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 ...
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.
"fixation". XYZ and all that.
Maybe. Still the fact that very secularist, atheist even, philosophers of mind exist and are worried about the problem, oddly offers a ray of hope.
Life go's on ping.
Why not? The logic of this article is flaky enough. Besides, I do remember hearing some materialist quack on Coast to Coast AM going on about how a computer program could create consciousness by imitating a brain (although I don't remember if it was Art Bell himself hosting).
Believe me, I have throught it through starting with onme time a teacher put me on a mind machine and I wondered "who is looking at this light show with what?" Cameras are not dependant on on the photographer to see and record images. Certainly, a blind photographer coulkd operate a camera that took perfectly good pictures.
Which is a different "heavenly sphere."
Speaking of which, a loose analogy would be the increasing complication of epicycles etc. etc. to the heliocentric solar system; someday I'll have to get a copy of C.S. Lewis The Discarded Image to read up on it...he was a prof of Medieval and Renaissance literature, and that book was not one of apologetics.
Cheers!
Still confused. Do you mean to say that while these particular OBEs may have a material explanation, it doesn't rule out that other OBEs might be paranormal in nature?
But he can't use it to see. The image never makes it to his consciousness. The specific claim here, which I am doubting, is that OBEs actually enable people--including, presumably, blind people--to see real things. THAT's the difference.
*shrug* Mine seemed real enough.
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