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 ...
No, a camera is just one of many illustrations that show there are other ways to see besides looking directly with eyes.
Oh, come on. You know I'm your hero.
But that same argument applies to lightning. I can't prove that every--or indeed any--lightning bolts are not in fact thunderbolts being hurled by the hand of Jupiter/Zeus/Odin. And that's emphatically NOT a glib comparison: the major civilizations of the West believed that to be the literal truth, for at least as long as Christianity has been around. You cannot prove them wrong.
For that matter, the argument applies to disease, incontinence, gravitation, peristalsis, hair growth. Sure, material explanations exist, but that doesn't rule out magic.
For what is that thought, but immaterial.
Pattern of material. It exists, but not independently of a material instantiation in a brain, a computer, or a sheet of paper. Mickey Mouse possesses immaterial reality in exactly the same sense. Forgive me for not questioning my reason or bowing down to worship in the face of such examples.
grey_whiskers claims that OBEs do enable people literally to see (presumably including blind people). That is, (it is claimed) people who have them perceive and experience accurate visual representations of their surroundings.
Do you see...sorry, understand the difference?
You are apparently overstating my case.
The link to which I referred you earlier is the website of a practicing MD in Kansas City. It details conversations with other MD's about OBE's which they had observed: I did not recall any of those OBE's including blind people.
To repeat, the assertion was made within that link that some people undergoing OBE's observed and were able to comment on physical facts which they would have been unable to know about beforehand (being unconscious); or which they would have been unable to see (line-of-sight) *if* conscious: or which were physically correct (shape of human heart) which contradicted their preconceived notions.
A purely materialist view that OBE's are merely the manifestation of electrochemical phenomenon within an electrically stimulated (or dying) brain cannot account for the details of those particular episodes.
If you wish to call it "indeterminate" and not jump whole hog into mysticism, fine.
If you wish to call the participants either liars or dupes, fine.
But to dismiss the whole point based on an incomplete reading, or by dismissing other, unrelated accounts of OBE's , does not sound like a careful, objective approach.
Cheers!
Here's the difficulty. (And I apologize in advance, I regretfully predict it is going to drive you nuts.)
The type of OBE's described by mystics *purport* to involve the supernatural (the "soul" or whatever). The type of OBE's induced by electric currents *purport* to be merely a poorly-understood naturalistic phenomenon.
Let us say you induce OBE's with current, and the person cannot read simple words hidden from people's sight.
What does that actually prove?
If one *assumes* that the same underlying mechanism is behind both the mystical OBE and the electrical OBE, the best you can claim is that "the test was unsuccessful"--since we don't know (even with electrical stimulation) how to "direct the attention" of the OBE-subject in a particular direction.
Further, we don't know, even if we give them instructions in advance to "look for the hidden flash cards", that they will "remember" to do so, in the midst of the OBE.
The other issue is, what if the two types of OBE are fundamentally different, and there really *is* a supernatural component? In that case, invoking a qualitatively different phenomenon (zapping the brain) yields *no* reliable information about a true supernatural phenomenon (the soul leaving the body).
I don't mean to be yanking your chain, or even to seem like I am.
It is very frustrating, but one seems to keep coming across the fundamental issue: if, for humans, experience is mediated *through* the nervous system, then how does one differentiate mere artefacts *of* the nervous system from supernatural events communicated *to* the nervous system.
Yeah, I know, "I have no need of that explanation."
But doing that only serves to minimize "false positives" in accepting things that aren't really there; it isn't so hot in eliminating "false negatives" -- rejecting real happenings on the basis of insufficient or irreproducible evidence.
...and the above, as I have said before, does not suffice to prove the supernatural. It just means that trying to test it is often a non-trivial task.
(And just to make it worse, these arguments always seem to come across as special pleading, because the supposed "very source" of the difficulty -- the supernatural -- is what is being called into question.)
Cheers!
It is true we are talking about two different aspects. If you define sight as perception through eyes, then only sighted people can see. If, on the other hand, you open your mind a little and ask if their might be other ways to perceive what eyes see, then cameras are an example of that and so might "soul sight" be. That is the way I have come to understand what I have read about and also my own experience.
You'll have to be the unforgiving to yourself, I'm must say. It's not to me to forgive you or not. It's your own "mens rea". Why are you so confused about who threw those thunderbolts, btw? You think that Odin et al cannot be shown a myth?
go a little easier on yourself...you'll be smarter ;)
m&s
do not be distracted by bumper stickers that might rise your blood pressure...our minds must be alert!
m&s
Coincidentally I was reading about meth users recently and the article went into some detail on what tweakers call "shadow people" described almost exactly as the sentence above.
Interesting. Also may help get to understanding how to undertand or treat disassociative schizophrenia -- where the person imagines others in the room interacting with him.
Good point and one I didn't even consider. Even leads to thoughts on why ECT seems to be so effective on some people.
Thank you, Fearless Leader!
Maybe a mineral therapy would be helpful.
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