DEAD DO TOO DANCE PART 1

Sep 07, 2007 18:43

NDEs OOBEs ARE NOT IMAX FOR THE DEAD - PART ONE

The recent flurry started with this - spread hither and yon in the paranormal and even occultist media.  I was first notified on this piece if work by my good friend and fellow author Brad Steiger.

Experiments get close to 'out-of-body' experience

European scientists have come close to replicating the mysterious "out-of-body" experience that trauma survivors sometimes report feeling as death nears.

By E.J. Mundell

HealthDay

European scientists have come close to replicating the mysterious "out-of-body" experience that trauma survivors sometimes report feeling as death nears.

The results of two experiments on healthy volunteers, reported in the Aug. 24 issue of Science, offer what experts call a plausible neurological explanation for these uncanny events.

An "out-of-body" experience is the feeling of corporal detachment and of looking at your own body from some distance, and it may arise when various sensory systems or "modalities" - vision, touch and the sense of being in your body, called proprioception - become disconnected under stress.

The new research "shows that the integration of various sensory modalities is important for retaining our sense of where our body is, of where our self is in that body," explained Dr. Kevin Nelson, a leading researcher on near-death phenomena who was not involved in either of the new studies.

Far from being a rare occurrence, the "out-of-body" experience is actually quite common, as Nelson's own work has shown. "In fact, one of 20 people have had 'out-of-body' experiences," said Nelson, who is a neurology professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. "In our study of 55 normal, everyday people, 3 - about 6 percent - had had an 'out-of-body 'experience."

Still, it has been tough to fully investigate "out-of-body" experiences, because they are so uncontrolled and spontaneous.

So, in the two Science studies, researchers tried to recreate them for healthy volunteers.

In one case, volunteers in London were equipped with high-tech 3-D goggles with which they viewed a real-time 3-D film of their own bodies, taken from a perspective of about six feet behind them.

At the same time, a researcher used two plastic rods to simultaneously touch the volunteer's real chest (out of his or her view) and the filmed - but distant - version of their chest in exactly the same spot.

The result, according to the participants, was the sensation of sitting behind their physical body and looking at it from that six-foot distance.

"This was a bizarre, fascinating experience for the participants - it felt absolutely real for them and was not scary," the author the study, Dr. Henrik Ehrsson of the University College London's Institute of Neurology, said in a prepared statement.

Ehrsson even used a hammer to create the illusion that the distant, illusory body was going to be hit. When that happened, sensors on the volunteers' skin showed increased sweating, indicating that they felt the threat was real.

Another team, this time led by Olaf Blanke of the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, in Switzerland, tried a slightly different experiment. In this case, the participants watched one of three 3-D holographic projections: of their own body, the body of a dummy, or a square block placed directly in front of them.

In each instance, the image's "back" was stroked with a brush, sometimes in sync with a brush being stroked on the volunteer's own back. Immediately afterward, the person was blindfolded and backed up, then told to return to where he believed he had been standing before.

If the participants had viewed either the dummy body or the block, they invariably returned to the correct spot, suggesting that they had not lost the notion of their actual body's position. However, participants who had viewed the 3-D likeness of themselves typically overshot the mark and advanced to where the illusory duplicate had been.

One expert called the findings "intriguing."

"You are feeling this touch as if you are watching it - like you are somewhere else," said Paul Sanberg, director of the Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair at the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa.

"It's like those video games where you are driving a car, but the car is in front of you," he reasoned. "You aren't actually in the car, but, in essence, I think some people think they are in the car."

While Ehrsson claims to have recreated a true "out-of-body" experience in the lab, Blanke's group doesn't go so far. They noted that the participants said they understand that the video "them" was just an illusion - whereas people who typically have "out-of-body" experience believe they are observing their own body. "We have only induced some aspects of 'out-of-body' experience," the Swiss team concluded.

Nelson believes that neither team fully replicated the "out-of-body" state but did create a convincing "illusion."

"I think these are very clever and interesting experiments," he added. "And I think they show the importance of the visual system in how we integrate our identity of self in space."

In other words, the two experiments create a visual illusion that is so convincing to the brain that it somehow disrupts the usually seamless integration between the eyes, touch and proprioception, Nelson said. The result - which might also occur during sleep-wake transitions, as the brain is put under stress near death, or in certain medical conditions - is that sensation of temporarily losing contact with the body.

None of this means that vision is the key component, Nelson said. "If we were able to manipulate another (sense) in such a comprehensive or complete fashion, maybe we'd get similar results," he added.

"There's a simple way of proving that," he said. "Close your eyes. Can you still tell where you are or where your body is? You can. You have no visual input, yet you still retain that sense of self and where you are in space."

He agreed with Blanke that your close identification with your own body was essential to the illusion, since viewing a dummy body had no effect.

"Full body consciousness seems to require not just the 'bottom up' process of correlating sensory information but also the 'top down' knowledge about human bodies," Blanke said in a statement.

The new findings have implications beyond neuroscience, he added. They might lead to better and more "real" video gaming technologies, or even surgeries where doctors conduct procedures from a distance.

Blanke's research team even included one philosopher - because the connection between the body and consciousness runs to the heart of much of theology and philosophy.

Nelson said it's tempting - but probably erroneous - to infer any higher spiritual meaning from these scientific findings, however.

"Does this ultimately prove a certain duality or spiritual, Platonic kind of existence?" he said. "No, these are totally separate (investigations), and people get them muddled and confused."

Published: August 27. 2007 1:55AM

To which I say, bullshit. .  Shortly thereafter,  I wrote to my friends at les vampires:

Out of body - astral experiences

I appreciate your posting this here. Wow, this article has sure gotten lots of publicity.  I first heard about it from my writer-buddy Brad Steiger, and then it has popped up on various groups, including a super-secret group of occultists.  I get pretty frustrated with experiments that mimic a really esoteric phenomenon rather than, in any sense, explain it.

Someone sure got some grant money to prove what anybody who has ever taken a "virtual roller coaster ride" at a Cinerama or IMAX movie already knows -- that the human brain can get confused about wherethe body actually is under certain circumstances.

Unfortunately and sort of amusingly, on closer examination it says *nothing whatever* about OOBEs (Out-of-Body-Experiences) or NDEs (Near-Death Experiences) in that it demonstrates a very different phenomenon from that reported rather consistently in NDE and OOBE actual case reports.

Also, as recently observed, active mind vivid activities are often reported from the perspective of the  " parabody" (body of light, 'astral body, or call it what seems most fitting) while the 'experiencer' is flatlined and quite dead (at everything but the cellular level), when the brain cannot function the the material body.  There are also many reports of distant 'apparitions of the living' seen by friends or relatives at the same time the person identifying with the "parabody" recalls visiting them out of body  et al.   In other words, what the experimenters have done is duplicate not out of body reports, but Cinerama effect....the feeling of actual moving, the most famous being the 'star gate' scene in the original Cinerama version of Kubrick's 2001.  Very few people got to see it in Cinerama, even less got to see it in Cinerama without mescaline enhancement.  I was fortunate to have seen it at one of the then-few Cinerama theatres absolutely straight.  Very interesting, but not anything like an OOBE.

It is very like an old skeptical stage magician trick....do something vaguely resembling a reported phenomenon, then claim you have 'solved' a mystery that, in fact, you haven't even really addressed. Please mention this to anyone who reads that report....it flies in the face of well over a century of psychical research data gathered by the Society for Psychical Research, among others.

Paranormal51.com recorded this typical case:

Entered by: ghost1976
Entered on: 07/29/07
Date of Experience: 07/15/07
Postalcode where the Experience Occurred: 411 021
Age of Subject: 45
Gender of Subject: Male

"I began to move through tunnels in my mind, very brightly coloured and getting more and more real. There began to be places, which appeared very, very clearly... I was thinking how high I was, in the sense that on looking down, my feet seemed a very long way away...

"I suddenly realised that I really was high up and looking down on my own body. I think at this point I was at about ceiling level and gently drifting about. Soon after I had begun talking, I saw the cord. I looked down from where I was and saw, apparently coming from where my tummy should be, a cord. It was not really any colour, but closest to a slightly shiny greyish-white and it was slowly moving... I reached out my hand but found two things. Firstly, if I wanted a hand I could have one, or as many as I liked. Secondly, it wasn't necessary to have a hand, I could move the cord at will, and had great fun doing it too. I was quite consciously talking all this time but very fast, as I wanted to say so much and tell them every thing I was doing." - Susan Blackmore, lecturer and writer, recounting her own out-of-body experience during her student days at Oxford, from The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences.

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are brief, bizarre experiences involving a sensation of floating outside one's body, perceiving the world from a location outside one's physical body and by means other than the physical senses.

Around one in 10 to 20 people have an OBE at least once in their lifetime, according to a BBC report. Though many sceptics dismiss them as dreams or dream-like sequences, researchers agree that OBEs happen when the person is fully awake and conscious. Quite a few seem to happen when the person is in bed, resting or ill, or under the influence of psychedelic drugs. OBEs are also very closely related to near-death experiences (NDEs). Unlike most drug-induced hallucinations or dreams, OBEs are not unstable and fleeting; they do not dissolve rapidly into something else. They seem as real and solid as the perceived world around us. As Dr Blackmore claims, "Somehow words fail to convey how completely real it all seemed at the time."

Recounts Devdeep Bhattacharya, a student of IIM-Kolkata who had an OBE when he was in school, "I was on my bed, lying face down, trying to sleep, when I had this weird feeling that I was afloat a few inches above my own body, tied to it by silvery cords. It must have lasted a few minutes... after which I suddenly plopped back into my own body, as if pulled down by gravity, and seemed to wake up. At that time I had no idea about out-of-body experiences... it was only a few years later when I came across other similar experiences of people on the web that I realised that the phenomenon had a name."

Usha Ram, professor in the department of psychology, Pune varsity, says, "OBEs are still treated in the realm of parapsychology and at present, studies and research regarding these experiences don't fit within standard theoretical models accepted by science or scientific methodologies currently practised. In spite of this, we are currently moving towards study of what is presently called paranormal, and I hope soon enough the research into that area would also be regarded as scientific."

According to her, there are various techniques, among them yoga and reiki, through which some people have cultivated the faculty of inducing OBEs, also known as astral projection.

Agrees Nandini Gulati, psychotherapist and a student of Brian Weiss, a prominent British psychiatrist dealing in past-life regression, "OBEs are usually induced when a person is undergoing an intense emotion or stress, like pain, grief or love, even in those who are otherwise not spiritually-inclined. I don't think science has a definitive explanation for out-of-body experiences... Moreover, if spirituality offers better insight into the cycle of life and death and offers comfort and strength, a scientific explanation is not required. I think it is a great insight into the meaning of being alive and human."

She has herself undergone a series of OBEs and describes one experience: "I heard a buzzing sound in my ears, and had the feeling of leaving my body and floating above... At that time, I was residing in London, and I had the distinct feeling of floating above London and seeing its roofs and the people walking in the street. I had a similar buzzing sensation when I was being pulled back into my body, by a force which was almost magnetic. The experience lasted about 15 minutes."

She also asserts being able to leave her body at will, though the duration is much shorter. "It strengthens my belief that we are more than just our corporeal selves, and consciousness can exist beyond the physical body."

Continued in Part Two

psi, nde, astral, oobe, paranormal

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