[Buddha-l] Re: Inducing Out-of-Body Experience

[Stuart Lachs]

>From today's NY Times.
Studies Report Inducing Out-of-Body Experience
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Published: August 24, 2007
Using virtual-reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced 
out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own 
body — in ordinary, healthy people, according to studies being published 
today in the journal Science.

A representation of one of the scenarios that scientists used to study 
out-of-body experiences.

When people gazed at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and 
were prodded in just the right way with the stick, they felt as if they had 
left their bodies.

The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily 
self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said one 
expert on body and mind, Dr. Matthew M. Botvinick, an assistant professor of 
neuroscience at Princeton University.

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the 
sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, 
Dr. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources 
does not match up, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the 
new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed 
to otherworldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University 
Hospital in Zurich, who, like Dr. Botvinick, had no role in the experiments. 
In what is popularly referred to as near-death experience, people who have 
been in the throes of severe and sudden injury or illness often report the 
sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said 
and then, just as suddenly, finding themselves back inside their body.

Out-of-body experiences have also been reported to occur during sleep 
paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports and intense meditation practices.

The complete article can be read at

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/science/24body.html?ref=science