It's good to see Olaf finally made something out of himself. 
My love for you is ticking clock... berserker...
Posted on 10/02/2006 8:52:07 PM PDT by neverdem
They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no one there. A woman feels herself leaving her body and floating in space, looking down on her corporeal self.
Such experiences are often attributed by those who have them to paranormal forces.
But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body. In another woman, electrical current delivered to the angular gyrus produced an uncanny feeling that someone was behind her, intent on interfering with her actions.
The two women were being evaluated for epilepsy surgery at University Hospital in Geneva, where doctors implanted dozens of electrodes into their brains to pinpoint the abnormal tissue causing the seizures and to identify adjacent areas involved in language, hearing or other essential functions that should be avoided in the surgery. As each electrode was activated, stimulating a different patch of brain tissue, the patient was asked to say what she was experiencing.
Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland who carried out the procedures, said that the women had normal psychiatric histories and that they were stunned by the bizarre nature of their experiences.
The Sept. 21 issue of Nature magazine includes an account by Dr. Blanke and his colleagues of the woman who sensed a shadow person behind her. They described the out-of-body experiences in the February 2004 issue of the journal Brain.
There is nothing mystical about these ghostly experiences, said Peter Brugger, a...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
<WHAP!>
Ow!
Damn you brain!
Repeat until no longer having out of body experience, or it becomes permanent...
Sounds really safe. Sign me up, please, I want my brain cells electrocuted.
Oceans exist but the sound you hear is REALLY the sound of shells on the beach and in the ocean... < /s >
I always knew my brain wasn't worth a damn....
If you want an out of mind experience, join the donkey party.
Art Bell is not going to want to hear this.
The indicated treatment is by fortifying one's spirit to at least 80, and preferably to >110 degrees proof, as measured by blood level. The cure works every time.
Until one has a convincing argument of how the brain causes consciousness and subjective experience generally, the results can be describe equally well as debunking OBE's or describing a mechanism for removing the consciousness from the body.
Of course if a subject reliably reports viewing the room from the ceiling when the particular part of the brain is stimulated, one can do an experiment to distinguish the two: change features of the room viewable only from the subjective vantage point the subject's consciousness seems to occupy, prod their brain, and see if the can report the changes correctly. (There are anecdotal reports of the ability to describe features of a room viewable only from above in some near-death OBEs.)
While she was looking down, what did she see? Anything that she couldn't have, in her line of vision?
"In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body."
But this still doesn't explain when in some out of body experiences the person not only feels to be looking down at their body but can describe everything that people did or said while they were dead??!
So maybe zapping the brain causes the spirit to leave the body temporarily.
This experiment proves nothing except the frantic desire of man-is-an-animal materialists to defend their turf.
If, in fact, there is a soul then there goes much of medical science... especially the mental health guys who are adamant that all is material and that personality is nothing but brain chemicals.
Mechanically inducing OBE through electrocution can hardly explain all cases of OBE.
Of course that is the obvious question that this article (I have not read it) does not report on. They never do.
Maybe it is because they have the answer, and do not want us to know it.
But I know a ND researcher who cannot receive permission from hospitals to do the research.
"Maybe it is because they have the answer, and do not want us to know it. "
Seems like there is a conspiracy behind everything these days.
It's good to see Olaf finally made something out of himself.
My love for you is ticking clock... berserker...
And if she could, then why do we have eyes, when a more effective method of vision could have been had by a simple electrical current to some part of the brain?
And just because Newton's Universal Gravitation works, it doesn't mean that there aren't teams of angels that push the planets in their courses.
I'm not trying to prove anything one way or the other. The mind is an awesome part of our designed body. To determine if it is a mind experience or OOB you need control tests don't you? While you might not be able to prove one way or another by stimulating the brain, it's harder to argue about a patient reporting seeing things that she could not have seen normally.
Ditto that. My brain can't even produce a minor hallucination. Useless.
Rarely. And then it's usually about me walking down a street in my underwear.
I've had an OBE in surgery. A bit different than what is being described, because I was under ether.
Ether started out as a recreational drug, like LSD. I can recall the experience 50 years later, but I don't recommend it. People forget to breathe under ether.
In my dreams I'm generally dressed as I am in fact, or not, as the case may be.
That's the thing about magic; it can never be disproved. People don't often let go of their mysticisms, simply because they're shown to be unnecessary.
it's harder to argue about a patient reporting seeing things that she could not have seen normally.
Well, no, it's not hard to argue when the conditions are not controlled. But if you really think that would really work, you should advocate taking money away from blindness research to fund out-of-body research. If it works, we won't even need a cure for blindness, because who would need eyes?
"This experiment proves nothing except the frantic desire of man-is-an-animal materialists to defend their turf."
I think you're exactly right.............
And why do we have telescopes and cameras? Your argument makes no sense.
Who needs bodies when the mind is elsewhere?
I do believe, however, that for many people, their mind is elsewhere.
: )
Very interesting. I envy you.
When I was a child, on several occasions as I drifted off to sleep in my bed, I had a very realistic vision of drifting down the hall, near the ceiling, and down the stairs, just before I jolted wide awake, my heart pounding. At the time, I was convined my ghost had left my body. It was disturbing, but not the more paranormal for that.
You're right. I remember reading sometime ago about scientists discovering a so-called 'God' chemical in our brain that causes us to believe in a creator. Same basic premise.
Of course you're right in identifying the problem or the fundamental question. And it is as old as philosophy itself.
However, in a culture where only what science can see is real and every human experience is reducible to biochemistry, the point will be lost.
Old wisdom: If you can point to it, quantify it or measure it, it ain't God.
Because you're not thinking it through. Cameras and telescopes extend the ability of our eyes. They are useless to blind people.
By contrast, OOB-vision, if all these claims are to be accepted, is both simpler and better than vision through eyes. It enables you to see things your eyes could not, without using your eyes at all. It would revolutionize the treatment for blindness, if it really worked.
thanks for posting those articles. Very interesting stuff and right up my alley.
This is your brain on electrodes...
Well, no, it's not hard to argue when the conditions are not controlled. But if you really think that would really work, you should advocate taking money away from blindness research to fund out-of-body research. If it works, we won't even need a cure for blindness, because who would need eyes?
Try this page by a practicing pathologist in Missouri.
After you click on the link, scroll down to "autoscopic near-death experience" (or search for it).
Quite interesting, it is...
Cheers!
Strictly speaking, that's true.
It is just that laying things on the angels' shoulders doesn't give us the same *predictive* capability, nor the impetus to find out more.
And the *reputation* of the models involving angels isn't so good, because of so many incorrect claims regarding what they've been up to.
Occam's razor and "uniformity of causes in a closed system", for sure!
But without knowing for sure if angels exist, what form they take, and how many can dance on the head of a pin, how do you *empirically* eliminate the possibility?
Cheers!
ping
Whatever doubt I had about an afterlife was eliminated by that experience.
A couple of examples:
A very good friend of hers preceded her in death by several weeks. Just an hour or so after the "friend" had passed, Grandma woke up and said "Oh, I just saw 'Jane'...she told me I should hurry and come over!"
And, sadly there is this: My Uncle died 20 years ago of cancer...he was one of two sons...my Dad was the other. A few days before she died, my Grandma looked around the room (my Dad was there) and said "why have I lost both of my boys?"
We thought she was simply confused....Dad was standing right next to her bed, seemingly healthy. My Dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer two months after she died; he died three months later, at 62. She KNEW that; someone told her he was coming.
No, such currents can happen randomly, particularly when consciousness is quiesced. I'm sure you've experienced a "hypnic jerk" while falling asleep. The point is that perfectly natural, materialistic causes are sufficient to describe the experience, so there's no need to invoke the paranormal.
It was sufficient for Laplace to say, "I have no need of that hypothesis."
I had an OBE when I was about 6 years old. I didn't know until years later what to call it but I have never forgotten it. It has never happened again.
That's a hypothesis, and that hasn't been shown anywhere at all close to the degree you assert. The greedy assertion, however, is a tell. You want an outcome. That want is a demanding want. A fization to say the least. You'll do what is necessary to get it. And that outcome includes calling your workproduct "science", no matter how much your pre-biases impair your methods.
You over-generalize the result.
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