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.
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