Hey Doc!

thanks for posting the link, it is really interesting stuff! I love reading about things like this, slowly but surely the proof is coming and the one day wham! It will be classed as "real" to the science world haha! Well maybe... thanks again

Ryan

I guess the big question which follows from the article is whether or not it implies that OOB experience is purely the result of physical circumstance, or if something more is going on...

If NDE's is a product of a dying brain - how can that accouint for facts that people again knowledge about things that they would otherwise never have known. For example, how would a NDE;r know about a sibling that died and was never told about. There are many such accounts. I think that people that simply dismass NDE'ers as a product of a dying brain are closed minded and ignorant. It is clearly more - but the question is what??

Finding that the brain can be stimulated into perceiving displacement from the body is one question - it probably makes sense that it has this ability. The question as to the true nature of OOB experience is another entirely....

smacdonald2007 wrote on Aug 24^th, 2007 at 12:51pm:


Because most OBE's are the spirit leaving the body.

Thanks for the link, Matthew

This may merit a trip to the library to see the original article. My initial reactions to the bbc news brief are to ask alot of questions.

I have to think about whether or not I agree with how they are defining out of body experience. Their definition seems a little vague. This seems to me to be an experiment about how we perceive when we are "in" the body.

On the other hand, I see that the news article starts off nonchalantly mentioning that about 10% of people report OBEs. Well you wouldn't have seen that a few years ago! That must be a relief to those who experience them. We now seem to have cultural permission to talk about this without sounding like nut cases.

Hey so maybe if you have to relate this to trying to get more sophisticated video games on the market and quote Blackmore (instead of Monroe) to get published in Science, maybe it's OK. The researchers will plug along with their mechanistic model and then maybe one day they will have a medical application in which treating the virtual body works and they will have a belief system breakdown about what causes disease and then they will be open to discussing real OBEs!

will science come to a reasonable satisfactory conclusion about OOBE's being physical or spiritual in my lifetime?  probably not.  but lucky for me, "the other side" has already been proven, because people's dead relatives visit them (the book hello from heaven) and (some) psychics have been scientifically proven to be real (the book the afterlife experiments).  so no matter what conclusion the scientists come to on this issue, the afterlife is real. 

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the scientists make me laugh because they scoff at anyone who has an alien abduction story, yet they send out radio waves into space to see if aliens respond, and readily admit that alien life is probable, even highly likely.  the other day there was a story about how they have a new theory on how time travel could be a possibility.  so they'll consider time travel but not reincarnation, as if reincarnation is any less weird??     they are such a strange bunch.