MAPS: Electrodes trigger out-of-body experience

["Joshua Tinnin" <krinklyfig@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mostly on-topic ...

- jt

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http://www.nature.com/nsu/020916/020916-8.html

Electrodes trigger out-of-body experience
Stimulating brain region elicits illusion often attributed to the
paranormal.
19 September 2002
HELEN PEARSON

Activity in one region of the brain could explain out-of-body experiences.
Researchers in Switzerland have triggered the phenomenon using
electrodes.[1]

People describe out-of-body experiences as feeling that their consciousness
becomes detached from their body, often floating above it. Because these
lucid states are popularly linked to the paranormal, "a lot of people are
reluctant to talk about them", says neurologist Olaf Blanke of Geneva
University Hospital in Switzerland.

Blanke found that electrically stimulating one brain region - the right
angular gyrus - repeatedly triggers out-of-body experiences. Blanke and his
team were using electrodes to excite the brain of a woman being treated for
epilepsy.

The right angular gyrus integrates visual information - the sight of your
body - and information that creates the mind's representation of your body.
This is based on balance and feedback from your limbs about their position
in space.

"It makes perfect sense," agrees Peter Brugger of University Hospital,
Zurich, in Switzerland, who studies the phenomenon. "We have representations
of our entire body that can be dissociated from our real body," he says. But
this is an isolated case, he points out.

With gentle stimulation, the woman, who could speak during the operation,
felt she was falling or growing lighter. As the intensity increased she told
them: "I see myself lying in bed, from above."

When asked to look at her raised arm, she thought it was coming to punch
her. This observation suggests that 'alien hand syndrome' - when people feel
that a limb is foreign - or 'phantom' limbs that people can feel after
amputations could be related to out-of-body experiences, says Blanke.

Weird science

Out-of-body experiences are incredibly common, says clinical neurologist
John Marshall of the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, UK. Some are part of
near-death experiences.

Some believe that the events have religious or spiritual causes, or that a
person really leaves their physical body behind. They may, for example,
interpret them as evidence that the physical and spiritual body can separate
again after death.

The new experiments cannot disprove such ideas, says Marshall: "It doesn't
show that people with paranormal beliefs are wrong" - it simply demonstrates
one way that the experience can be stimulated. Nevertheless, "I think it
would give great comfort to patients" who, he says, frequently question
their own sanity.

Thrill-seekers will be hard-pushed to artificially create their own
out-of-body experiences, adds Brugger. "You can't stimulate that precisely
without opening up the skull," he says.


References
1. Blanke, O., Ortigue, S., Landis, T., Seeck, M. Stimulating own-body
perceptions. Nature, 419, 269 - 270, (2002). |Article|


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