From the New Your Times:
Using virtual-reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences the sensation of drifting outside of ones own body in ordinary, healthy people, according to studies being published today in the journal Science.
When people gazed at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and were prodded in just the right way with the stick, they felt as if they had 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 one expert on body and mind, Dr. Matthew M. Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University.
Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where ones 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.
The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to otherworldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, who, like Dr. Botvinick, had no role in the experiments. In what is popularly referred to as near-death experience, people who have been in the throes of severe and sudden injury or illness often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said and then, just as suddenly, finding themselves back inside their body. ...Yet another success for methodological naturalism, and another diminution of the domain of the God-of-the-Gaps.
Studies Report Inducing Out-of-Body Experience
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE - Published: August 24, 2007
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE - Published: August 24, 2007
Using virtual-reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences the sensation of drifting outside of ones own body in ordinary, healthy people, according to studies being published today in the journal Science.
When people gazed at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and were prodded in just the right way with the stick, they felt as if they had 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 one expert on body and mind, Dr. Matthew M. Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University.
Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where ones 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.
The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to otherworldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, who, like Dr. Botvinick, had no role in the experiments. In what is popularly referred to as near-death experience, people who have been in the throes of severe and sudden injury or illness often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said and then, just as suddenly, finding themselves back inside their body. ...
