Experiment gives hint of brain's role in out-of-body sensation
The Boston Globe ^
| 9/19/2002 | By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff
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By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff, 9/19/2002
A tiny part of the brain behind the right ear can cause out-of-body experiences and could explain the many stories of near-death patients who say they have looked down at their own bodies, a team of Swiss scientists announced yesterday.
While treating a woman with epilepsy, the researchers discovered that every time they applied a mild electrical current to part of the woman's brain she felt as if she were floating near the ceiling, looking down on her own body like a soul freed of its earthly bonds.
The results were published in today's issue of the journal Nature.
Because the experiment was done on only one person, the finding does not definitively explain out-of-body experiences, scientists cautioned.
But the work represents the first time that a precise part of the brain has been linked to the out-of-body sensation, a phenomenon that has inspired talk of a spiritual self that can roam free of the body and, after many accounts of patients ''watching'' themselves before pulling back from the verge of death, has been seen as evidence of an afterlife. The experiment is also the first time that out-of-body experiences have been repeatedly flipped on and off.
''This does not mean that all out-of-body experiences are related to this area,'' said Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland and the lead author of the article. But ''now they are open to a more hard-science experimental investigation,'' he said.
The Swiss work is just one example of the inroads neuroscience is now making into topics once considered paranormal. Researchers are also studying the biological basis of presence, the mystical sensation of being near a powerful intelligence, and of synesthesia, in which the senses cross and give the impression of seeing a sound or smelling a color. The research is an indication of the increasing sophistication of the tools of modern neuroscience.
It also represents a scientific change of attitude.
''This is one of those things that 10 or 15 years ago were considered just another crazy phenomenon that scientists wouldn't study,'' said Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.
''Now we can study them and learn something about the brain.''
The part of the brain involved in the out-of-body experience is the right angular gyrus, which sits about an inch above and behind the right ear.
That area helps assemble information from the visual system, the balance system, and the somatosensory system, which tells the brain where the body is. The somatosensory system is what allows people to bring their fingers together, even when their eyes are closed.
The Nature paper suggests that a disruption at the right angular gyrus, involved in processing the information from these different systems into a coherent whole, creates an illusion of floating in which one's own body feels and looks distant.
Near-death episodes make up a very small proportion of out-of-body experiences, according to Susan Blackmore, a British psychologist who studied out-of-body experiences for nearly 30 years.
Blackmore has collected many stories of people having an out-of-body experience as they were falling asleep or meditating. Such episodes can also hit at moments of extreme stress, she said.
Blackmore herself became interested in the topic when, sitting with friends when she was an undergraduate at Oxford University, she had an intense out-of-body experience, including visits to France and New York City's Fifth Avenue.
To see whether she had really left her body, she checked the color of her building's roof tiles to see if it matched what she had seen as she felt herself floating over the building. It did not.
Some epileptics have also had sudden feelings of floating or out-of-body experiences related to their disease, said Blanke.
Scientists know little about the roots of those episodes. Wilder Penfield, a pioneering neuroscientist, published a paper in 1955 that described the strange effects of applying electrical currents to the brain: sudden limb twitching, hallucinations, and, in one case, a woman who said she felt as if she had just left her body.
But the work was very crude, said Blackmore, because the instruments available at the time did not allow Penfield to determine the specific area of the brain involved or to replicate the out-of-body effect.
The Swiss discovery is a case of serendipity. Doctors were planning brain surgery to help a woman with severe epilepsy who was not responding to medication.
Before such surgeries, doctors need to be sure which parts of the nearby brain are involved in crucial functions and which parts can be sacrificed to stop the seizures.
To do this, different areas of the brain are stimulated with electrodes, hampering the activity of that area.
With electrical stimulation at one location, Blanke said, the woman described feeling as if she were floating. When the current was increased, she described seeing her own body from the midsection down, as if she were on the ceiling.
''I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk,'' she said, according to the paper.
The electrode was activated several times, and each time she described leaving her body.
The 43-year-old woman, whose name was not disclosed, could prove to be a pioneer, building a bridge between two stubborn camps: those convinced that out-of-body experiences have a larger spiritual significance and those who dismiss them as frauds.
The new research ''holds up some hope that the ultraskeptics will see that there is something interesting happening and the ultra-spiritualists will see that it is something happening in the brain,'' Blackmore said. ''Maybe this will close that awful gap.''
Gareth Cook can be reached at cook@globe.com.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 9/19/2002.
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WOW.
1 posted on 9/19/02 8:06 AM Pacific by vannrox
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I get that same feeling after a case of Bud......
Here...Hold muh beer and watch me float near the ceiling....
NeverGore
2 posted on 9/19/02 8:12 AM Pacific by nevergore
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Wait till the fume-sniffers hear about this. They will be inserting electrodes into their brains instead of snorting gasoline in no time.
3 posted on 9/19/02 8:17 AM Pacific by E. Pluribus Unum
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Well, they have been boring holes in their heads to "raise their consciousness" for quite a while now. I imagine we will find a few miscreants electrocuted with wires taped to their heads.
4 posted on 9/19/02 8:24 AM Pacific by hopespringseternal
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Boring holes in their heads, eh? Sounds about right. They should bore them a little deeper.
5 posted on 9/19/02 8:31 AM Pacific by E. Pluribus Unum
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Hi vannrox
DON'T STOP
Chattanooga cardiologist Maurice Rawlings, M.D., tells of a patient who had a cardiac arrest in Dr. Rawlings' office. Throughout the attempted resuscitation, the patient faded in and out.
Each time the doctor interrupted the heart massage, the patient appeared to die again.
When the man came to, he screamed, "I am in hell!" A look of sheer terror clouded his face. "Don't stop!" he begged. "Don't you understand? I am in hell. Each time you quit I go back to hell! Don't let me go back to hell!"
The patient survived and put his faith in Christ to take away his sins and secure his place in heaven.{8}The place the Bible calls hell, or hades, is the current home of those who do not accept Jesus' gift of forgiveness. It is a place of constant, conscious torment.{9}Hades is not the final dwelling place of those who die without a personal relationship with Christ.
John says these will be judged at the "great white throne" judgment. Since no one's deeds are sufficient to earn eternal life, those without Christ's pardon will be cast into the "lake of fire."{10}Jesus said that "the eternal fire...has been prepared for the devil and his angels" (Matthew 25:41).
Not a pleasant subject. But remember, God does not want you to perish in hell. He loves you and wants you to spend eternity with Him. Not without Him.{11}Paul wrote that God our Savior wants all people to be saved (or made safe from the consequences of sin, which is separation from God).
He wants us to know Him because He is truth.{12}God sent Jesus Christ, His Son, to pay the penalty for our sins (attitudes and actions that fall short of God's perfection).
Jesus literally went through hell for us. We simply need to receive His free gift of forgiveness--we can never earn it--to be guaranteed eternal life. "Whoever hears my word, Jesus says, "and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life" (John 5:24).
If you'd like to watch a movie about this: Dr. Maurice Rawlings, MD, a heart surgeon, has written a number of books on the near death experience and clearly shows from his own practice and the experiences of his patients, that not everyone goes to the light when they die, where there is total love.
He has written of many patients being resuscitated on the operating table and speaking about being in hell, where there was a real devil and demons, and where the inhabitants were tormented with fire.
Dr. Rawlings writes that these people are a lot more reluctant to talk about it than those who went to the good place. This film (1:28 min.), hosted by Dr. Rawlings, looks at the experiences of people who have literally gone 'To Hell and Back'. [ Both links to view the Real Video should work, try the alternate if your first choice fails.]
http://amightywind.com/hell/testimonies.htm
6 posted on 9/19/02 8:37 AM Pacific by Ready2go
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I'm waiting for them to announce they've found the chemical formula for truth, goodness and beauty.
It's just in the brain after all.
7 posted on 9/19/02 8:54 AM Pacific by D-fendr
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They are trying to produce an out of mind experience!
8 posted on 9/19/02 9:21 AM Pacific by sheik yerbouty
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Except doesnt explain how the patient can sometimes see in minute detail what is being done and said in the operating room when unconscious. Also some report seeing things that can only be seen from a position other than the operating table. So much for the big explanation. Hell, I have dreams where Im floating in air so what the big deal about triggering similar sensation in unconscious person.
My dad had a near death experience during a heart operation and he was able to recall many details that could not be explained.
9 posted on 9/19/02 9:22 AM Pacific by Dave S
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reminds me of the movie "Total Recall"
10 posted on 9/19/02 9:30 AM Pacific by Nathan Jr.
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 Swiss doctors found that it's possible to trigger out-of-body experiences by using electrodes to stimulate a portion of the right side of the brain. (ABCNEWS.com) |
Mind Over Body
Neurologist Finds Way to Trigger
Out-of-Body Experiences By Amanda Onion  Sept. 19
— At one point she felt she was "sinking into the bed." Later she said, "I see myself lying in bed, from above …"
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But rarely has the sensation been captured in the controlled setting of a laboratory — until now. In a new study released today in the journal Nature, Swiss scientists describe how they were able to trigger bizarre, out-of-body experiences in a 43-year-old female epileptic patient while analyzing her brain with electrodes. Olaf Blanke, a neurosurgeon at University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne, wasn't trying to set off the sensations in his patient but was using electrical stimulation to map the activity of her brain in preparation for surgical treatment. But by recording the patient's reactions and matching them with specific electrodes, Blanke was able to pinpoint the region where out-of-body experiences seem to originate. "We wanted [and needed] to be sure that what the patient experienced and told us was related to the actual stimulation," says Blanke. When Blanke and colleagues activated electrodes placed just above the patient's right ear — a region known as the right angular gyrus — the woman began to have the strange sensations. Depending on the amplitude of the stimulation and the current position of the patient's body, her experience varied. Each of the patient's four episodes lasted about two seconds. After one stimulation, the patient said she felt as though she were sinking into her bed and then she felt as though she were "falling from a height." After another stimulation she said felt like she was "floating" about 6½ feet above her bed, close to the ceiling. When she was asked to watch her legs during the stimulation, the patient said she saw her legs "becoming shorter." Scientists have long tried to explain how people might have such sensations. Last December a British journal described a Dutch study that estimated 12 percent of cardiac patients resuscitated from clinical death experience out-of-body sensations such as seeing a bright light or their own dead bodies. In 1995, Michael Persinger, a psychologist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, found he was able to trigger out-of-body and other paranormal experiences in people by exposing the right sides of their brains to a series of electromagnetic pulses. Severe migraines, small strokes and epilepsy have also been known to trigger the condition and previous work has located the cause to the brain's right lobe. Blanke says his study shows the right angular gyrus has a specific role in triggering the feeling. This region is the part of the brain that scientists believe integrates visual information, including how the body is seen, and touch and balance sensations that all work together to create the mind's representation of the body. He says out-of-body experiences "may reflect a failure by the angular gyrus" to integrate these different channels of information. Physical stress, or a lack of oxygen to the brain, he says, might trigger the kind of brain misfiring he induced in his patient. Vilayanur Ramachandran, a professor of neurosciences and psychology at the University of California in San Diego, says Blanke's study makes sense since damage to the same region of the brain has been known to cause a confused physical sense of the body. But, he adds, it's rare to be able to induce the sensation. "This is exciting because it shows this technology can be used to produce reversible lesions," he says. "This can be a powerful tool to study the condition." But Robert Peterson, a person who regularly experiences out-of-body experiences and who has written about them in two books, argues no study can prove the sensations are just the result of a quirk in the brain. "People who have these experiences are nearly always extremely firm in their convictions," he says. "No amount of evidence can convince the subjects that it wasn't 'real.'" Persinger of Laurentian University argues it only illuminates how much is left to learn about the human brain. "This is more evidence," he says, "that that great raveled knot — our brain — still has a lot of mysteries to unfold." |
| Copyright © 2002 ABC News Internet Ventures. Click here for Press Information, Terms of Use & Privacy Policy & Internet Safety Information applicable to the site. |
11 posted on 9/19/02 10:03 AM Pacific by vannrox
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Cool. The next big trend at Raves.
12 posted on 9/19/02 10:34 AM Pacific by DocBenway
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"Except doesnt explain how the patient can sometimes see in minute detail what is being done and said in the operating room when unconscious."
Right on Dave! Sometimes scientists just need to think outside the box and accept that some things are in the realm of metaphysics. I'm sure someday the distinction between science and metaphysics will become blurred to the point where they are one in the same.
13 posted on 9/19/02 10:44 AM Pacific by hove
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The part of the brain involved in the out-of-body experience is the Right Angular Gyrus...
Hmmmmm. Gives new meaning to the term "RAGhead," doesn't it...
14 posted on 9/19/02 10:54 AM Pacific by forsnax5
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Does sincerity count in one's affirmation? And how is it measured? This is a serious question I don't see dicussed much. One man may think the thought "I accept Jesus" in passing. Another man may have strong emotions with that thought. Are both sufficient? Is a man with a huge heart and mind, like a saint, required to commit more fully than a man of very limited feelings or even a mentally retarded man? What if a man sincerely turns to Christ, but then never thinks of it again?
It seems to me that "belief" can mean very different things and that those differences should have importance. I wonder, too, if the original words for "belief in the Lord" in the scripture might have been better translated as "knowledge of the Lord".
Sorry to get so theological on you, you are not my pastor of course :) But you raised the point, as many bible oriented Christians will, so I thought I'd take you up on it.
15 posted on 9/19/02 10:57 AM Pacific by SupplySider
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she had an intense out-of-body experience, including visits to France and New York City's Fifth Avenue.
hmmmm....
Cordially,
16 posted on 9/19/02 11:09 AM Pacific by Diamond
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Drilling holes in skulls is old news.
Many web pages discuss trepanning, which has been practiced since ancient days.
"Skulls with signs of trepanning were found practically in all parts of the world where man has lived. Trepanning is probably the oldest surgical operation known to man: evidence for it goes back as far as in 40,000 year-old Cro-Magnon sites. "
For more, see http://www.epub.org.br/cm/n02/historia/trepan.htm
17 posted on 9/19/02 12:15 PM Pacific by PoisedWoman
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