Out-of-body experience Totally Explained

Everything about Out-of-body Experience totally explained

An out-of-body experience (OBE or sometimes OOBE), is an experience that typically involves a sensation of floating outside of one's body and, in some cases, perceiving one's physical body from a place outside one's body (autoscopy). About one in ten people has reported having an out-of-body experience at some time in their lives. Scientists know little about the phenomenon. OBEs are often part of the near-death experience, and reportedly may also lead to astral projection. It is claimed that those experiencing an OBE sometimes observe details which were unknown to them beforehand. In some cases the phenomenon appears to occur spontaneously; in others it's associated with a physical or mental trauma, use of psychedelic drugs, or a dream-like state. It is possible to induce the experience deliberately, for example through visualization while in a relaxed, meditative state. Recent (2007) studies have shown that experiences somewhat similar to OBEs can be induced by direct brain stimulation. Relatively little is known for sure about OBEs.

Types of OBE

Initiated during/after sleep

OBEs are sometimes reported to be preceded by and initiated from a lucid dream state, though other types of initiation—ranging anywhere from immediate and spontaneous experiences, to conscientiously controlled and pre-meditated methods (examples of which are widely available in all the most popular books on the subject)—are also reported. In many cases, people who claimed to have had an OBE reported being asleep, on the verge of sleep, or already asleep shortly before the experience. A large percentage of these cases referred to situations where the sleep wasn't particularly deep (due to illness, noises in other rooms, emotional stress, exhaustion from overworking, frequent re-awakening, etc.). In most of these cases, the subjects then felt themselves awake; about half them noted a feeling of sleep paralysis.

In some cases, extreme physical effort can induce an OBE. For example, one running in a marathon could overwork themselves and feel "extraordinarily weightless" and actually see themselves from above. Many times this is related to dehydration.

Near-death experiences

Another form of a spontaneous OBE occurs during a near death experience (INDEE or NDE). The phenomenology of an NDE usually includes physiological, psychological and transcendental factors (Parnia, Waller, Yeates & Fenwick, 2001) such as impressions of being outside the physical body (an out-of-body experience), visions of deceased relatives and religious figures, transcendence of ego and spatiotemporal boundaries and other transcendental experiences (Lukoff, Lu & Turner, 1998; Greyson, 2003). Typically the experience follows a distinct progression, starting with the sensation of floating above one's body and seeing the surrounding area, followed by the sensation of passing through a tunnel, meeting deceased relatives, and concluding with encountering a being of light (Morse, Conner & Tyler, 1985).

Scientific studies of OBEs

The first extensive scientific study of OBEs was made by Celia Green (1968). She collected written, first-hand accounts from a total of 400 subjects, recruited by means of appeals in the mainstream media, and followed up by questionnaire. Her purpose was to provide a taxonomy of the different types of OBE, viewed simply as an anomalous perceptual experience or hallucination, while leaving open the question of whether some of the cases might incorporate information derived by extrasensory perception.
Previous collections of cases had been made by Dr Robert Crookall; however, he'd approached the subject from a spiritualistic position, and collected his cases predominantly from spiritualist newspapers such a Psychic News, which appears to have biased his results in various ways. For example, the majority of his subjects reported ‘seeing’ a cord connecting their ‘external’ body to their physical body; whereas Green found that less than 4% of her subjects noticed anything of this sort, and some 80% reported feeling they were a ‘disembodied consciousness’, with no external body at all.

Neurology and OBE-like experiences

There are several possible physiological explanations for parts of the OBE. OBE-like experiences have been induced by stimulation of the brain and by using cameras to fool the mind into thinking that the body is somewhere it's not. The OBE has been reproduced through stimulation of the posterior part of the right superior temporal gyrus in a patient. Positron-emission tomography was also used in this study to identify brain regions affected by this stimulation.
English psychologist Susan Blackmore suggests that an OBE begins when a person loses contact with sensory input from the body while remaining conscious. The person retains the illusion of having a body, but that perception is no longer derived from the senses. The perceived world may resemble the world he or she generally inhabits while awake, but this perception doesn't come from the senses either. The vivid body and world is made by our brain's ability to create fully convincing realms, even in the absence of sensory information. This process is witnessed by each of us every night in our dreams, though OBEs are claimed to be far more vivid than even a lucid dream.
Irwin pointed out that OBEs appear to occur under conditions of either very high or very low arousal. For example, Green found that three quarters of a group of 176 subjects reporting a single OBE were lying down at the time of the experience, and of these 12% considered they'd been asleep when it started. By contrast, a substantial minority of her cases occurred under conditions of maximum arousal, such as a rock-climbing fall, a traffic accident, or childbirth. McCreery has suggested that this paradox may be explained by reference to the fact that sleep can supervene as a reaction to extreme stress or hyper-arousal. He proposes that OBEs under both conditions, relaxation and hyper-arousal, represent a form of ‘waking dream’, or the intrusion of Stage 1 sleep processes into waking consciousness.

Olaf Blanke studies

Research by Olaf Blanke in Switzerland found that it's possible to reliably elicit experiences somewhat similar to the OBE by stimulating regions of the brain called the right temporal-parietal junction (TPJ; a region where the temporal lobe and parietal lobe of the brain come together). Blanke and his collaborators in Switzerland have explored the neural basis of OBEs by showing that they're reliably associated with lesions in the right TPJ region and that they can be reliably elicited with electrical stimulation of this region in a patient with epilepsy. These elicited experiences may include perceptions of transformations of the patient's arm and legs (complex somatosensory responses) and whole-body displacements (vestibular responses).
   In neurologically normal subjects, Blanke and colleagues then showed that the conscious experience of the self and body being in the same location depends on multisensory integration in the TPJ. Using event-related potentials, Blanke and colleagues showed the selective activation of the TPJ 330-400 ms after stimulus onset when healthy volunteers imagined themselves in the position and visual perspective that generally are reported by people experiencing spontaneous OBEs. Transcranial magnetic stimulation in the same subjects impaired mental transformation of the participant’s own body. No such effects were found with stimulation of another site or for imagined spatial transformations of external objects, suggesting the selective implication of the TPJ in mental imagery of one's own body. In a follow up study, Arzy et al. showed that the location and timing of brain activation depended on whether mental imagery is performed with mentally embodied or disembodied self location. When subjects performed mental imagery with an embodied location, there was increased activation of a region called the "extrastriate body area" (EBA), but when subjects performed mental imagery with a disembodied location, as reported in OBEs, there was increased activation in the region of the TPJ. This leads Arzy et al. to argue that "these data show that distributed brain activity at the EBA and TPJ as well as their timing are crucial for the coding of the self as embodied and as spatially situated within the human body."
   Blanke and colleagues thus propose that the right temporal-parietal junction is important for the sense of spatial location of the self, and that when these normal processes go awry, an OBE arises.
   In August 2007 Blanke's lab published research in Science demonstrating that conflicting visual-somatosensory input in virtual reality could disrupt the spatial unity between the self and the body. During multisensory conflict, participants felt as if a virtual body seen in front of them was their own body and mislocalized themselves toward the virtual body, to a position outside their bodily borders. This indicates that spatial unity and bodily self-consciousness can be studied experimentally and is based on multisensory and cognitive processing of bodily information.

Michael Persinger studies

Michael Persinger has undertaken similar research to Olaf Blanke using magnetic stimulation applied to the right temporal lobe of the brain, which is known to be involved in visuo-spatial functions, multi-sensory integration and the construction of the sense of the body in space. Persinger's research also found evidence for objective neural difference between periods of remote viewing in two individuals thought to have psychic abilities. Persinger undertook his research on Sean Harribance and Ingo Swann, a renowned remote viewer who has taken part in numerous studies. Examination of Harribance showed enhanced EEG activity within the alpha band (8 - 12 Hz) over Harribance's right parieto-occipital region, consistent with neuropsychological evidence of early brain trauma in these regions. In a second study, Ingo Swann was asked to draw images of pictures hidden in envelopes in another room. Individuals with no knowledge of the nature of the study rated Swann's comments and drawings as congruent with the remotely viewed stimulus at better than chance levels. Additionally, on trials in which Swann was correct, the duration of 7 Hz (alpha band) paroxysmal discharges over the right occipital lobe was longer. Subsequent anatomical MRI examination showed anomalous subcortical white matter signals focused in the perieto-occipital interface of the right hemisphere that were not expected for his age or history.

Ehrsson study

In August 2007 Henrik Ehrsson, then at the Institute of Neurology at University College of London (now at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden) published research in Science demonstrating the first experimental method that, according to the scientist's claims in the publication, induced an out-of-body experience in healthy participants. The experiment was conducted in the following way:

The study participant sits in a chair wearing a pair of head-mounted video displays. These have two small screens over each eye, which show a live film recorded by two video cameras placed beside each other two metres behind the participant’s head. The image from the left video camera is presented on the left-eye display and the image from the right camera on the right-eye display. The participant sees these as one ‘stereoscopic’ (3D) image, so they see their own back displayed from the perspective of someone sitting behind them.
The researcher then stands just beside the participant (in their view) and uses two plastic rods to simultaneously touch the participant’s actual chest out-of-view and the chest of the illusory body, moving this second rod towards where the illusory chest would be located, just below the camera’s view.
The participants confirmed that they'd experienced sitting behind their physical body and looking at it from that location.

The experiment fits a three-point definition of the out-of-body experience (OBE). The OBE as reported in spontaneous cases can be phenomenologically more complex as commented in Slate and elsewhere.

Astral projection

Astral projection is a paranormal interpretation of an out-of-body experience achieved either awake or via lucid dreaming or deep meditation. The concept of astral projection assumes the existence of another body, separate from the physical body and capable of traveling to non-physical planes of existence. Commonly such planes are called astral, etheric, or spiritual. Astral projection is often experienced as the spirit or astral body leaving the physical body to travel in the spirit world or astral plane.
Evidence for objective reality of astral projection is sometimes suggested when people, such as patients during surgery, describe OBEs in which they see or hear events or objects outside their sensory range (for instance, one woman reportedly described a surgical instrument she hadn't seen previously, as well as conversation that occurred while she was clinically dead).
Skeptics such as Susan Blackmore have disputed whether anything leaves the body during an OBE.

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