[Open Mind]

Skidoo,

Rebuttal of Link 2 .

Visualizing Out-of-Body Experience in the Brain - Dirk De Ridder, M.D., Ph.D., Koen Van Laere, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., Patrick Dupont, Ph.D., Tomas Menovsky, M.D., Ph.D., and Paul Van de Heyning, M.D., Ph.D.

(1) I couldn't access the whole article. However this experiment on just a single patient must surely cast doubt on whether proper double blind testing was possible at all, if the patient half knew what to expect, they could imagine or modify the experience. If you stimulate a part of the brain and the person has some idea what is supposed to happen, they will report closer to that. .... experiments should be double blind ideally.

Around 80% of Parapsychology trials are blind or double blind - therefore avoid such bias. If only other areas of science lived up to that too.

(2) I found comments on the above paper by experts in NDE research - the natural spontaneous kind. According to Greyson, Parnia and Fenwick the report does not match natural NDE/OBE that well at all ....

'........ The report by De Ridder and colleagues describing a sense of disembodiment elicited by temporoparietal-junction stimulation in a patient with tinnitus extends similar findings in patients with epilepsy.1 We should be cautious, however, about drawing analogies between an induced sense of disembodiment and spontaneous out-of-body experiences. That they have similar neuroanatomical loci is a plausible hypothesis but an untested one.

The sense of disembodiment induced by electrical stimulation is limited to a fixed location; those in whom this experience is induced by stimulation perceive the environment from the visual perspective of the physical body, and they perceive the event as illusory. Spontaneous out-of-body experiences often involve accurate perception of the environment (including the physical body) from an extracorporeal visual perspective; the disembodied center of consciousness may seem to move about independently of the physical body, and those who have such a spontaneous experience usually perceive the event as profoundly real.2,3 Given the differences in phenomenology and in psychological aftereffects for those who have the experience, it is premature to assume that the mechanism of an induced sense of disembodiment also applies to spontaneous experiences.4


Bruce Greyson, M.D.
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22908-0152
cbg4d@virginia.edu


Sam Parnia, M.D., Ph.D.
Weill Cornell Medical Center
New York, NY 10021


Peter Fenwick, M.D.
King's College Institute of Psychiatry
London SE5 8AF, United Kingdom

References


Blanke O, Ortigue S, Landis T, Seeck M. Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions. Nature 2002;419:269-270. [CrossRef][Medline]
Gabbard GO, Twemlow SW, Jones FC. Differential diagnosis of altered
mind/body perception. Psychiatry 1982;45:361-369. [ISI][Medline]
Gabbard GO, Twemlow SW. With the eyes of the mind: an empirical analysis of out-of-body states. New York: Praeger, 1984.
Alvarado CS. Out-of-body experiences. In: Cardeña E, Lynn SJ, Krippner SC, eds. Varieties of anomalous experience: examining the scientific evidence. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2000:183-218.