to why you feel threatened by the existence of a soul. Sure, maybe it makes the world a little or perhaps even a lot more complex, but if you ask me, that could be a good thing.

For a different perspective on this issue, and other kicks and giggles, you should read:

Amazon.com: Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-death Experience: Books: Kenneth Ring,Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino,Caroline Myss

and

Amazon.com: Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation: Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged: Books: Ian Stevenson