Out-of-body experience
From RationalWiki
This topic is a pseudoscience, and is not accepted by the scientific community as a valid discipline.
Although it may use scientific terminology, it does not use scientific methodology.
Remember: just because it sounds right doesn't mean it's actually right.
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An out-of-body experience (OBE) is a moment or period during which a person feels detached from, or outside of, their body. Such feelings can be imagined or hallucinated effects brought on through meditation, drugs, or dreaming. While OBEs have been claimed by many people, they are more likely to be "explained" by paranormal concepts rather than scientific ones. OBEs are a subject within a wide range of pseudosciences and New Age practices:
- Astral projection, in which a person's soul or spirit purportedly travels outside their body or even to a different plane of existence, and remains attached to their body only through an imagined "silver cord".
- Transcendental Meditation can bring about this effect through such practices as "yogic flying".
- Scientology uses some practices claiming to bring the "thetan" (spirit) outside the body and mind which is claimed to be the ideal state for more effective "auditing".
- Claimed alien abductions and near-death experiences often involve imagined or claimed out-of-body experiences
- Sensory deprivation or "float tanks", a popular New Age practice, seeks to induce feelings of floating outside ones own body
- Sometimes, you just daydream a bit, and follow your fantasy with a strong imagination, and then accidentally walk into your room in your daydream, and "whoa!" that's me over there on the bed! Woo!
Research into OBE has shown that it can be induced by various physiological, psychological and experimental conditions. The easiest way to induce it is through oxygen deprivation, and this method is probably related to OBE with certain "meditation" techniques that create a state of hyperventilation. It is also experienced after stimulation of the temporal and parietal lobes in the brain. Transcranial magnetic stimulation or localized epileptic seizures in these regions creates various kinds of OBE and "shadow person" perceptions. Work in brain imaging has shown that these particular anatomical regions are activated during the experiences.[1] These regions are related to our proprioception, and the disruption of this sense is what is causing the OBE. All this suggests that OBEs are all just inside the person's head. Other research, though, is slated to examine if there is any truth to the claim that people "leave their bodies" after cardiac arrest in hospitals.[2]
