Telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs

[Albert George]

The link below is part one and two of the secrets of sleep. It is a newly produced British documentary from 2008.

Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRf835hwpKI

Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nZ6cOeNaEE&feature=related

Very interesting, saw this a couple of days ago.
Personally I believe in telepathy. It is waiting for science to explain the phenomena, if you will, can call telepathy


I am new to this page, registered today. I am overwhelmed of all the topics and subjects. All information it is so much :bugeye: . Finally a forum page I have been looking for.

[ZapperZ]

For science to explain any phenomenon, it must first of all be verified scientifically, and not before that.

Do you think telepathy has passed that first test? Is there a scientific consensus that such a phenomenon exists? Is there any evidence beyond just anecdotal evidence?

Zz.

[humanino]

First of, let me mention that I am a scientist. Once another scientist friend of mine made a dream where he saw myself and yet another guy working on a problem and solving the problem, just as we were doing it. He described in many details what happened. Well, he knew us both very well, it might be just random that he dreamt of us solving this particular math problem. He would also have been able to solve it, and the fact that he described in great details how things happened can not be proven not to be a mixture of chance, imagination and him knowing us well. You might choose the easy and sexy explanation that he was really experiencing out of body lucid dream. But unfortunately, that's not even a theory, just fantasy. As long as you are aware that it is merely fantasy, you are fine. Otherwise, you may need professional help, as drifting away from reality can end up being dangerous.

None of this is science, because the two scenarios describe perfectly well the same situation. You can always focus your attention on coincidences, but then you can not claim that they are a rule.

[Ivan Seeking]

The problem that I see is that we have no way to test and see if alleged "random" psychic events occur more frequently that we would expect due to chance. While we tend to assume these claims are coincidental due to a lack of evidence otherwise, to my knowledge there has never even been an attempt to quantify and test this explanation. So while "chance" may be the most sensible and mundain explanation for some claims, there is no evidence for it.

[humanino]

The movie describes such an attempt. It is however not clear to me that it is significant. Let us say the "sender" tries to send an apple. If I am the dreamer, how many things will be considered correlated ? A pie ? A Sunday afternoon at my grandmother's ? An orange ? Will a banana count ? So I meant to say, you have means to justify a correlation, and will only count "uncorrelated" when your imagination fails...

In this sense, it is intrinsically difficult to reject randomness.

[Albert George]

So what do you people count as evidence? If not video documentary then what?
I ask so that I can put in links that you consider as evidence.

But this was rather interesting and somewhat convincing? The evidence points to telepathy and suggests that it could really exist?

Out of body experience has occurred, in many cases they have described the surroundings and what was going on very accurate.

[ZapperZ]

So what do you people count as evidence? If not video documentary then what?
I ask so that I can put in links that you consider as evidence.

But this was rather interesting and somewhat convincing? The evidence points to telepathy and suggests that it could really exist?

Out of body experience has occurred, in many cases they have described the surroundings and what was going on very accurate.

But out-of-body experience CAN be an illusion. In fact, there have been many scientific evidence that such a thing can be induced artificially.

See H. Henrik Ehrsson Science v.317, p.104824 (2007); Bigna Lenggenhager et al. Science v.317, p. 1096 (2007).

It means that the brain can be tricked!

Notice that I gave you scientific papers, not YouTube videos, as my evidence. Proper scientific evidence is not done on YouTube.

Zz.

[Mammo]

Fortunately, there are perhaps half a dozen scientific demonstrations of dream
telepathy.

The most famous among these were the experiments in dream
telepathy carried out in the Dream Laboratory of the
Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn by Dr. Montague Ullman and
Dr. Stanley Krippner in the late 1960s. These dream
researchers monitored sleeping subjects. During the periods
that the subjects were in REM sleep, a person in another room
focused on an art reproduction and attempted to
telepathically transmit an image of the painting to the
sleeping subjects, who were awakened for dream reports at the
end of each of their REM periods. Afterwards, judges were
able to match which picture went with which dream report with
an accuracy significantly above chance.

The link is from pftest, http://www.lucidity.com/LD9DIR.html. This is more likely to have a basis in reality compared to OBEs, in my opinion.

[ZapperZ]

The link is from pftest, http://www.lucidity.com/LD9DIR.html. This is more likely to have a basis in reality compared to OBEs, in my opinion.

I wish you stick to the practice of making an exact reference to these so-called "scientific demonstration" and where they were published. I've tried to show enough respect to people who participate in here to go to such lengths to not simply say things off the top of my head, but also find the exact citation to what I'm referring to. If people can't show the same courtesy to allow me to look up these things, then don't blame me when I lose my cool and consider these things as crackpottery.

Zz.

[Stratosphere]

1 to 74 ( or 75) million is a very, very small chance, althought still possible. How could this not be considered scientific evidence? They seem to have followed the scientific method. They definetly tested it thouroghly

[ZapperZ]

1 to 74 ( or 75) million is a very, very small chance, althought still possible. How could this not be considered scientific evidence? They seem to have followed the scientific method. They definetly tested it thouroghly

The signal must be above background "noise", i.e. it must be strong enough to rule out random chance!

This is where I wish a lot of people who go through college get to do really good and relevant experimental work, not only to familiarize oneself with basic science, but also how one deals with data and to what level of confidence one can make a conclusion. This is the one aspect of intro physics that I wish gets revamped.

Zz.

[Stratosphere]

I once had a teacher who had a brother. When my teacher (let’s just call him O) was sleeping one night, he had a dream that he was floating above his brother’s car and then he heard a very load crash that was like metal being crushed against metal. He then was awoken right after the crash by a phone call that his brother had been in a crash and was being driven to the hospital (this was all around 2 AM). O then got out of bed and went to the hospital where his brother was badly hurt. He needed many stitches and the doctors said he wouldn't be able to use his arm anymore (he eventually regained full use of his arm thankfully). The chances of O seeing his brother in a car and hearing a car crash that was many miles away (I think 15-20 miles) is incredibly unlikely.

[Evo]

The problem is that it is easier to remember the 'hits" and not the "misses". How many times do people have bad dreams that never happen? Constantly?

[Stratosphere]

The problem is that it is easier to remember the 'hits" and not the "misses". How many times do people have bad dreams that never happen? Constantly?
I suppose you are correct however I don't know of people who have bad dreams frequently.

[Evo]

I suppose you are correct however I don't know of people who have bad dreams frequently.I wasn't saying that a single person was constantly having bad dreams, but that in general there are probably millions of people each day that have a dream where something bad happens. We also only remember a small fraction of what we dream, on average. I know people that swear that they never dream simply because they do not remember.

[Ivan Seeking]

The movie describes such an attempt. It is however not clear to me that it is significant. Let us say the "sender" tries to send an apple. If I am the dreamer, how many things will be considered correlated ? A pie ? A Sunday afternoon at my grandmother's ? An orange ? Will a banana count ? So I meant to say, you have means to justify a correlation, and will only count "uncorrelated" when your imagination fails...

In this sense, it is intrinsically difficult to reject randomness.

I was referring to a test that would be statistically significant; and in particular where the dreams or visions [I am not limiting the discussion to dreams only] are subjectively significant to the person involved. Most people dream every night but don't find those dreams to be significant. The claim of a psychic vision or dream is relatively rare. There are plenty of examples where the person claiming the vision also claims the experience to be unique and subjectively significant. A typical example would the claim of knowing through a dream or feeling that a close family member has died.

Again, while we can't reject coincidence, and while we might tend to assume this is the correct explanation, I don't think we can't cite it with certainty as the definitive explanation. It is really just a guess; or better said, we have no scientific evidence suggesting that it could be anything other than coincidence.

[Ivan Seeking]

I was ignoring the alleged claims of subjectively insignficant dreams coming true. That is another class of claims that has to my knowledge never been tested.

Obviously the reason that such tests haven't been done is that it would be very difficult to get good data in any quantity.

[Mammo]

I wish you stick to the practice of making an exact reference to these so-called "scientific demonstration" and where they were published. I've tried to show enough respect to people who participate in here to go to such lengths to not simply say things off the top of my head, but also find the exact citation to what I'm referring to. If people can't show the same courtesy to allow me to look up these things, then don't blame me when I lose my cool and consider these things as crackpottery.

Zz.I agree with you on this one. It's a shame there doesn't appear to be any technical research papers to look at.

[Russell Berty]

I agree that there is as of yet no reliable scientific evidence for telepathy. However, when concluding...



It means that the brain can be tricked!



...you are approaching a slippery slope. Once you use this to discredit one observation... uh oh. Have we been all tricked into believing in gravity, sunshine, puppies? Is your brain being tricked right now? Tough to pull this one out in order to refute someone's claims and then try to defend one's own theories from the implications.

Just a thought.

[ZapperZ]

I agree that there is as of yet no reliable scientific evidence for telepathy. However, when concluding...



...you are approaching a slippery slope. Once you use this to discredit one observation... uh oh. Have we been all tricked into believing in gravity, sunshine, puppies? Is your brain being tricked right now? Tough to pull this one out in order to refute someone's claims and then try to defend one's own theories from the implications.

Just a thought.

No, it isn't a slippery slope, because that is why we try to do reproducible experiments! Unless there is mass hallucinations with everyone hallucinating the SAME, identical results, only such reproducible experiments ensure that we are not being tricked into thinking that something did occur or did exist when it didn't. This is why science works and pseudoscience doesn't!

Zz.

[CRGreathouse]

The movie describes such an attempt. It is however not clear to me that it is significant. Let us say the "sender" tries to send an apple. If I am the dreamer, how many things will be considered correlated ? A pie ? A Sunday afternoon at my grandmother's ? An orange ? Will a banana count ? So I meant to say, you have means to justify a correlation, and will only count "uncorrelated" when your imagination fails...

In this sense, it is intrinsically difficult to reject randomness.

I don't think that has to be a problem. Just make a list (say, 100 items long) from which the sender will be given a randomly selected object. Then select some fixed number (say, 4) of other objects from the list and have the dreamer report which of those (five) items appeared in the dream, correlated as they find appropriate. Then see if, over a large number of trials, the correct item appears with greater than chance frequency.

If the dreamer was presented with a list "house, bird, computer, apple, book" and said that of those only apples appeared, in the form of an apple pie, then that would lend more evidence toward telepathy than if they said that all (or none, etc.) appeared. If out of 100 tests the correct item was selected 98 times and the average number of items selected was 1.9, that would give strong evidence of telepathy (or cheating). If out of 100 tests the correct item was selected 61 times and on average 3.1 items were selected... that shows good evidence against telepathy.

[zoobyshoe]

I agree that there is as of yet no reliable scientific evidence for telepathy. However, when concluding...
...you are approaching a slippery slope. Once you use this to discredit one observation... uh oh. Have we been all tricked into believing in gravity, sunshine, puppies? Is your brain being tricked right now? Tough to pull this one out in order to refute someone's claims and then try to defend one's own theories from the implications.

Just a thought.
Once you grasp how the brain works to perceive the environment you realize that, in an important way, you are always hallucinating: there is no completely objective way to represent a puppy or sunshine or the experience of centripetal acceleration, and what we experience amounts to one possible choice out of an infinity of choices.

The particular quality of the sound of a flute, for example, is not an objective property of the air vibrations produced by a flute: with a different sort of sense organ for air vibrations and a different configuration of auditory neurons a flute would sound very different. The quality of the color red is not an objective property of EM radiation at that frequency range: the eyes and brain create the particular, specific experience we have of that frequency of light. Red is, in fact, a mass hallucination, as is blue. However, the fiction, red, consistently, and quite usefully, represents the external, objective fact: light in a certain frequency range.

The same is true for the particular subjective experience we have of every sense impression: it's a non-objective, and non-inevitable way to represent objective, external phenomena. Mutations happen and the ones that work best get selected. (The way we represent the world to ourselves is, apparently, extremely useful: it works so well that we can usually march forward completely confident that what we see is absolutely what's there, that our perceptions are "real".)

It is the fact of this 'processing' of stimuli into some sort of specific experience, though, that allows for hallucinations in the usual sense of the word: experiences that are total fiction in that they are generated from within the brain without being stimulated by any external phenomena. People who hear disembodied voices that no one else can hear are clearly not experiencing air vibrations. The brain is an organ, like any other in the body, and is subject to not working properly.

How, at any given time, can you or anyone be sure you aren't experiencing a total fiction generated from within the brain? Unfortunately, you can't. You should, obviously, question experiences that are outside expectation: a guy I know once saw a 10 foot tall rabbit sitting in a vacant lot after 4 days without sleep. He was aware he was sleep deprived and the impossibility of the creature tipped him off to the fact he was hallucinating. Had he hallucinated an old junk car he would never have suspected anything. (He may, in fact, have hallucinated half the cars and pedestrians he saw that day, without realizing it.) Sometimes, though, even when confronted with impossibilities, the very mechanism that causes the hallucination also causes delusional thinking and the hallucination is not doubted, despite its being outlandish, out of place, or grossly contrary to expectation.

Your question was about defending oneself against someone elses claim that the telepathic dream or Out-Of-Body experience was an hallucination. You can't, and shouldn't try. If you can't offer incontrovertible evidence or proof of a thing it's silly to expect anyone else to change their mind about it. When the subject comes up I offer my personal opinion that telepathy, or something that convincingly presents as telepathy, probably exists, based on things that have happened to me I can't otherwise explain. But because I can't give them any proof, I don't expect or require them to be persuaded, and am not particularly upset if they aren't. You may give your report of your encounter with bigfoot, sure, but you should not require or pressure anyone else to take it at face value if you can't substantiate it. That would amount to an assertion that the brain always works perfectly, or that yours does, anyway, which is something that could easily be disproved by subjecting you to various illusions, or by turning you over to a skilled hypnotist, like Derren Brown.

[Nanook]

How science can approach a phenomena which is not repeatable upon demand and occurs relatively rarely?

Two reasons I can think of that very real phenomena can not be repeated upon demand are:

1) We don't know all of the necessary conditions for the phenomena to occur.
2) We lack the capability to create the necessary conditions.

There are many natural phenomena that we can't reproduce on demand, that doesn't mean that such phenomena should be immediately dismissed.

I'm interested in precognitive dreams, out-of-body experiences, and telepathy because I have experienced all of them and I would very much like to be able to reproduce all of them on demand but can not. Any attempt to explore that seems to be immediately labeled pseudo-science.

A friend that moved up from California. We would have conversations where we'd rarely get more than two or three words into a sentence before the other person would start to reply because they already knew what the rest of the sentence would be. It could be argued that context and familiarity made that possible not telepathy.

He was describing a strip mall where he used to live and all of the sudden I had this picture in my minds eye and I could see it clearly, so I stopped him and named the stores and in what order, correctly. I had never been there.

That visual kind of telepathy only happened to me once. Not only can I not do it on demand but in 3-1/2 decades since that time it has never happened again.

I used to have lucid dreams in which as soon as I became aware I was dreaming, I could go anyplace or anywhere just by thinking about it. There are some very strange aspects of this that I could go into, but I just will say this much. I wanted to know if I was able to get real information about a remote location or if it was just something I was generating internally.

To test this I went to a place where I hadn't been but was close enough that I could drive to it, wrote down everything I saw, then drove there and verified that what I had seen was in accurate.

If I could make lucid dreams happen reliably, this is something that could be testable invoking third parties to task me with a location and verifying the accuracy of the data, but I can't. They happen when they happen, and unfortunately as I've grown older, that is much less frequently.

I think people tend to dismiss things out of hand too quickly on the basis that they haven't been scientifically proven; if they haven't been scientifically disproven then it should be just accepted as an unknown and something worthy of further research.

If instead of dismissing out of hand, one takes a bit more open minded approaches and starts looking for commonalities between these experiences, perhaps we'll eventually discover the necessary conditions to make them reproducible on demand.

[zoobyshoe]

I think people tend to dismiss things out of hand too quickly on the basis that they haven't been scientifically proven; if they haven't been scientifically disproven then it should be just accepted as an unknown and something worthy of further research.
The Out-Of-Body experience has been demonstrated to be a neurological phenomenon, a temporary failure, or blocking of, the sense of proprioception coupled with a release hallucination. It's been known for decades that it commonly happens to some people diagnosed with seizures, and also to some people who suffer from Migraines, and it was specifically located to an area on the temporo-parietal junction a couple years ago when it was induced in a woman with epilepsy who was about to undergo epilepsy surgery. Another class of people who seem to report frequent OBE's is heavy pot smokers, I recently found out.

Believers in the authenticity of the OBE are generally upset to find out there's any sort of coherent neurological explanation for it, it seems, and rush to form a sort of "callous" of rationalizations around this information, to prevent disillusionment I suppose, the main one offered being that these pathological and induced OBE's don't necessarily rule out the possibility of 'authentic' OBE's.

You may not be familiar with the sense of proprioception. You can google, and also read the chapter called "The Disembodied Lady" in Oliver Sacks' book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, which abundantly demonstrates the importance of this sense and how its loss can devastate a person's life.

The phenomenon of release hallucinations is demonstrated in the Phantom Limb phenomenon (you can also google that) as well as in the phenomenon of Musical Hallucinations that are suffered by some people after a certain degree of hearing loss. It's most common in the elderly. The basic mechanism is that, when deprived of stimulation by normal sensory input, the "starved" area of the brain is vulnerable to erroneous stimulation by the surrounding neurons. This is described at length in Sacks' newest book Musicophilia . Its a version of the same thing that happens in the sensory deprivation tank. (Sounds like you might be of an age to remember that fad from the late 70', early 80's.) I read yesterday that if you cut a ping pong ball in half, tape one half over each eye and lie down with a radio playing but which is tuned to static (white noise), you get the same result as from a sensory deprivation tank. I don't know, I haven't tried it, and don't recommend it. The point is sensory deprivation is one known cause of hallucinations.

So, anyway, the OBE that is, in fact, repeatable in the lab, in principle anyway, and which might be studied, is not acceptable to the believers. I have to suppose that anyone who has trained themselves to do this at will and could undergo a brain scan while doing it would be rejected by the believers as having a non-authentic OBE if their brain activity showed up at this spot, and they would be rejected by the neuroscientists if no brain activity did show up at this spot.

[fuzzyfelt]

Are there some references for the first couple of paragraphs in the previous post, too?

[zoobyshoe]

The Out-Of-Body experience has been demonstrated to be a neurological phenomenon, a temporary failure, or blocking of, the sense of proprioception coupled with a release hallucination. It's been known for decades that it commonly happens to some people diagnosed with seizures, and also to some people who suffer from Migraines, and it was specifically located to an area on the temporo-parietal junction a couple years ago when it was induced in a woman with epilepsy who was about to undergo epilepsy surgery.
The articficially induced one:
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/09/19/coolsc.outofbody/
Linking the OBE to the temporoparietal junction:
http://nro.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/1/16
General linking of OBE with autoscopy to seizures:
http://archneur.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/46/10/1080
Sensations of "floating, levitating, falling, sinking" reported as Migraine Aura:
http://www.migraine-aura.org/content/e27891/e27265/e26585/e43013/e46075/index_en.html
Another class of people who seem to report frequent OBE's is heavy pot smokers, I recently found out.
Miscellaneous reports by pot smokers on different forums:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=marijuana+out+of+body+experience&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=
Some sort of paper assembled from questionaires filled out by pot smokers (scroll down to "paranormal experiences"):
http://www.druglibrary.org/special/tart/tart31.htm
Believers in the authenticity of the OBE are generally upset to find out there's any sort of coherent neurological explanation for it, it seems, and rush to form a sort of "callous" of rationalizations around this information, to prevent disillusionment I suppose, the main one offered being that these pathological and induced OBE's don't necessarily rule out the possibility of 'authentic' OBE's.
On this site a "believer" builds an argument to try and salvage the OBE from being a "mere" neurological phenomenon. In the end he thanks science for having found a way to make this spiritual experience available to all:
http://www.shaktitechnology.com/obe.htm

[fuzzyfelt]

Those are interesting links, thanks, and a big task, sorry. (Also, sorry that these posts are tangential to the OP, and should be in another thread.) I’d been wondering why someone with ulterior motives to perpetuate a belief in spiritual involvement in OBEs would especially wish to question TPJ disturbance in all OBEs, when I couldn’t see that such claims would necessarily impede such beliefs, and imagined further scientific investigations, regardless of beliefs, would consider the veracity of different aspects of that claim. As an example, possibly the relevance of the claim to studies, in healthy people, that suggests body-ownership sense results from interactions of multisensory regularities with influences of a cognitive model of the body.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0708/07082305

[pftest]

The ability to induce an OBE is not a proper argument to support the position that an OBE is not actually "out there". An approach that better addresses this is to induce the experience and determine its correspondence to the surroundings.

[zoobyshoe]

Those are interesting links, thanks, and a big task, sorry. (Also, sorry that these posts are tangential to the OP, and should be in another thread.)
No problem on the links. I am happy to give them when asked, but otherwise try to avoid that chore.

None of this is really tangential. Dissuading people from automatic 'paranormal' interpretations of things that aren't at all necessarily paranormal is comparable to dissuading people from the ideas of perpetual motion and free energy: you have to back track and fill them in on a rather large amount of basic physics and ways of reasoning they never have been exposed to. To the extent Telepathy in Dreamstate is believed by anyone to be an epiphenomenon of the OBE then detailed discussion of the scientific understanding of body position and its distortions is warranted, just as a detailed discussion of conservation of energy would be warranted in the matter of Perpetual Motion.

I’d been wondering why someone with ulterior motives to perpetuate a belief in spiritual involvement in OBEs would especially wish to question TPJ disturbance in all OBEs, when I couldn’t see that such claims would necessarily impede such beliefs, and imagined further scientific investigations, regardless of beliefs, would consider the veracity of different aspects of that claim. As an example, possibly the relevance of the claim to studies, in healthy people, that suggests body-ownership sense results from interactions of multisensory regularities with influences of a cognitive model of the body.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0708/07082305

To be honest, I am not sure what you just said: your writing is a bit too densely compacted, perhaps. I have the feeling you might be suggesting that body sense requires multisensory imput, but I'm not sure that is what you meant. The question that arose in my mind from reading your last sentence was: "Does 'results from' imply "'requires'"? In my mind there is always a sense proper, and the separate issue of its being supported or contradicted by other senses. Here's a thing I posted in Medical Sciences a couple weeks back which addresses the issue of the role of "multisensory regularities":

Adopting A Rubber Hand

This indicates that sense of body position is arrived at by input from sight, touch, and proprioception, and that, when the stimuli are inconsistent, sight and touch are "believed" by the brain over proprioception:

In the study, each volunteer hid their right hand beneath a table while a rubber hand was placed in front of them at an angle suggesting the fake hand was part of their body. Both the rubber hand and hidden hand were simultaneously stroked with a paintbrush while the volunteer's brain was scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

On average, it took volunteers 11 seconds to start experiencing that the rubber hand was their own. The stronger this feeling, the greater the activity recorded in the premotor cortex.

After the experiment, volunteers were asked to point towards their right hand. Most reached in the wrong direction, pointing towards the rubber hand instead of the real hidden one, providing further evidence of the brain's re-adjustment.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/07/040702093052.htm

The essential sense of proprioception is a dedicated one (in the sense any sense can be called "dedicated" before you start parsing it) processed in specific brain locations, but that information is always heavily "supported" by corroborative evidence, so to speak, from any other sense that is active at the time. The corroborative evidence is nearly always consistent, so we come to automatically expect it to relate to the dedicated sense under consideration according to specific dynamics, but it (corroborative evidence) is actually not necessary for the sense in question to be operational in the first place. It's a matter of learned association, like a bell ringing when dinner is served. I don't believe Helen Keller, both deaf and blind, demonstrated any proprioceptive problems, and blind people obviously don't. I can close my eyes and still know what position my body is in.

Trouble arises when the "corroborative evidence" starts conflicting with the essential sense, or, better put, whenever information from different senses conflicts with expectation, or learned patterns of how they normally relate to each other. Here, we find, the brain starts making choices about what to believe and seems to take its best shot at constructing something coherent, however unusual.

Your link, and the rubber hand experiment, are demonstrations of this. My point is that, while body ownership sense may result "from interactions of multisensory regularities," it shouldn't be construed as requiring multi-modes. It happens to have them, and so utilizes them, and, importantly when it comes to the matter of illusions, gets used to them "supporting" each other in specific ways, an expectation that can be foiled with an elaborate lab set up, or a neurological event in one of many different critical areas, depending. Any sense can develop by itself, and be quite useful, in the absence of corroborating senses.

On the same topic, have a look at my post #132 in the concurrent "Ghost" thread here:

http://physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=307647&page=9

That story from Sacks might lead to the statement (paraphrasing you): "As an example, possibly the relevance of the claim to studies, in healthy people, that suggests hearing results from interactions of multisensory regularities with influences of a cognitive model of sound."
It's true that we are all probably always supporting what we hear other people saying by unconsciously lip reading, but it is not necessary for hearing that we lip read, or that we have a visual correspondence to sound: we can hear in the dark.

What is exceptionally interesting is that, under the right circumstances, the usual visual accompaniment to sound can trigger the hallucination of sound, in the absence of the ability to hear sound.

[Chronos]

No paranormal claims have been affirmed by science - when real scientists have spared the time to put them to real tests. Call me unconvinced.

[fuzzyfelt]

So it was still densely compacted even after I broke the one sentence up into three different sentences? :) Again, the further discussion is interesting, thanks. I tried to make some points- one which pftest expressed better-The ability to induce an OBE is not a proper argument to support the position that an OBE is not actually "out there".

Another point was that I imagined there were reasonable grounds for questioning disturbances of TPJ, and felt the link might support this. Firstly because TPJ disturbance may not be involved in every case (again, I think your explanation of how this was done without seeming to involve TPJ disturbance, and using the glove example, was better than mine). And secondly because it noted that healthy people were tested in this instance , rather than the pathological cases of previous tests.

And to answer your question, no, when I said ‘results from’ I didn’t mean ‘requires’, and I think it was this sort of confusion that I had hoped to clarify - hope I’ve expressed this better now.

[zoobyshoe]

I tried to make some points- one which pftest expressed better-
The ability to induce an OBE is not a proper argument to support the position that an OBE is not actually "out there".
Any demonstration of a purely neurological cause for the experience is obviously a proper argument to support the position that there is no "out there" OBE. Any demonstration of the spherical nature of the earth is a proper argument to support the position the earth is not flat.

[Ivan Seeking]

Any demonstration of a purely neurological cause for the experience is obviously a proper argument to support the position that there is no "out there" OBE. Any demonstration of the spherical nature of the earth is a proper argument to support the position the earth is not flat.

One cannot prove that there are no genuine OBEs. We can show evidence that OBEs can induced and explained using conventional science. We can also cite the lack of evidence to support other explanations for OBEs.

A more appropriate analogy might be that proof the earth is round is not proof that there are no flat planets. Likewise, the ability to induce sensations artificially is not evidence that those sensations don't occur otherwise due to real, tactile experiences.

[zoobyshoe]

Likewise, the ability to induce sensations artificially is not evidence that those sensations don't occur otherwise due to real, tactile experiences.
The "sensation" here is lack of sensation: the person's sense of proprioception is shut off or somehow disconnected from consciousness.

I am sure you've heard of the phantom limb phenomenon in amputees. They feel the limb is still there because their internal model of the limb is still there, and the neurons where that model is located are being stimulated by nearby neurons in the absence of authentic stimuli from the outside.

Strangely, the opposite can happen: the internal model can be damaged such that a person can not sense a limb they still have as part of their body. The real limb becomes strange and grotesque to them. They "disown" it, and can't account for it.

Best reference for that is The Man Who Fell Out of Bed, chapter 4 of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat in which Sacks tells the story of a stroke patient who woke with no proprioception in one leg. Unable to feel any ownership of the limb, he regarded it as a strange, foreign, horrible object, and threw it out of his bed. But, of course, he went with it.

Sacks, himself, years later had the same experience of his own leg after he damaged it badly and was recuperating in a hospital. (He tells the whole story in A Leg To Stand On)It is, apparently, not uncommon for people's internal model, their proprioception, of damaged limbs to fade away. Sacks says it's not that you feel the limb is missing, rather it's as if you never had a limb there and can't account for the strange, unearthly thing you find attached to you. He describes all this in rich detail in the book: a kind of purgatory of 12 days before the sensation started to come back bit by bit, during which had a major identity crisis based on his now distorted body image.

The "real, tactile" experience here is your internal sense of touch. It's not being "stimulated" to reall a memory here, it's being shut off or otherwise disconnected or made quiescent.

[fuzzyfelt]

The "sensation" here is lack of sensation: the person's sense of proprioception is shut off or somehow disconnected from consciousness.


I'm lost here, with this and discussions of phantom limbs etc., are you still discussing TPJ disturbance?

[NeoDevin]

One cannot prove that there are no genuine OBEs. We can show evidence that OBEs can induced and explained using conventional science. We can also cite the lack of evidence to support other explanations for OBEs.

And then we simply apply Occam's Razor to shave away the "other explanations" for OBE's, and conclude that there are no "genuine" OBE's. Once cannot prove that there are no genuine OBE's in the same sense that one cannot prove that there is no sasquatch, yeti, loch ness monster, aliens visiting earth, secret "new world order", fairies, dragons, dodo birds alive today, leprechauns, and/or mermaids.

We have a perfectly reasonable explanation, based on well established scientific principles, which reasonably explains all the claims of OBE's. Without any further evidence (which you admitted we don't have in posts #4, #16, and #17), there is no reason to consider any "other explanations".

Why has this thread lasted this long? This thread should have been locked after the first post or at least after Zz's response.

[Ivan Seeking]

And then we simply apply Occam's Razor to shave away the "other explanations" for OBE's, and conclude that there are no "genuine" OBE's.

Occams razor is a rule of thumb, not a scientific principle that can be used to draw conclusions.

[NeoDevin]

Occams razor is a rule of thumb, not a scientific principle that can be used to draw conclusions.

Well in that case you can't disprove that it is actually invisible faeries holding us down and keeping the planets in orbit.

[Ivan Seeking]

Well in that case you can't disprove that it is actually invisible faeries holding us down and keeping the planets in orbit.

Correct. We can only cite evidence to the contrary, and the lack of evidence to support the assertion.

Long ago it was believed that the angels pushed the planets along on their celestial spheres. Then Newton came along and rotated the positions of the angels by ninety degrees.

[NeoDevin]

Correct. We can only cite evidence to the contrary, and the lack of evidence to support the assertion.

So you would contend that genuine OBE's are as worthy of consideration as invisible faeries holding things down? I can live with that.

[Ivan Seeking]

So you would contend that genuine OBE's are as worthy of consideration as invisible faeries holding things down? I can live with that.

We have anecdotal evidence for OBE's, but as far as I know, we don't even have anecdotal evidence for fairies. So, no, they are not the same. The question in my mind is whether we have compelling anecdotal evidence for any claims of OBEs.

This almost seems like a religion to you [and many others here]. Why? Why are you determined to have a definite opinion?

[Ivan Seeking]

The assertion of invisible fairies was designed to not be falsifiable. If a person really believes that they experience genuine OBEs, then they could be tested and the claim confirmed [evidence presented to support the claim] or falsified [the person is not able to provide information about a remote location as claimed]. But, like fairies, we could never prove that there are no genuine OBEs even if no one claimed to experience them. We can reduce - generalize - the claim to one that can't be falsified.

[NeoDevin]

If you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFO6ZhUW38w)

[zoobyshoe]

I'm lost here, with this and discussions of phantom limbs etc., are you still discussing TPJ disturbance?

Ivan is comparing the OBE to other sorts of hallucinations, the hallucination of a sound, for example, or the hallucination of something in the visual field, saying that the ability to induce such an hallucination does not disprove real sounds or real visual experiences. His train of reasoning is: just because there can be a false OBE doesn't mean there are no real experiences of this sensation. I am pointing out the flaw in that train of reasoning, which is that the proprioceptive failure that is required for an OBE is not a stimulation of a sensation, it is the failure of a sensation: the failure of proprioception to give you internal information about your body. When you have no feel for where your limbs are in relation to each other, no feel for your body position as a whole, it is a situation of sensory deprivation. And it is from sensory deprivation that hallucinations easily arise. Failure of proprioception is not the hallucination of something that isn't there, it's the inability to sense something that is there. It is analogous to blindness or deafness.

Phantoms limbs and their opposite (the inability to sense the position of a limb which is still there) are further examples of the importance of proprioception, and the sensory and cognitive confusions that result when it is disturbed. The inability to feel the position of a limb results in a massive crisis of self-image, and emotional and cognitive disownership of the limb. By extension, during the OBE where complete sense of body ownership is lost, you often have people hallucinating the sight of themselves from outside.

[zoobyshoe]

Occams razor is a rule of thumb, not a scientific principle that can be used to draw conclusions.

In Principia Mathematica Newton laid out some "Rules of Reasoning" which are essentially a restatement of Occam's Razor:

RULE 1

We are to admit no more causes of natural things, than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

RULE II

Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.

RULE III

The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intension nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.

RULE IV

In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions collected by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/newton-princ.html

[DaveC426913]

The thing about OBEs is that
1] we do have anecdotal evidence AND
2] there is some case for repeatability, reproducibility and falsifiability.

So it falls within the realm of scientific study.

[Whoeveryouare]

What Ivan Seeking says makes a lot of sense to me. It seems the only sensible approach. We can't hold a definite opinion on the basis of heresay evidence, we would have to verify it empirically. This means running an experiment and obtaining statistically significant and reproducible results.

Unfortunately in physics no such experiment is possible. In consciousness studies we can't even prove that people have in-body experiences. Elesewhere there is even a popular view by which bodies are illusory and OBE's the only kind of experience we can have.

Presumably Christians and those with similar beliefs have no choice but to believe in OBE's, (or is it because they do not believe in them that our bodies must come back to life at the Resurection?), but I'm quite sure that there's no way to demonstrate that they're possible or impossible. It seems to be just the 'other minds' problem in another guise.

I recently read Carlos Castenada's Tales of Power and would highly recommend to anyone looking into these things. His Don Juan, (who can shape-shift, teleport and other cool stuff as some Zen adepts are said to be able to do), gives the sorcerers explanation for our ability to act at times as if we are in Neo's Matrix. It would be because we are.

I think this would be the implication of OBE's, if such things are possible, but I can't see how their possiblity could ever be proved except by having one.

[NeoDevin]

Zooby, thanks for the reference.

Dave, then where are the studies?

[zoobyshoe]

Zooby, thanks for the reference.
You're welcome.

Dave, then where are the studies?
I just finished a book by V.S. Ramachandran, A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness in which he mentions that the drug Ketamine can produce OBE's. I googled "ketamine out of body experience" and got a few interesting links on the first page which you can do yourself if you're interested. This would be a relatively reliable way to produce the experience at will, however it doesn't seem to be a "clean" OBE: the person feels drugged and high, and it is mixed up in many cases with the travel through a tunnel experience of the "Near Death" experience. Ketamine was developed in the early 1960's and was used as a field anesthetic in Viet Nam for a while, but it was discontinued specifically because of this "OBE" side effect.
-------------------------------------------------------
In the same book Ramachandran mentions the following odd case that has an obvious bearing here:

"Shai Azoulai and I recently saw a patient with a right parieto-occipital tumor who constantly experienced a visual hallucination of a twin or doppelganger always about a foot to his left and front. The twin mimed his movements in perfect synchrony. When I irrigated his left ear canal with cold water (stimulating the vestibular system) the twin was seen to 'jump around' and 'shrink in size' to a midget. Here is yet another reminder of how tenuous our sense of being anchored to our body really is, even though we usually take it to be one of the axioms of our existence."

p.150

This irrigating the ear with cold water is a technique used in rural India to diagnose seizures since it will trigger a seizure in some epileptics. This is probably where Ramachandran picked it up. He mentions having tried it on a stroke patient who was paralyzed one one side but seemed unaware of that; to be hallucinating that the paralyzed side was working perfectly well. (This happens in some cases, this woman wasn't unique.) Irrigating the contralateral ear brought her to awareness of the paralysis, snapped her out of the hallucination for a time, but she later reverted. Perhaps he tried it here hoping it would make the man's doppelganger completely disappear, but he changed it to a midget instead.

[fuzzyfelt]

The Out-Of-Body experience has been demonstrated to be a neurological phenomenon, a temporary failure, or blocking of, the sense of proprioception coupled with a release hallucination. It's been known for decades that it commonly happens to some people diagnosed with seizures, and also to some people who suffer from Migraines, and it was specifically located to an area on the temporo-parietal junction a couple years ago when it was induced in a woman with epilepsy who was about to undergo epilepsy surgery. Another class of people who seem to report frequent OBE's is heavy pot smokers, I recently found out.

The "sensation" here is lack of sensation: the person's sense of proprioception is shut off or somehow disconnected from consciousness.


is comparing the OBE to other sorts of hallucinations, the hallucination of a sound, for example, or the hallucination of something in the visual field, saying that the ability to induce such an hallucination does not disprove real sounds or real visual experiences...

Phantoms limbs and their opposite (the inability to sense the position of a limb which is still there) are further examples of the importance of proprioception, and the sensory and cognitive confusions that result when it is disturbed.

The TPJ was mentioned as the specific location of proprioception, yet in the information you linked to about limbs (Ehrsson's virtual hand experiment) brain activity was mentioned as occuring in the premotor cortex.

As well, the results of further studies of TPJ disturbance could not distinguish between an arrest and extra noise in the TPJ-

'We can postulate at least two mechanisms for
the interfering effect of TMS, either of which could explain our
results. First, TMS could have added extra noise to the neural
signals that provide input to a body/non-body discrimination pro-
cess. Additional input noise would impair discrimination. Second,
TMS could have transiently arrested the test-for-fit process itself,
reducing the difference between body and non-body processing.
Our results cannot distinguish between these two mechanisms of
action'

http://www.manostsakiris.googlepages.com/TsakirisNeuropsychologia.pdf

Also, Ehrsson's repeatable experiment upon healthy people, which is anecdotally more like an anecdotally reported OBE (than the partial effects of Blanke's magnetic disturbance on an epileptic patient's TPJ) and which involves virtual sensations, seems more likely to involve more sensations than less.

Thus, I think the evidence of lack of sensation as sole cause is inconclusive or irrelevant.
(Wrote something like this yesterday, but have had computer problems.)

[zoobyshoe]

The TPJ was mentioned as the specific location of proprioception...
No, it is mentioned as the specific location where OBE's were triggered by stimulation with an electrode. Proprioception, as far as I know is generalized throughout the parietal lobes and is also processed in the cerebellum. I have never heard it attributed to one spot. Proprioception may be got to in some different way by stimulating some other spot on the parietal lobes: touch them somewhere else and the person may feel like their nose is pointed sideways, who knows?

As well, the results of further studies of TPJ disturbance could not distinguish between an arrest and extra noise in the TPJ-

'We can postulate at least two mechanisms for
the interfering effect of TMS, either of which could explain our
results. First, TMS could have added extra noise to the neural
signals that provide input to a body/non-body discrimination pro-
cess. Additional input noise would impair discrimination. Second,
TMS could have transiently arrested the test-for-fit process itself,
reducing the difference between body and non-body processing.
Our results cannot distinguish between these two mechanisms of
action'

http://www.manostsakiris.googlepages.com/TsakirisNeuropsychologia.pdf...

...Thus, I think the evidence of lack of sensation as sole cause is inconclusive or irrelevant.
(Wrote something like this yesterday, but have had computer problems.)
Whether it's one mechanism or the other with the TMS is not too important since they have merely "suggested" a test-for-fit process here, not exactly proven one. What I would like to know is whether any of the test subjects felt their hand had turned into a spoon after TMS at the TPJ. (Such things can happen: a girl I know said she felt like she had turned into a giant muffin after eating mushrooms. Carlos Castenada reports that Don Juan slowly talked him into "becoming" a crow after smoking something, as well.)

There is clearly some higher function somewhere making decisions about what to believe in the event of sensory discrepancies but the proposal of the OBE as a disturbance of the test-for-fit process is shaky when you ask where the rubber hand (or spoon) is in the wild OBE. Also, what corresponds to the tactile deception?

The OBE is a great deal more dramatic and comprehensive than adopting a rubber hand and also happens without elaborate lab illusions: it happens spontaneously to people as they are drifting off to sleep with their eyes closed. As you may know from accounts, the experience is often preceded by a loud buzzing and strong sense of the body vibrating. This is obviously some kind of neuronal hyperactivity, be it a simple partial seizure or the kind of less organized "noise" that precedes the expanding area of spreading cortical depression in migraine aura. The loss of sense of body follows this, and is obviously something akin to post-ictal Todd's Paralysis or cortical depression in the wake of a scintillating scotoma happening in brain areas responsible for proprioception. Once it is paralyzed or depressed, some other part(s) of the brain try to make sense of this come up with the interesting "solution" to the problem which is that consciousness has left the body, complete with corroborative hallucinations of autoscopy and/or of travel.

Also, Ehrsson's repeatable experiment upon healthy people, which is anecdotally more like an anecdotally reported OBE (than the partial effects of Blanke's magnetic disturbance on an epileptic patient's TPJ) and which involves virtual sensations, seems more likely to involve more sensations than less.
Blanke did not use magnetic stimulation. He was using depth implanted electrodes which can both send and receive signals. They do this to try and provoke the seizures from which the patient normally suffers in an effort to specifically locate the problem seizure focus which will be removed in surgery. For obvious reasons they want to limit what they remove as much as possible. Depth implanted electrodes are an invasive procedure and are only used on people going to have surgery anyway.
I don't see why you find the rubber hand to be more like anecdotally reported OBE's.

[fuzzyfelt]

No, it is mentioned as the specific location where OBE's were triggered by stimulation with an electrode.

OK, that is a relief! I had been confused by the words and run-ons and thought you were saying the OBE phenomenon or proprioception is specifically located at the TPJ, which seemed a big leap. Rather you only meant that electrodes in that spot caused something-‘failure’, ‘blocking’…- affecting something around the area which has something to do with proprioception. It took me a while to get that!

And, sorry, electrodes in Blanke’s case, and magnetism used in a further study of TPJ disturbance with results that left possibilities of arrest or noise open, but is there any reason to state that lack of sensation is a sole or necessary cause?

I don't see why you find the rubber hand to be more like anecdotally reported OBE's.

And no, I didn’t think Ehrsson’s glove experiment that you linked to was more similar to anecdotally reported OBEs, and I think that answers some of your questions. Instead I meant Ehrsson’s OBE experiment that I had linked to.

To explain, I had originally linked to Ehrsson’s OBE experiment as good reason to question Blanke’s OBE experiment since it is a repeatable experiment and unlike Blanke’s, involves healthy people. Another reason was because it may not involve TPJ disturbance. Further, it also is more similar to anecdotal descriptions of OBEs than the experience in Blanke’s case. I raised it again here because it involves virtual sensations, suggesting involvement in this seemingly better OBE experiment of more, rather than less, sensation.

[zoobyshoe]

OK, that is a relief! I had been confused by the words and run-ons and thought you were saying the OBE phenomenon or proprioception is specifically located at the TPJ, which seemed a big leap. Rather you only meant that electrodes in that spot caused something-‘failure’, ‘blocking’…- affecting something around the area which has something to do with proprioception. It took me a while to get that!Sorry if my wording was confusing. Yes, all I meant to say was that the TPJ had been isolated as a critical spot where an OBE could be triggered. What that means is that it's neurological. The TPJ is some kind of important point of contact with the circuit, or circuits that are involved in the OBE, but "OBE activity" in these circuits may range far from that spot.

... but is there any reason to state that lack of sensation is sole cause?
The failure of one sensation, proprioception in this case, is all we need to start a multimodal hallucination in other senses. Removing one class of information, internal sense of body, is all we need to require the brain to reprocess everything else it has to work with into the new fictional picture of the body located floating in the room near the ceiling. If you don't feel located anywhere you confabulate something plausible to account for that and outright hallucinate a view of yourself lying in bed from a perspective near the ceiling.

You may wonder why I don't suppose the visual hallucination precedes the feeling of floating: Autoscopy can, and does, happen by itself with no "floating", as in the report from Ramachandran I quoted to Neodevin. The "double" seems perfectly subject to gravity. In other reports the person's visual perspective can shift from the real position to the perspective of the double and they can look at themselves from either perspective, but neither is floating. It's not a case of being out of body, but more like suddenly having two separate bodies and one consciousnes that can shift back and forth. There is no automatic tendency for autoscopic experiences to take the form of "floating", therefore there must be some specific trigger for it when they do.

If we suppose that an unexpected failure of proprioception is the primary event, then we have good reason for the hallucinations that follow which are, in effect, answers to the question "Why don't I feel like I'm in my body?"

Interferring with some integrative process (test-for-fit) by the introduction of "noise" seems very unlikely to produce the relatively coherent (however erroneous) experience of the OBE. Failures of integration, agnosias, are incoherent, chaotic experiences. Here's what facial agnosia looks like to a migraine sufferer who has episodic experiences of it:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/037570406X/sr=1-1/qid=1241788105/ref=dp_image_text_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books&qid=1241788105&sr=1-1

Sacks describes an equally horrifying, Picasso-like, experience of his leg the first time he tried to stand on it after recuperating from having torn a major muscle loose: it's position seemed to change incoherently six times a second. Ascribing the cause of the OBE to a failure of a specific integration process doesn't fit with the much more chaotic and bewildering, choppy things that actually seem to happen when integration fails. I am more likely to suppose the integration process goes really well in an OBE. The problem with it is that it's based on incomplete data: with no internal information from the body the brain decides it is located floating in the room.

Messages from proprioceptors in the body, like all other sensory information, go first to the thalamus, and they are reworked and sent to the cortex from there. The cortex feeds info back to the thalamus, and the thalamus responds. The thalamus always controls the cortex and has the ability to put the cortex to "sleep": to slow or stop the information it feeds to the cortex and to send those neurons the instruction to stop processing. This is what happens when we go to sleep. This thalamo-cortical-thalamo circuit is where proprioceptive information could be blocked or disrupted. The TPJ may be a critical place to get into that circuit and mess with it.

And no, I didn’t think Ehrsson’s glove experiment that you linked to was more similar to anecdotally reported OBEs, and I think that answers some of your questions. Instead I meant Ehrsson’s OBE experiment that I had linked to.

To explain, I had originally linked to Ehrsson’s OBE experiment as good reason to question Blanke’s OBE experiment since it is a repeatable experiment and unlike Blanke’s, involves healthy people. Another reason was because it may not involve TPJ disturbance. Further, it also is more similar to anecdotal descriptions of OBEs than the experience in Blanke’s case. I raised it again here because it involves virtual sensations, suggesting involvement in this seemingly better OBE experiment of more, rather than less, sensation.
Blankes' is repeatable, in principle, though no one would allow such an invasive procedure under other circumstances. The Ehrrson demonstration is of gravity-bound autoscopy, not an OBE with floating near the ceiling. The Blanke OBE definitely sounds more like the average anecdotal report than the Ehrrson one. Also, I hope it is clear by now that I am not asserting the OBE consists exclusively of the lack of proprioception. The "more sensations" are obviously there, but they are supplied by hallucination: there are no cameras showing you a view of yourself from the outside, no one simultaneously touching you and your virtual image with a stick. That demonstration tells us that proprioception can be fooled: over-ridden by conflicting information from other senses. It doesn't begin to explain why someone should suddenly not feel located in their body or why they have a clear view of themselves from the outside in the absence of a camera set up.

I get the feeling you are attaching to the "healthy" part of the Ehrrson demonstration, as if it's a forgone conclusion that all spontaneous OBE experiencers are neurologically perfectly sound. The full body lab illusion in healthy people requires an elaborate technological set up to create autoscopy. What is creating the autoscopy in the spontaneous OBE? Clearly it is some kind of hallucination, and, as such, pathological: something isn't working right. The notion of a perfectly "healthy" spontaneous OBE doesn't really make sense.

[fuzzyfelt]

I've just read more of the earlier parts of this thread and see the Ehrsson OBE experiment had been mentioned before me, sorry to be repetitive, but I'm now left with little time to reply fully to the previous post.

I was interested in clearer data shedding any light on various reasonable doubts.


as if it's a forgone conclusion that all spontaneous OBE experiencers are neurologically perfectly sound..

Odd it was felt that I’d leapt to that conclusion, despite being mindful of not doing so, and conversely the statement-

Clearly it is some kind of hallucination, and, as such, pathological

discounts the already mentioned toxicological anecdotal exceptions. General population surveys also suggest anecdotal cases without relationship to specific pathology.

[zoobyshoe]

Although Colman, in 1894, wrote specifically about "Hallucinations in the Sane, associated with local organic diease of the sensory organs, etc.," the impression has long remained both in the popular mind and among physicians, too, that "hallucinations" means psychosis - or gross organic disease of the brain. The reluctance to observe the common phenomenon of "hallucinations in the sane" before the 1970's was perhaps influenced by the fact that there was no theory of how such hallucinations could occur untill 1967, when Jerzy Konorski, a Polish neuropsychologist, devoted several pages of his Integrative Activity of the Brain to the "physiological basis of hallucinations". Konorski inverted the question "Why do hallucinations occur?" to "Why do hallucinations not occur all the time? What constrains them?" He conceived a dynamic system which, he wrote, "can generate perceptions, images, and hallucinations...the mechanism producing hallucinations is built into our brains, but it can be thrown into operation only in some exceptional conditions." Konorski brought together evidence - weak in the 1960's but overwhelming now - that there are not only afferent connections going from the sense organs to the brain, but "retro" connections going in the other direction. Such retro connections may be sparse compared to the afferent connections, and may not be activated under normal circumstances. But they provide , Konorski felt, the essential anatomical and physiological means by which hallucinations can be generated. What, then, normally prevents this from happening? The crucial factor, Konorski suggested, is the sensory input from ears, eyes, and other sense organs, which normally inhibits any backflow of activity from the haighest parts of the cortex to the periphery. But if there is a crucial deficiency of input from the sense organs this will facilitate a backfow, producing hallucinations phisiologically and subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions. (There is normally no such reduction of input in conditions of silence or darkness, beause "off-units" fire up and produce continuous activity.)

Konorski's theory provided a simple and beautiful explanation for what soon came to be called "release" hallucinations associated with de-afferentation." Such an explanation now seems obvious, almost tautological - but it required originality and audacity to propose it in the 1960's.

There is now good evidence from brain-imaging studies to support Konorski's idea. In 2000 Michael Griffiths published a detailed and pineering report on the neural basis of musical hallucinations; he was able to show, using PET scans, that musical hallucinations were associated with a widespread activation of the same beural networks that are normally activated during the perception of actual music.

-Musicophilia

pp 82-84

[fuzzyfelt]

Thanks, that was interesting too, although I wonder about a number of things including what overwhelming evidence is referred to aside from Griffiths’ 2000 report. Or, regarding that report, does it support Konorski’s idea in any way other than via activation of the same neural networks as activated during actual perception? Another wonder is, is there any difference between the workings of the brain during hallucination and such workings during sleep? For example, http://www.celiagreen.com/charlesmccreery/dreams-and-psychosis.pdf

[zoobyshoe]

Thanks, that was interesting too, although I wonder about a number of things including what overwhelming evidence is referred to aside from Griffiths’ 2000 report.
The "overwhelming evidence" was for the existence of the "retro-connections". Sacks doesn't cite any sources for this. I assume it is so accepted he didn't feel the need to: that's the impression his wording has on me, anyway.

The Griffiths study was not called "overwhelming evidence", merely "good evidence". I take it from the context that the Griffiths' study is cited as one example of a pleurality of such studies (perhaps because it was the first?): "There is now good evidence from brain-imaging studies to support Konorski's idea."

Or, regarding that report, does it support Konorski’s idea in any way other than via activation of the same neural networks as activated during actual perception?
I am not sure what else you feel needs to be supported. The existence of "retro-connections" is, apparently, not in doubt, having been previously confirmed from other sources, according to Sacks' mention of "overwhelming evidence".

Another wonder is, is there any difference between the workings of the brain during hallucination and such workings during sleep? For example, http://www.celiagreen.com/charlesmccreery/dreams-and-psychosis.pdf
Sacks is speaking specifically about "release" hallucinations here, in reference to the concept of "hallucinations in the sane". I haven't read your link but from the "dreams-and-psychosis" in the address I assume it discusses "hallucinations in the insane", which Sacks isn't addressing here.

[fuzzyfelt]

I am not sure what else you feel needs to be supported. The existence of "retro-connections" is, apparently, not in doubt, having been previously confirmed from other sources, according to Sacks' mention of "overwhelming evidence".
Ok, thanks.


Sacks is speaking specifically about "release" hallucinations here, in reference to the concept of "hallucinations in the sane". I haven't read your link but from the "dreams-and-psychosis" in the address I assume it discusses "hallucinations in the insane", which Sacks isn't addressing here.

Do only psychotic people dream? :)

[zoobyshoe]

Do only psychotic people dream? :)
Meaning?

[fuzzyfelt]

I haven't read your link but from the "dreams-and-psychosis" in the address I assume it discusses "hallucinations in the insane", which Sacks isn't addressing here.

A look at the link (Charles McCreery, DPhil Formerly lecturer in Experimental Psychology, Magdalen College, Oxford, 2008,) should explain why I was alluding that the paper was not just about psychotic hallucinations, nor possibly at all, according to Sach's definition of psychotic.

To answer – a proposal linking dream and psychosis attendant hallucinations encompasses all who dream, psychotic or not. This is different to your assumption that it would only discuss psychotic people.

To elaborate, under a heading about Hallucinatory Episodes in the Sane, OBEs are discussed as a microcosm. For example,

‘ As Irwin (1985) points out, these experiences seem to occur in conditions either of
extremely low or extremely high cortical arousal.’

Interestingly, it also offers an alternative view to Sachs' definition ‘psychosis - or gross organic disease of the brain’, instead putting forward a case that although there may be some underlying organic lability,

‘the behavioural, affective and cognitive symptomatology may indeed be seen as functional on the present view, since they are only the observable by-products of a disorder of function’,

hence if the assumption that it only involved psychotic people according to Sachs' definition of psychotic and thus was not applicable, such an assumption could also be faulty.

I could ask my question differently, however - how does this ‘release’ hallucination differ from other hallucinations to be a sub-set of all hallucinations, or are you suggesting all hallucinations are 'release' hallucinations?

[zoobyshoe]

A look at the link (Charles McCreery, DPhil Formerly lecturer in Experimental Psychology, Magdalen College, Oxford, 2008,) should explain why I was alluding that the paper was not just about psychotic hallucinations, nor possibly at all, according to Sach's definition of psychotic.

To answer – a proposal linking dream and psychosis attendant hallucinations encompasses all who dream, psychotic or not. This is different to your assumption that it would only discuss psychotic people.

To elaborate, under a heading about Hallucinatory Episodes in the Sane, OBEs are discussed as a microcosm. For example,

‘ As Irwin (1985) points out, these experiences seem to occur in conditions either of
extremely low or extremely high cortical arousal.’

Interestingly, it also offers an alternative view to Sachs' definition ‘psychosis - or gross organic disease of the brain’, instead putting forward a case that although there may be some underlying organic lability,

‘the behavioural, affective and cognitive symptomatology may indeed be seen as functional on the present view, since they are only the observable by-products of a disorder of function’,

hence if the assumption that it only involved psychotic people according to Sachs' definition of psychotic, (that is, on organic rather than functional grounds), and thus was not applicable, such an assumption could also be faulty.

I could ask my question differently, however - how does this ‘release’ hallucination differ from other hallucinations to be a sub-set of them, or are you suggesting all hallucinations are 'release' hallucinations?

If you are questioning why Sacks seems to be fusing psychosis with gross organic disease of the brain, then so do I. I tend to think it was an error in syntax on his part, that the thought he meant to express was "Hallucination is associated in people's minds with psychosis, or, gross organic disease of the brain." His main drift, clear from the context, is that there is a stigma associated with hallucination: hallucination = crazy, or, brain damaged, therefore the subject of hallucinations in people who don't fit the criteria of "crazy" or "brain damaged" was neglected for a long time because no one had any good ideas how a "sane" person might hallucinate.

"Hallucinations in the sane" are those cases where the person has full insight that the hallucination is not real, or is easily persuaded they are not real. There is no delusional system supporting the reality of the hallucination. Charles Bonnet Syndrome is often cited as the classic example of this:

Usually people with CBS are aware that their hallucinations, although vivid, are not real. CBS hallucinations only affect sight and do not involve hearing things or any other sensations. People with CBS do not develop complicated non-medical explanations about the cause of their hallucinations (sometimes called ‘delusions’). If you think you are having Charles Bonnet syndrome hallucinations, tell your GP about them. You may find it useful to take a copy of this webpage along with you to show to your doctor.
http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/PublicWebsite/public_rnib003641.hcsp

Likewise the many cases of people he mentions who hear music playing when there is no music playing are not psychotic: they quickly figure out it is not real and, like Charles Bonnet sufferers, worry that they are going crazy. That worry, obviously, demonstrates that they aren't crazy: they have insight into the fact they're hallucinating.

The guy in your link is proposing that psychosis is a kind of dreaming resulting from either hypo- or hyper-arousal. To the extent he explains the OBE as a brief, sudden episode of the same thing in a person who is otherwise sane, he is, never the less, explaining the OBE as a brief, sudden psychotic episode. In his short side excursion into hallucinations in the sane, he is pretty much saying they're briefly insane.

In Charles Bonnet and other release hallucinations there is no overall delusional or psychotic mechanism believed to be at work. The mechanism Sacks reports from Konorski accounts fully for it.

As for the OBE being caused by extremely low or extremely high cortical arousal: this simply throws the explanation back to a simple partial seizure. (Your author doesn't seem to be aware that a solid connection has been made between OBE's and simple partial seizures, and he doesn't see this vector.) Seizures are most likely to occur during sleep, or, during episodes of high stress, emotional or physical. This is why, when being given an EEG, people are instructed for some of the time to relax as deeply as possible, and then, later, they are instructed to breath deeply and quickly, as if exerting themselves:

During the Procedure

An EEG may be performed on an outpatient basis or as part of your stay in a hospital. Procedures may vary depending on your condition and your physician's practices.

Generally, an EEG procedure follows this process:

1. You will be asked to relax in a reclining chair or lie on a bed.

2. Between 8 and 20 electrodes will be attached to your scalp with a special paste, or a cap containing the electrodes will be used.

3. You will be asked to close your eyes, relax, and be still.

4. Once the recording begins you will need to remain still throughout the test. You may be monitored through a window in an adjoining room to observe any movements that can cause an inaccurate reading, such as swallowing or blinking. The recording may be stopped periodically to let you rest or reposition yourself.

5. After the initial recording performed at rest, you may be tested with various stimuli to produce activity that does not show up while you are resting. For example, you may be asked to breathe deeply and rapidly for three minutes, or you may be exposed to a bright light.

[glondor]

I know telepathy works in a dream state as it has happened to me many years ago. I will tell more if any one is interested.

[fuzzyfelt]

The Out-Of-Body experience has been demonstrated to be a neurological phenomenon, a temporary failure, or blocking of, the sense of proprioception coupled with a release hallucination.

So most of this sentence and further posts relating 'release' hallucinations with 'retro' connections to OBEs etc., is no longer applicable, but is applicable in other cases involving the ‘sane’-

In Charles Bonnet and other release hallucinations there is no overall delusional or psychotic mechanism believed to be at work. The mechanism Sacks reports from Konorski accounts fully for it.

'Konorski brought together evidence - weak in the 1960's but overwhelming now - that there are not only afferent connections going from the sense organs to the brain, but "retro" connections going in the other direction. Such retro connections may be sparse compared to the afferent connections, and may not be activated under normal circumstances. But they provide , Konorski felt, the essential anatomical and physiological means by which hallucinations can be generated. What, then, normally prevents this from happening? The crucial factor, Konorski suggested, is the sensory input from ears, eyes, and other sense organs, which normally inhibits any backflow of activity from the haighest parts of the cortex to the periphery. But if there is a crucial deficiency of input from the sense organs this will facilitate a backfow, producing hallucinations phisiologically and subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions. (There is normally no such reduction of input in conditions of silence or darkness, beause "off-units" fire up and produce continuous activity.)

Konorski's theory provided a simple and beautiful explanation for what soon came to be called "release" hallucinations associated with de-afferentation." Such an explanation now seems obvious, almost tautological - but it required originality and audacity to propose it in the 1960's.’ -Musicophilia

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/musical-maladies

'Konorski's thesis is that hallucinations are caused by connections going from the sensory regions of the brain to the sense organs (so-called "retro" or "descending" connections). He hypothesizes that hallucinations are normally inhibited by sensory experiences but that when sensory stimulation falls below a certain level, the "retro" fibers act on the sense organs to produce "virtual" experiences that are as vivid as real ones.

Sacks swallows this theory whole, stating that although evidence of such connections was scant in the 1960s, it is now overwhelming. In fact, the descending connections of the auditory system to the cochlea were well known even in the 1960s. However, the existence of retro connections cannot validate a particular theory about their function.

The explanation that a deficiency of input from the sense organs will facilitate a backflow "now seems obvious, almost tautological," Sacks says. But Konorski's schema is light-years away from being self-evident. It fails to explain why hallucinations can occur without any strong sensory deprivation. Nor does it shed any light on why the brain, which already possesses the hallucinatory material, needs to send extremely detailed hallucinatory scenes to the retina or cochlea, where they must be precisely reconstituted into a "real" sensory experience and returned to the sensory cortices. After all, the brain could produce the vivid images itself, as it does in the case of phantom limb sensations.'

And although simple partial seizures are difficult to diagnose, it is stated that because of evidence contrary to the original explanation of OBEs

this simply throws the explanation back to a simple partial seizure.

The Out-Of-Body experience has been demonstrated to be a neurological phenomenon, a temporary failure, or blocking of, the sense of proprioception coupled with a release hallucination. It's been known for decades that it commonly happens to some people diagnosed with seizures, and also to some people who suffer from Migraines, and it was specifically located to an area on the temporo-parietal junction a couple years ago when it was induced in a woman with epilepsy who was about to undergo epilepsy surgery.

And in another post- No, it is mentioned as the specific location where OBE's were triggered by stimulation with an electrode.

So, ‘it’ here is not an OBE but the trigger of OBEs that was specifically located. Maybe it would have been helpful if there was some mention of ‘ trigger’ somewhere in that post (24).

Believers in the authenticity of the OBE are generally upset to find out there's any sort of coherent neurological explanation for it, it seems, and rush to form a sort of "callous" of rationalizations around this information, to prevent disillusionment I suppose, the main one offered being that these pathological and induced OBE's don't necessarily rule out the possibility of 'authentic' OBE's.

It doesn’t follow that believers would want to question this because it doesn’t explain enough, for, just as religions may accommodate both a meeting of gametes to trigger life and also mystery of life, so too may believers accommodate both a trigger of OBEs whilst maintaining supernatural facets of them.

However, given that: the patient was already diagnosed with a history of chronic seizures which could cause OBEs; the patient may have unusual damage resulting from siezures; anaesthetics or surgery or other trauma may also cause OBEs; the OBE the epileptic patient described varied from typical OBE reports and involved other hallucinations atypical of reported OBEs; little knowledge is shown here to explain how these various areas of the brain affect each other; at least two possibly exclusive factors, high and low cortical arousal, sensation and lack of sensation, may be associated with OBE causation; that Ehrsson’s OBE induction via virtual sensation may or may not involve the TPJ area, so too other information which is possibly related, like phantom limbs, toxins, changed brain structure in practitioners of meditation (Roepstorff 2009), etc.; and finally given how little is shown here to be known about hallucinations and their ambiguous nature (like the difference between OBEs, psychotic hallucinations and naturally occurring dreams), all sorts of permutations with a range of alternative possibilities may be allowed.

These could include ideas that the trigger in question is not a trigger but coincides with other circumstances; or, as mentioned, that which was triggered was like an OBE, or artificial OBE, unrelated to otherwise reported OBEs; that the trigger itself is only a trigger in exceptional circumstances and not necessarily a trigger for non-seizure or damaged patients; it is one of various triggers; or that this ‘trigger’ is not entirely a trigger, but a contributing factor toward triggering, either only in exceptional circumstances or not.

All of which allow reasonable doubts that this is

the specific location where OBE's were triggered by stimulation with an electrode. in all cases, along with other ideas contained in post 24.

[zoobyshoe]

So most of this sentence and further posts relating 'release' hallucinations with 'retro' connections to OBEs etc., is no longer applicable, but is applicable in other cases involving the ‘sane’-





http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/musical-maladies

'Konorski's thesis is that hallucinations are caused by connections going from the sensory regions of the brain to the sense organs (so-called "retro" or "descending" connections). He hypothesizes that hallucinations are normally inhibited by sensory experiences but that when sensory stimulation falls below a certain level, the "retro" fibers act on the sense organs to produce "virtual" experiences that are as vivid as real ones.

Sacks swallows this theory whole, stating that although evidence of such connections was scant in the 1960s, it is now overwhelming. In fact, the descending connections of the auditory system to the cochlea were well known even in the 1960s. However, the existence of retro connections cannot validate a particular theory about their function.

The explanation that a deficiency of input from the sense organs will facilitate a backflow "now seems obvious, almost tautological," Sacks says. But Konorski's schema is light-years away from being self-evident. It fails to explain why hallucinations can occur without any strong sensory deprivation. Nor does it shed any light on why the brain, which already possesses the hallucinatory material, needs to send extremely detailed hallucinatory scenes to the retina or cochlea, where they must be precisely reconstituted into a "real" sensory experience and returned to the sensory cortices. After all, the brain could produce the vivid images itself, as it does in the case of phantom limb sensations.'

And although simple partial seizures are difficult to diagnose, it is stated that because of evidence contrary to the original explanation of OBEs





And in another post-

So, ‘it’ here is not an OBE but the trigger of OBEs that was specifically located. Maybe it would have been helpful if there was some mention of ‘ trigger’ somewhere in that post (24).



It doesn’t follow that believers would want to question this because it doesn’t explain enough, for, just as religions may accommodate both a meeting of gametes to trigger life and also mystery of life, so too may believers accommodate both a trigger of OBEs whilst maintaining supernatural facets of them.

However, given that: the patient was already diagnosed with a history of chronic seizures which could cause OBEs; the patient may have unusual damage resulting from siezures; anaesthetics or surgery or other trauma may also cause OBEs; the OBE the epileptic patient described varied from typical OBE reports and involved other hallucinations atypical of reported OBEs; little knowledge is shown here to explain how these various areas of the brain affect each other; at least two possibly exclusive factors, high and low cortical arousal, sensation and lack of sensation, may be associated with OBE causation; that Ehrsson’s OBE induction via virtual sensation may or may not involve the TPJ area, so too other information which is possibly related, like phantom limbs, toxins, changed brain structure in practitioners of meditation (Roepstorff 2009), etc.; and finally given how little is shown here to be known about hallucinations and their ambiguous nature (like the difference between OBEs, psychotic hallucinations and naturally occurring dreams), all sorts of permutations with a range of alternative possibilities may be allowed.

These could include ideas that the trigger in question is not a trigger but coincides with other circumstances; or, as mentioned, that which was triggered was like an OBE, or artificial OBE, unrelated to otherwise reported OBEs; that the trigger itself is only a trigger in exceptional circumstances and not necessarily a trigger for non-seizure or damaged patients; it is one of various triggers; or that this ‘trigger’ is not entirely a trigger, but a contributing factor toward triggering, either only in exceptional circumstances or not.

All of which allow reasonable doubts that this is

in all cases, along with other ideas contained in post 24.
So, you're saying you believe in a "real" OBE.

[fuzzyfelt]

I didn't mention another possibility, that everything about triggers and OBEs is fictitious.
I'm interested in factual information.

[zoobyshoe]

I didn't mention another possibility, that everything about triggers and OBEs is fictitious.
I'm interested in factual information.

Direct question: do you believe in "real" OBE's?

[Ivan Seeking]

That has nothing to do with the discussion. He is saying that you have not represented the facts accurately.

[zoobyshoe]

So most of this sentence and further posts relating 'release' hallucinations with 'retro' connections to OBEs etc., is no longer applicable, but is applicable in other cases involving the ‘sane’-
I'm not sure what this means.
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/musical-maladies

'Konorski's thesis is that hallucinations are caused by connections going from the sensory regions of the brain to the sense organs (so-called "retro" or "descending" connections). He hypothesizes that hallucinations are normally inhibited by sensory experiences but that when sensory stimulation falls below a certain level, the "retro" fibers act on the sense organs to produce "virtual" experiences that are as vivid as real ones.

Sacks swallows this theory whole, stating that although evidence of such connections was scant in the 1960s, it is now overwhelming. In fact, the descending connections of the auditory system to the cochlea were well known even in the 1960s. However, the existence of retro connections cannot validate a particular theory about their function.

The explanation that a deficiency of input from the sense organs will facilitate a backflow "now seems obvious, almost tautological," Sacks says. But Konorski's schema is light-years away from being self-evident. It fails to explain why hallucinations can occur without any strong sensory deprivation. Nor does it shed any light on why the brain, which already possesses the hallucinatory material, needs to send extremely detailed hallucinatory scenes to the retina or cochlea, where they must be precisely reconstituted into a "real" sensory experience and returned to the sensory cortices. After all, the brain could produce the vivid images itself, as it does in the case of phantom limb sensations.'
Weinberger seems not to understand Konorski is describing "release hallucinations", that he is attempting to explain "hallucinations in the sane", not hallucinations in general, and faults him for not explaining other hallucinations, in particular hallucinations in the absence of sensory deprivation. On the other hand I think his taking issue with the need for "retro" connections in this kind of hallucination is a good point. Given Phantom Limbs, why would this Konorski mechanism be necessary? I looked on Amazon for Konorski's book and it is $170.00, so I'm not about to buy it to find out. Perhaps Sacks will hear about Weinberger's criticism and address it somewhere at some point.



And although simple partial seizures are difficult to diagnose, it is stated that because of evidence contrary to the original explanation of OBEs

Originally Posted by zoobyshoe

this simply throws the explanation back to a simple partial seizure.

Originally Posted by zoobyshoe

The Out-Of-Body experience has been demonstrated to be a neurological phenomenon, a temporary failure, or blocking of, the sense of proprioception coupled with a release hallucination. It's been known for decades that it commonly happens to some people diagnosed with seizures, and also to some people who suffer from Migraines, and it was specifically located to an area on the temporo-parietal junction a couple years ago when it was induced in a woman with epilepsy who was about to undergo epilepsy surgery.

And in another post-
Originally Posted by zoobyshoe

No, it is mentioned as the specific location where OBE's were triggered by stimulation with an electrode.

So, ‘it’ here is not an OBE but the trigger of OBEs that was specifically located. Maybe it would have been helpful if there was some mention of ‘ trigger’ somewhere in that post (24).
I can't tell what you're saying here. Your original sentence before the quotes was never completed. Likewise it's clear you frequently have difficulty making out the intent of my sentences. I have explained this but I'll repeat: the reason I did not specifically characterize the tpj as the place where the OBE could be triggered, saying instead merely that they had been "located" to that area, is that my intent was simply to point out it was neurological.

It doesn’t follow that believers would want to question this because it doesn’t explain enough, for, just as religions may accommodate both a meeting of gametes to trigger life and also mystery of life, so too may believers accommodate both a trigger of OBEs whilst maintaining supernatural facets of them.
I think this is a straw man. I did not say they questioned it because it did not explain enough.
However, given that: the patient was already diagnosed with a history of chronic seizures which could cause OBEs; the patient may have unusual damage resulting from siezures; anaesthetics or surgery or other trauma may also cause OBEs;
This is the point: the OBE was easy to trigger in this patient because she was epileptic. This was not her normal seizure, but because she was epileptic she had hyperexitable neurons. The OBE happened incidentally to their search for her seizure focus, they were not looking for it or expecting it.

Could the same thing be triggered in a non-epileptic at this spot? Almost certainly, but it would require more voltage and would not be allowed because it could leave them vulnerable to spontaneous seizures once the neurons here had been "kindled".
the OBE the epileptic patient described varied from typical OBE reports and involved other hallucinations atypical of reported OBEs;
The haptic hallucinations were not typical, yes. In other respects it was much more like the typical OBE than the Ehrrson demonstration.
little knowledge is shown here to explain how these various areas of the brain affect each other
What various areas? How much knowledge would satisfy you?
at least two possibly exclusive factors, high and low cortical arousal, sensation and lack of sensation, may be associated with OBE causation;
How are they exclusive? As I pointed out earlier one can lead to the other: seizures can be followed by paralysis, and subdued cortical activity can lead to seizures. Likewise, the spreading cortical depression of migraine aura is preceded by a slow wave of neuronal hyperactivity. The depression that follows can then spawn another wave of hyperactivity. To the extent your linked paper ascribes hallucination to a dream state caused by either hypo- or hyper- activity it is also, apparently unknown to that author, proposing the circumstances from which seizures and migraine aurae arise. In other words, it isn't providing an air tight case for the dream mechanism of OBE at all, but points back at seizures instead.

The dream mechanism has the misfortune of ascribing the OBE to a brief period of psychosis. Even if we stipulate that is the cause, you couldn't call it an "hallucination in the sane" anymore. Your promise about that paper was that it had something relevant to say about hallucinations in the sane. Instead, I wasted my time reading up to that part only to find out it was actually saying sane people sometimes lapse into brief psychosis.

[However, given that:]... Ehrsson’s OBE induction via virtual sensation may or may not involve the TPJ area, so too other information which is possibly related, like phantom limbs, toxins, changed brain structure in practitioners of meditation (Roepstorff 2009), etc.;
I don't see a complete thought here.
and finally given how little is shown here to be known about hallucinations and their ambiguous nature (like the difference between OBEs, psychotic hallucinations and naturally occurring dreams), all sorts of permutations with a range of alternative possibilities may be allowed.
No, it's not "anything goes". Certain kinds of hallucinations are associated with certain causes. The OBE is known to be a simple partial seizure. There may be other related mechanisms for it (Migraine aura) , or some experience similar enough to it to be casually described as an OBE, but that one, at least, has been positively identified. Infrequently and by itself a simple-partial seizure is harmless. The danger is that if a person finds themselves to be frequently having spontaneous OBE's they could also be having more serious seizures for which they have amnesia (complex partial seizures) and should be checked out. The notion we can just throw out any "alternative", and one is as good as another is not correct.

These could include ideas that the trigger in question is not a trigger but coincides with other circumstances; or, as mentioned, that which was triggered was like an OBE, or artificial OBE, unrelated to otherwise reported OBEs; that the trigger itself is only a trigger in exceptional circumstances and not necessarily a trigger for non-seizure or damaged patients; it is one of various triggers; or that this ‘trigger’ is not entirely a trigger, but a contributing factor toward triggering, either only in exceptional circumstances or not.
This paragraph is pretty silly.

All of which allow reasonable doubts that this is

Originally Posted by zoobyshoe

the specific location where OBE's were triggered by stimulation with an electrode.

in all cases, along with other ideas contained in post 24.
All the cases linking the OBE to the tpj in seizures pretty much sews up the case that it is an essential area to this phenomenon. That doesn't limit the experience to that area, the activity is almost certainly spreading out from there, just based on the fact seizure activity usually does spread out into adjacent areas, and sometimes to remote areas. In any event, stimulation of the brain areas of epileptics by electrode is how Wilder Penfield mapped out many areas of the cortex and created his famous "homunculus". From this we got further proof that brain areas are dedicated. The homunculus is not in dispute: the brain areas of epileptics perform the same tasks as those of non-epileptics. People who deviate from the normal map are rare. The right temporo-parietal junction is clearly important for creating the sense we are located in our bodies. That's fascinating. Who knew we even needed such a sense?

If you read all these books by Sacks, Ramachandran, Penfield, and Klawans you find they are packed full of cases of unbelievable neurological experiences you never imagined existed. In 95% of these cases no one questions that they are neurological, despite the fact none has been fully explained. It is only when you get to the small percentage of experiences that have become attached in people's minds to the paranormal or mystical that people suddenly start trying to pick the neurological explanations apart. No one ever seems to come out of the woodwork and argue that hemi-neglect after stroke has a mystical significance. No one seems interested in asserting that the "shuffling gait" of Parkinson's sufferers is the characteristic walk of the Ascendent Masters of the Third Level of Sainthood and Uppity Consciousness, or some such. Malfunction is accepted as malfunction, and the neurological explanation is not doubted EXCEPT when it has become attached to a notion people don't want to relinquish. Obviously people must have been suffering these seizures going back to prehistoric times, and the experience was taken at face value: the 'spirit or 'mind' was assumed to be able to leave the body, because that what it seemed like.

[zoobyshoe]

That has nothing to do with the discussion.
It does, of course, and addressing it could prevent tedious, sentence by sentence argument of things that are not the real issue.

He is saying that you have not represented the facts accurately.
No, he/she was saying my case was weak.

[Ivan Seeking]

It does, of course, and addressing it could prevent tedious, sentence by sentence argument of things that are not the real issue.

No, it doesn't. Personal beliefs have nothing to do with the evidence.

No, he/she was saying my case was weak.

I will let FF respond. I only care that you don't try to make this personal.

[fuzzyfelt]

I'm not sure what this means.

I'll make it a question. You wrote that OBEs were a neurological phenomenon, a blockage... coupled with release hallucinations, and are you now saying that this isn't the case?


Weinberger seems not to understand Konorski is describing "release hallucinations", that he is attempting to explain "hallucinations in the sane", not hallucinations in general, and faults him for not explaining other hallucinations, in particular hallucinations in the absence of sensory deprivation. On the other hand I think his taking issue with the need for "retro" connections in this kind of hallucination is a good point. Given Phantom Limbs, why would this Konorski mechanism be necessary? I looked on Amazon for Konorski's book and it is $170.00, so I'm not about to buy it to find out. Perhaps Sacks will hear about Weinberger's criticism and address it somewhere at some point.

Yes, I had been wondering about their superfluous nature as well as evidence of function. I don’t really see how this idea makes much sense. Also I feel any wish to link sensory deprivation and release hallucinations only to sanity and extra noise and different hallucinations only to psychosis is not supported here. Is such a link supported?


I can't tell what you're saying here. Your original sentence before the quotes was never completed. Likewise it's clear you frequently have difficulty making out the intent of my sentences. I have explained this but I'll repeat: the reason I did not specifically characterize the tpj as the place where the OBE could be triggered, saying instead merely that they had been "located" to that area, is that my intent was simply to point out it was neurological.


My sentence was completed by the quote, but the intention is fair enough.


I think this is a straw man. I did not say they questioned it because it did not explain enough.

No straw man, the words in the sentence following the word 'because' was part of my explanation, not any addition of words to your position.


This is the point: the OBE was easy to trigger in this patient because she was epileptic. This was not her normal seizure, but because she was epileptic she had hyperexitable neurons. The OBE happened incidentally to their search for her seizure focus, they were not looking for it or expecting it.


Could the same thing be triggered in a non-epileptic at this spot? Almost certainly, but it would require more voltage and would not be allowed because it could leave them vulnerable to spontaneous seizures once the neurons here had been "kindled".


That there is an understandable reason for the experiment to be limited doesn’t change that fact that it is limited.



The haptic hallucinations were not typical, yes. In other respects it was much more like the typical OBE than the Ehrrson demonstration.


Agreed other hallucinations involved were not typical and, again, it varied in other respects from typical OBE reports.



What various areas? How much knowledge would satisfy you?

Accurate information and relevant facts.



How are they exclusive? As I pointed out earlier one can lead to the other: seizures can be followed by paralysis, and subdued cortical activity can lead to seizures. Likewise, the spreading cortical depression of migraine aura is preceded by a slow wave of neuronal hyperactivity. The depression that follows can then spawn another wave of hyperactivity. To the extent your linked paper ascribes hallucination to a dream state caused by either hypo- or hyper- activity it is also, apparently unknown to that author, proposing the circumstances from which seizures and migraine aurae arise. In other words, it isn't providing
an air tight case for the dream mechanism of OBE at all, but points back at seizures instead.



My words were ‘possibly exclusive’. The paper offers two complimentary possibilities.


Failure of proprioception is not the hallucination of something that isn’t there, it’s the inability to sense something that is there

states a possibly exclusive course.

Certainly states may change.

I'm not in any position to speak for the author, but there was no mention of any air-tight case.



The dream mechanism has the misfortune of ascribing the OBE to a brief period of psychosis. Even if we stipulate that is the cause, you couldn't call it an "hallucination in the sane" anymore. Your promise about that paper was that it had something relevant to say about hallucinations in the sane. Instead, I wasted my time reading up to that part only to find out it was actually saying sane people sometimes lapse into brief psychosis.


Then also included in this criterion of psychosis is sleep with attendant hallucinational dreams. Recalling that McCreery was discussing functional dis-order, sleep - something that happens routinely in all humans, and considered beneficial isn’t considered dis-order, but natural order. The bigger picture here is that he is not discussing sanity and insanity as mutually exclusive, but that there are varying degrees that is something more like a continuum across the population. Also interesting is an idea that unusual experiences and cognitive disorganisation are linked with academic achievement and creativity (Nettle 2006) and problem solving and adapting (Jackson 1997) so that degrees may be beneficial.


I don't see a complete thought here.


The explanation given for OBEs may not accommodate additional information.



No, it's not "anything goes". Certain kinds of hallucinations are associated with certain causes. The OBE is known to be a simple partial seizure. There may be other related mechanisms for it (Migraine aura) , or some experience similar enough to it to be casually described as an OBE, but that one, at least, has been positively identified. Infrequently and by itself a simple-partial seizure is harmless. The danger is that if a person finds themselves to be frequently having spontaneous OBE's they could also be having more serious seizures for which they have amnesia (complex partial seizures) and should be checked out. The notion we can just throw out any "alternative", and one is as good as another is not correct.



I see the misunderstanding, I was not expanding on the little knowledge shown of hallucinations, I meant here that given all these problems with the statements in post 24that there were a range of alternative explanations to those stated.


This paragraph is pretty silly.



It is pedantic, sure, and I could have left a range of alternatives that I spoke of above to be guessed at, but thought it might be helpful to suggest what these may be. Given how misunderstood my language has been, it would seem to have actually been not so silly.



All the cases linking the OBE to the tpj in seizures pretty much sews up the case that it is an essential area to this phenomenon. That doesn't limit the experience to that area, the activity is almost certainly spreading out from there, just based on the fact seizure activity usually does spread out into adjacent areas, and sometimes to remote areas. In any event, stimulation of the brain areas of epileptics by electrode is how Wilder Penfield mapped out many areas of the cortex and created his famous "homunculus". From this we got further proof that brain areas are dedicated. The homunculus is not in dispute: the brain areas of epileptics perform the same tasks as those of non-epileptics. People who deviate from the normal map are rare. The right temporo-parietal junction is clearly important for creating the sense we are located in our bodies. That's fascinating. Who knew we even needed such a sense?


That is a fairer explanation.



If you read all these books by Sacks, Ramachandran, Penfield, and Klawans you find they are packed full of cases of unbelievable neurological experiences you never imagined existed. In 95% of these cases no one questions that they are neurological, despite the fact none has been fully explained. It is only when you get to the small percentage of experiences that have become attached in people's minds to the paranormal or mystical that people suddenly start trying to pick the neurological explanations apart. No one ever seems to come out of the woodwork and argue that hemi-neglect after stroke has a mystical significance. No one seems interested in asserting that the "shuffling gait" of Parkinson's sufferers is the characteristic walk of the Ascendent Masters of the Third Level of Sainthood and Uppity Consciousness, or some such. Malfunction is accepted as malfunction, and the neurological explanation is not doubted EXCEPT when it has become attached to a notion people don't want to relinquish. Obviously people must have been suffering these seizures going back to prehistoric times, and the experience was taken at face value: the 'spirit or 'mind' was assumed to be able to leave the body, because that what it seemed like.



Certainly it would be difficult to question things that had not yet been imagined :)

I don’t know, but possibly it is that reports of OBEs in 15-25% of the general population (Irwin 1985- I think, I'll check it later) that makes them prone to some explanation.

[fuzzyfelt]

Re the last reference, it is Irwin 1985, from 'Flight of the Mind'.

I think this has been argued on reasonable grounds and, as argued, any convictions or not is irrelevant and it would not be helpful to answer the direct question. If it matters at all where my interests lie, they are more especially concerned with physical theories about creativity and perception- only slightly related to the thread and I wouldn’t ask to discuss them here particularly. I have tried to understand the position of post 24, and argued that there reasonable questions remain.

[zoobyshoe]

Re the last reference, it is Irwin 1985, from 'Flight of the Mind'.

I think this has been argued on reasonable grounds and, as argued, any convictions or not is irrelevant and it would not be helpful to answer the direct question. If it matters at all where my interests lie, they are more especially concerned with physical theories about creativity and perception- only slightly related to the thread and I wouldn’t ask to discuss them here particularly. I have tried to understand the position of post 24, and argued that there reasonable questions remain.

I am hard at work composing an answer to your last post!

You could start a thread in Medical Sciences on the topic you want to discuss. There have been some threads about things somewhat related to creativity such as synesthesia and problem solving in autistic savants. Maybe some others.

[fuzzyfelt]

No hurry, Zooby, I'll be away for a while. Look forward to it! Yes, thanks, I enjoy those threads often when they come up, and I'll think about what I'd like to discuss specifically.

[zoobyshoe]

I see you're back.

I'll make it a question. You wrote that OBEs were a neurological phenomenon, a blockage... coupled with release hallucinations, and are you now saying that this isn't the case?
No, I haven’t changed my position. Weinberger has cast doubt on the mechanism proposed by Konorski for release hallucinations, but not on the phenomenon of release hallucinations.

Release hallucinations are those arising from sensory deprivation.

Here is how Sacks explains these kinds of hallucinations to a patient:

“Her hallucinations, I replied, were not psychotic, but neurological, so-called “release” hallucinations. Given her deafness, that auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation, whether auditory or visual, it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations”

Musicophilia
p.57

That phenomenon isn’t disputed by Weinberger. He’s disputing the proposed mechanism, specifically the need for efferent connections. His argument was (paraphrasing): “Why do we need all this stuff about efferent connections when release hallucination happens without them in Phantom Limbs?”

Yes, I had been wondering about their superfluous nature as well as evidence of function. I don’t really see how this idea makes much sense.
Unfortunately, after I said that Weinberger seemed to have a good point, something important Ramachandran said about Phantom Limbs came back to me. I found it and reread it. Now I have reservations about Weinberger’s criticism. I can’t sort it out till I read Konorski, though. Sacks’ brief digest of what Konorski said may lack important points. God spoke to me recently in a telepathic dream state during a temporal lobe seizure and told me a copy of this book would soon come into my hands at a cheap price, so I'm holding out for that. In any case I hope it’s clear to you the phenomenon of release hallucinations is not being doubted by Weinberger, just the need for efferent connections in producing them. I get the feeling you do understand that, but I want to state it clearly.

Also I feel any wish to link sensory deprivation and release hallucinations only to sanity and extra noise and different hallucinations only to psychosis is not supported here. Is such a link supported?
I wasn‘t linking them like that. I only objected to the particular “noise and different hallucinations” you brought into the discussion, because they were specifically being asserted by that author as arising from his proposed mechanism for psychosis. My repeated pointing to the fact that Sacks and Konorski were explaining “hallucination in the sane” wasn’t intended to rule out “noise and other hallucinations” in the sane, it was to prevent ascribing any specifically psychosis-based hallucinations to the sane. You can’t ascribe psychosis to the sane, because then, of course, they aren’t sane.

Konorski is trying to explain a certain kind of hallucination in people who don’t really fit the criteria for psychosis. The notion there might be a continuum of sanity/insanity across the population is fine, but beside the point, because release hallucinations arise independently of a person’s place on that continuum. “Noise and other hallucinations” which aren’t stipulated as arising from psychosis are, it follows, allowed to be ascribed to the sane.

Repeating myself: “His main drift, clear from the context, is that there is a stigma associated with hallucination: hallucination = crazy, or, brain damaged, therefore the subject of hallucinations in people who don't fit the criteria of "crazy" or "brain damaged" was neglected for a long time because no one had any good ideas how a "sane" person might hallucinate.”

That there is an understandable reason for the experiment to be limited doesn’t change that fact that it is limited.
The fact it’s limited could mean all such experiences are limited. I explain below.
Agreed other hallucinations involved were not typical and, again, it varied in other respects from typical OBE reports.
It did, but I feel you are overemphasizing the differences and failing to appreciate the rather more important similarities.

I realized on reading this we have never established what you consider to be a typical OBE. Doing that would probably bring the discussion more to the point.

Accurate information and relevant facts.
Hmmm. All neurological authors I’ve read explain that the way we learn what the brain does is to observe it when it fails. This discovery-by-deficit started with Paul Broca who noticed that people with injuries to the same place on the left hemisphere had the same language deficits, a fact from which he drew the right conclusion. Brain damage isn’t considered the only, or best, source of info, however. Penfield called Epilepsy “The Great Teacher, and I’m sure many agree that more has been learned about the brain from Epilepsy than from any other neurological disorder. (But every disorder contributes huge amounts to our understanding. ) Brain damage is often gross and can simultaneously affect several functions, while simple partial seizures tend to either emphasize or delete the functions of specific “circuits”. (J. Hughlings Jackson deduced the existence and layout of the motor strip in the 1800’s from the progression of seizure activity in his wife’s simple partial motor seizures, to name a famous example.) Broca's "right conclusion" has had to be refined and updated according to a more sophisticated understanding of the contributions of different areas to what we consider a single function, but his basic conclusion was right: this area of the brain is important for specific aspects of language.

The distortions a person experiences during these seizures at the TPJ represents the typical sort of information anyone has about what this area does when it‘s working properly (depending on how well you interpret the distortions). We, in this thread, probably have 70% of the information known about what this area does. Deeper understanding will require hypothesis and detective work by clever experimentalists like Ramachandran, Ehrrson, and others.

“How much knowledge would satisfy you?” is the important question. Statements like this: “and finally given how little is shown here to be known about hallucinations and their ambiguous nature (like the difference between OBEs, psychotic hallucinations and naturally occurring dreams), all sorts of permutations with a range of alternative possibilities may be allowed,” are symptomatic of a desire for a specific kind of answer to a specific kind of question. Approaching the subject with that kind of mental filter can result in missing all the information that actually is there.This happens often in the hard science forums here: “What is a photon?, “What is energy?” The questioner is expecting a certain kind of definite answer, but runs into the confusing fact that physicists don’t analyze things such that they can give an answer that is satisfying to the questioner at the level the question was asked. Unbeknownst to the questioner the question is naïve. “…how little is shown here to be known” could easily be changed to the opposite statement by someone who, like myself, is constantly surprised by how much they have recently figured out, and characterizing hallucinations as having an “ambiguous nature” about which little is known, simply demonstrates that your specific questions aren’t answerable at the level they’re asked. My level of curiosity about hallucinations would lead me to the opposite statement, that we actually know a great deal about hallucinations. If you know what the terms mean and imply, it's entirely possible to distinguish OBE's from psychotic hallucinations and naturally occuring dreams.

Then also included in this criterion of psychosis is sleep with attendant hallucinational dreams. Recalling that McCreery was discussing functional dis-order, sleep - something that happens routinely in all humans, and considered beneficial isn’t considered dis-order, but natural order. The bigger picture here is that he is not discussing sanity and insanity as mutually exclusive, but that there are varying degrees that is something more like a continuum across the population.
I’ve personally observed varying degrees of insanity across the population, yes.

On the subject of psychosis that paper was very interesting and I’m sure I would have had an enthusiastic reaction to it if that were what I was focused on at the moment. I’ll go back to it sometime and read it through carefully. The kind of sanity/insanity continuum you report he’s proposing doesn’t really have any applicability to “release” hallucinations; those caused by sensory deprivation. Does it have any applicability to OBE’s? I don’t think so because OBE’s are stereotyped experiences with the same features in evidence across large populations of individuals and cultures. Dreams are more obviously individual-specific and lack the relatively rigid stereotype format you see in OBE reports. The OBE is stereotyped because its content does not arise from “mind,” as dreams do, it arises from a glitch in neurological hardwiring common to all people. If you aren’t looking for a preconceived mystical explanation it’s evident that the OBE both arises from, and informs us of, the existence of a sensory/neural mechanism that evolved to tell us that we are located in our body in the first place. I, personally, was incredibly surprised to find out we even needed such a sense. Isn't it self-evident that we're located in our bodies? But no: it is not enough that things and phenomena exist for us to be aware of them: in all cases we need sensory/neural mechanisms to be aware of them.

This video is a brief look at one of the 6 known people in the world to have completely lost proprioception:

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/30683-one-step-beyond-loss-of-proprioception-video.htm

With decades of constant self-training, he manages to function pretty well. The scary part of the video is the brief glimpse of Charles Freed, another of the 6 with no proprioception, who is clearly incapacitated by it.

Also interesting is an idea that unusual experiences and cognitive disorganisation are linked with academic achievement and creativity (Nettle 2006) and problem solving and adapting (Jackson 1997) so that degrees may be beneficial.
Yes, see also: Townshend, Daltry, et al. 1969:

“Sickness will surely take the mind where minds can’t usually go.”

I see the misunderstanding, I was not expanding on the little knowledge shown of hallucinations, I meant here that given all these problems with the statements in post 24that there were a range of alternative explanations to those stated…
… It is pedantic, sure, and I could have left a range of alternatives that I spoke of above to be guessed at, but thought it might be helpful to suggest what these may be. Given how misunderstood my language has been, it would seem to have actually been not so silly.
I am not persuaded that post #24 has “all these problems”.

I think the range of alternatives has to be reigned in to what we know is possible and probable. What I meant earlier when I said all such experiences could be limited is that they could all be seizures. Since seizures are the only documented cause, we should suspect they are all seizures (hypersynchronous neuronal firing), first, and not start throwing other speculative causes around for the hell of it, and especially not to accommodate mystical notions that probably arose in an attempt to explain this kind of seizure in the first place. There should be a pretty good reason, something pointing directly at some other cause for us to suspect some other cause. (Migraine runs second in my mind, but I haven’t found any Migraine OBE descriptions that fit with total comfort: there are sensations of floating, of having no body, but not coupled with autoscopy.)

Certainly it would be difficult to question things that had not yet been imagined J
Um…good point.

However, things like Autism, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Tourette’s, Stroke, Amnesia, and Migraine are well known, but you don’t find people claiming they’re anything but neurological problems.

Explanations are questioned (doubted) when the questioner has a different belief about the cause already in mind.

It doesn’t follow that believers would want to question this because it doesn’t explain enough, for, just as religions may accommodate both a meeting of gametes to trigger life and also mystery of life, so too may believers accommodate both a trigger of OBEs whilst maintaining supernatural facets of them.
I haven't exactly searched, but as far as I know but there’s no organized religion that asserts the OBE is any sort of religious phenomenon. It’s “authenticity” seems mostly to be claimed by armchair mystics and paranormal afficionados of eclectic lineage: a little yoga, a dash of zen, two parts Moody, a smattering of Swedenborg, etc. Lord Nelson declared his phantom limb was proof of the existence of the soul. No doubt many followers of organized religion would nod at that with approval, but it is not a tenet of any of those religions that this is the case.

[fuzzyfelt]

Originally Posted by zoobyshoe
I see you're back.

Yes, back, didn’t realise you were waiting for me particularly, sorry. I’m afraid any of my replies are likely to be take some time.

I am not persuaded that post #24 has “all these problems”.


Despite having some written fairer explanations since, there were problems with post 24. For example-


The Out-Of-Body experience has been demonstrated to be a neurological phenomenon, a temporary failure, or blocking of, the sense of proprioception coupled with a release hallucination.
This seems incompatible with this-


As for the OBE being caused by extremely low or extremely high cortical arousal: this simply throws the explanation back to a simple partial seizure.
and this-

(Migraine runs second in my mind, but I haven’t found any Migraine OBE descriptions that fit with total comfort: there are sensations of floating, of having no body, but not coupled with autoscopy.)

On another point, there is this-


It's been known for decades that it commonly happens to some people diagnosed with seizures, and also to some people who suffer from Migraines, and it was specifically located to an area on the temporo-parietal junction a couple years ago when it was induced in a woman with epilepsy who was about to undergo epilepsy surgery. Another class of people who seem to report frequent OBE's is heavy pot smokers, I recently found out.
What is ‘it’ that is ‘specifically located’, as so far OBEs, proprioception and triggers have been suggested and these have been denied, e.g.-

No, it is mentioned as the specific location where OBE's were triggered by stimulation with an electrode

and-

the reason I did not specifically characterize the TPJ as the place where the OBE could be triggered, saying instead merely that they had been "located" to that area
Whatever the conclusion reached here is, it is boldly asserted. Blanke himself is more cautious, using words, like results ‘suggest’ …TPJ, and ‘may’ lead… to OBEs.

But rather than continue repeating myself, I’ll stop exemplifying problems with post 24 here, and move on.


The fact it’s limited could mean all such experiences are limited.

Certainly, but I was not arguing that.


It did, but I feel you are overemphasizing the differences and failing to appreciate the rather more important similarities.

I realized on reading this we have never established what you consider to be a typical OBE. Doing that would probably bring the discussion more to the point.

I objected to the convenient generalisation of phenomena amongst other generalisations. It is not what I consider, but what has been researched and well argued as being typical. I imagine there are various sources, but since I have just read a Metzinger paper-

http://www.mindmatter.de/mmpdf/metzinger.pdf


I'll refer to that a lot here (for convenience), in which he details typical OBEs, summarised by me as- involving an egocentric duality apart from the body, may be full blown or not, and (Blackmore) involving motion.



“How much knowledge would satisfy you?” is the important question. Statements like this: “and finally given how little is shown here to be known about hallucinations and their ambiguous nature (like the difference between OBEs, psychotic hallucinations and naturally occurring dreams), all sorts of permutations with a range of alternative possibilities may be allowed,” are symptomatic of a desire for a specific kind of answer to a specific kind of question. Approaching the subject with that kind of mental filter can result in missing all the information that actually is there.This happens often in the hard science forums here: “What is a photon?, “What is energy?” The questioner is expecting a certain kind of definite answer, but runs into the confusing fact that physicists don’t analyze things such that they can give an answer that is satisfying to the questioner at the level the question was asked. Unbeknownst to the questioner the question is naïve. “…how little is shown here to be known” could easily be changed to the opposite statement by someone who, like myself, is constantly surprised by how much they have recently figured out, and characterizing hallucinations as having an “ambiguous nature” about which little is known, simply demonstrates that your specific questions aren’t answerable at the level they’re asked. My level of curiosity about hallucinations would lead me to the opposite statement, that we actually know a great deal about hallucinations. If you know what the terms mean and imply, it's entirely possible to distinguish OBE's from psychotic hallucinations and naturally occuring dreams.

No, it was a reasonable response to post 24, whatever it means, that assumed a rationally unquestionable knowledge. Maybe you are correct about people who assume a definite answer, however, it wasn't me who proffered one.

I agree, the stuff you mention about proprioception is interesting, the vid was sad and interesting too, and as I said I will mainly limit my references to Metzinger, he mentions some interesting philosophical ideas about it too. I do find these ideas about the origins of perceiving identity really interesting too.


I think the range of alternatives has to be reigned in to what we know is possible and probable. What I meant earlier when I said all such experiences could be limited is that they could all be seizures. Since seizures are the only documented cause, we should suspect they are all seizures (hypersynchronous neuronal firing), first, and not start throwing other speculative causes around for the hell of it

Yes, it would be interesting to read more about arguments for your speculations, and how you intend to incorporate other information. Further scientific information which would also be interesting.

Originally Posted by fuzzyfelt
It doesn’t follow that believers would want to question this because it doesn’t explain enough, for, just as religions may accommodate both a meeting of gametes to trigger life and also mystery of life, so too may believers accommodate both a trigger of OBEs whilst maintaining supernatural facets of them.

I haven't exactly searched, but as far as I know but there’s no organized religion that asserts the OBE is any sort of religious phenomenon. It’s “authenticity” seems mostly to be claimed by armchair mystics and paranormal afficionados of eclectic lineage: a little yoga, a dash of zen, two parts Moody, a smattering of Swedenborg, etc. Lord Nelson declared his phantom limb was proof of the existence of the soul. No doubt many followers of organized religion would nod at that with approval, but it is not a tenet of any of those religions that this is the case.

An argument that (A) gametes trigger life is to, or may be accomodated by, (B) a religious view of life, as, (C) a trigger of OBEs is to, or may be accomodated by, (D) 'believers' of OBEs, doesn’t depend on D and B being the same thing, if that is what you are arguing( (?). I was using your term ‘believers’ for people with convictions in some supernatural qualities of OBEs or something like that.


Explanations are questioned (doubted) when the questioner has a different belief about the cause already in mind.

I think it suffice to repeat, yet again, that there are, aside from the reasons you gave for questioning your statements, rational reasons for questioning your statements. I hope this discussion such as it is will be above-board in future.


However, things like Autism, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Tourette’s, Stroke, Amnesia, and Migraine are well known, but you don’t find people claiming they’re anything but neurological problems.

Already mentioned have been some statistics about prevalence in the general population. I like Metzinger’s neuroanthropological idea that OBEs may be the basis for the concept of soul, a perceptual constant, and enjoy further speculation that, vice-versa-ish, an anthropological concept of duality may have been necessary for reinforcing cognition of self-awareness.


The kind of sanity/insanity continuum you report he’s proposing doesn’t really have any applicability to “release” hallucinations; those caused by sensory deprivation. Does it have any applicability to OBE’s?

More importantly, why are ‘release’ hallucinations mentioned at all? I asked what was special about them, received an answer in the form of a description of a mechanism, and now that the mechanism is reasonably questioned the original question again stands. Again, how do ‘release’ hallucinations differ from other hallucinations and on what grounds are they specifcally connected with OBEs? Again, strong evidence suggests both low and high cortical activity associated with OBEs.

To answer your question ‘does this continuum have any applicability to OBEs?’, again, OBEs are described as a microcosm in the paper I offered regarding NREM sleep hallucinations. Here, there is Monique’s paper in the ‘strange sensations’ thread linking lucid dreams and OBEs. Metzinger mentions that although it does not necessarily fit with his theories, OBEs could still be a sub cluster of pre-lucid dreams.

For interest’s sake, on a less grand level than neuroanthropological constant theories, from the ‘strange sensation’ thread in the Medical Sciences sub forum, Monique said-

‘I tried to find some information on the internet. This is not the best website, but it does somewhat describe the phenomenon. It appears to be an out-of-body experience that occurs in a lucid dream at the direct transition between wakefulness and REM sleep.’

Offering the name ‘Alice In Wonderland syndrome’ as a possible syndrome descibing the condition, it interests me that that sensation has became part of our culture if it were not before, famously described since the Victorians. Whether it was originally inspired by education and imagination- Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, was also a logician and mathematician; by NREM, as has been suggested; by migraine auras (he mentioned his first or second migraine years after ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was published); by drugs – e.g. he moved in Pre-Raphaelite circles with the Rossettis, she dying from an over-dose of laudanum, he sinking into an abyss of Chloral addiction (admittedly, I don’t happen to know if this sensation bears any resemblance to the effects of laudanum or chloral); or, there may be evidence of Dodgson suffering epilepsy; or whatever. Funny this is so well known and read to our kids, performed, updated, and reinterpretted e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gMA9qvphpM&feature=related, itself.

[fuzzyfelt]

edit-

I should have said 'Metzinger's ideas'?

Also, Metzinger cites Blackmore 1982b and himself 2003a regarding the sub cluster of pre-lucid dreams.

And, it may be helpful to mention Metzinger's paper referred to here, 2005, was reviewed by Blanke.

'Acknowledgments I wish to thank two reviewers, Olaf Blanke and Harald Atmanspacherfor valuable discussions. I also wish to thank Sue Blackmore and Peter Brugger for critical comments on earlier versions of this paper; and Olaf Blanke and Ernst Waelti for the permission to reproduce their figures.'

And, the 'or not' in the summary of traditional OBEs is an intricate point made by Irwin (1985).

Sorry for the late editing, it was a hurried post.

[zoobyshoe]

Fuzzyfelt, have you, yourself, ever had an OBE?

[Ivan Seeking]

Zooby, could you explain the relevance of your question? It always concerns me when one assumes or even implies that a logical debate is somehow dependent on one's personal experiences or beliefs.

[fuzzyfelt]

Agreed, I don’t get how this is an appropriate response to this post in a logical debate-



I see you're back.
Yes, back, didn’t realise you were waiting for me particularly, sorry. I’m afraid any of my replies are likely to be take some time.


I am not persuaded that post #24 has “all these problems”.


Despite having some written fairer explanations since, there were problems with post 24. For example-

The Out-Of-Body experience has been demonstrated to be a neurological phenomenon, a temporary failure, or blocking of, the sense of proprioception coupled with a release hallucination.


This seems incompatible with this-

As for the OBE being caused by extremely low or extremely high cortical arousal: this simply throws the explanation back to a simple partial seizure.


and this-

(Migraine runs second in my mind, but I haven’t found any Migraine OBE descriptions that fit with total comfort: there are sensations of floating, of having no body, but not coupled with autoscopy.)


On another point, there is this-


It's been known for decades that it commonly happens to some people diagnosed with seizures, and also to some people who suffer from Migraines, and it was specifically located to an area on the temporo-parietal junction a couple years ago when it was induced in a woman with epilepsy who was about to undergo epilepsy surgery. Another class of people who seem to report frequent OBE's is heavy pot smokers, I recently found out.

What is ‘it’ that is ‘specifically located’, as so far OBEs, proprioception and triggers have been suggested and these have been denied, e.g.-

No, it is mentioned as the specific location where OBE's were triggered by stimulation with an electrode


and-

the reason I did not specifically characterize the TPJ as the place where the OBE could be triggered, saying instead merely that they had been "located" to that area
Whatever the conclusion reached here is, it is boldly asserted. Blanke himself is more cautious, using words, like results ‘suggest’ …TPJ, and ‘may’ lead… to OBEs.


Rather than continuing to repeat myself exemplifying problems with post 24, I’ll stop here and move on.



The fact it’s limited could mean all such experiences are limited.

Certainly, but I was not arguing that.


It did, but I feel you are overemphasizing the differences and failing to appreciate the rather more important similarities.

I realized on reading this we have never established what you consider to be a typical OBE. Doing that would probably bring the discussion more to the point.


I objected to the convenient generalisation of phenomena amongst other generalisations. It is not what I consider, but what has been researched and well argued as being typical. I imagine there are various sources, but since I have just read a Metzinger paper-

http://www.mindmatter.de/mmpdf/metzinger.pdf


I'll refer to that a lot here (for convenience), in which he details typical OBEs, summarised by me as- involving an egocentric duality apart from the body, may be full blown or not, and (Blackmore) involving motion.


“How much knowledge would satisfy you?” is the important question. Statements like this: “and finally given how little is shown here to be known about hallucinations and their ambiguous nature (like the difference between OBEs, psychotic hallucinations and naturally occurring dreams), all sorts of permutations with a range of alternative possibilities may be allowed,” are symptomatic of a desire for a specific kind of answer to a specific kind of question. Approaching the subject with that kind of mental filter can result in missing all the information that actually is there.This happens often in the hard science forums here: “What is a photon?, “What is energy?” The questioner is expecting a certain kind of definite answer, but runs into the confusing fact that physicists don’t analyze things such that they can give an answer that is satisfying to the questioner at the level the question was asked. Unbeknownst to the questioner the question is naïve. “…how little is shown here to be known” could easily be changed to the opposite statement by someone who, like myself, is constantly surprised by how much they have recently figured out, and characterizing hallucinations as having an “ambiguous nature” about which little is known, simply demonstrates that your specific questions aren’t answerable at the level they’re asked. My level of curiosity about hallucinations would lead me to the opposite statement, that we actually know a great deal about hallucinations. If you know what the terms mean and imply, it's entirely possible to distinguish OBE's from psychotic hallucinations and naturally occuring dreams.




No, it was a reasonable response to post 24, whatever it means, that assumed a rationally unquestionable knowledge. Maybe you are correct about people who assume a definite answer, however, it wasn't me who proffered one.

I agree, the stuff you mention about proprioception is interesting, the vid was sad and interesting too, and as I said I will mainly limit my references to Metzinger, he mentions some interesting philosophical ideas about it too. I do find these ideas about the origins of perceiving identity really interesting too.


I think the range of alternatives has to be reigned in to what we know is possible and probable. What I meant earlier when I said all such experiences could be limited is that they could all be seizures. Since seizures are the only documented cause, we should suspect they are all seizures (hypersynchronous neuronal firing), first, and not start throwing other speculative causes around for the hell of it


Yes, it would be interesting to read more about arguments for your speculations, and how you intend to incorporate other information. Further scientific information which would also be interesting.

Originally Posted by fuzzyfelt
It doesn’t follow that believers would want to question this because it doesn’t explain enough, for, just as religions may accommodate both a meeting of gametes to trigger life and also mystery of life, so too may believers accommodate both a trigger of OBEs whilst maintaining supernatural facets of them.

I haven't exactly searched, but as far as I know but there’s no organized religion that asserts the OBE is any sort of religious phenomenon. It’s “authenticity” seems mostly to be claimed by armchair mystics and paranormal afficionados of eclectic lineage: a little yoga, a dash of zen, two parts Moody, a smattering of Swedenborg, etc. Lord Nelson declared his phantom limb was proof of the existence of the soul. No doubt many followers of organized religion would nod at that with approval, but it is not a tenet of any of those religions that this is the case.


An argument that (A) gametes trigger life is to, or may be accomodated by, (B) a religious view of life, as, (C) a trigger of OBEs is to, or may be accomodated by, (D) 'believers' of OBEs, doesn’t depend on D and B being the same thing, if that is what you are arguing( (?). I was using your term ‘believers’ for people with convictions in some supernatural qualities of OBEs or something like that.


Explanations are questioned (doubted) when the questioner has a different belief about the cause already in mind.


I think it suffice to repeat, yet again, that there are, aside from the reasons you gave for questioning your statements, rational reasons for questioning your statements. I hope this discussion such as it is will be above-board in future.


However, things like Autism, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Tourette’s, Stroke, Amnesia, and Migraine are well known, but you don’t find people claiming they’re anything but neurological problems.


Already mentioned have been some statistics about prevalence in the general population. I like Metzinger’s neuroanthropological idea that OBEs may be the basis for the concept of soul, a perceptual constant, and enjoy further speculation that, vice-versa-ish, an anthropological concept of duality may have been necessary for reinforcing cognition of self-awareness.


The kind of sanity/insanity continuum you report he’s proposing doesn’t really have any applicability to “release” hallucinations; those caused by sensory deprivation. Does it have any applicability to OBE’s?


More importantly, why are ‘release’ hallucinations mentioned at all? I asked what was special about them, received an answer in the form of a description of a mechanism, and now that the mechanism is reasonably questioned the original question again stands. Again, how do ‘release’ hallucinations differ from other hallucinations and on what grounds are they specifcally connected with OBEs? Again, strong evidence suggests both low and high cortical activity associated with OBEs.

To answer your question ‘does this continuum have any applicability to OBEs?’, again, OBEs are described as a microcosm in the paper I offered regarding NREM sleep hallucinations. Here, there is Monique’s paper in the ‘strange sensations’ thread linking lucid dreams and OBEs. Metzinger mentions that although it does not necessarily fit with his theories, OBEs could still be a sub cluster of pre-lucid dreams.

For interest’s sake, on a less grand level than neuroanthropological constant theories, from the ‘strange sensation’ thread in the Medical Sciences sub forum, Monique said-

‘I tried to find some information on the internet. This is not the best website, but it does somewhat describe the phenomenon. It appears to be an out-of-body experience that occurs in a lucid dream at the direct transition between wakefulness and REM sleep.’

Offering the name ‘Alice In Wonderland syndrome’ as a possible syndrome descibing the condition, it interests me that that sensation has became part of our culture if it were not before, famously described since the Victorians. Whether it was originally inspired by education and imagination- Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, was also a logician and mathematician; by NREM, as has been suggested; by migraine auras (he mentioned his first or second migraine years after ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was published); by drugs – e.g. he moved in Pre-Raphaelite circles with the Rossettis, she dying from an over-dose of laudanum, he sinking into an abyss of Chloral addiction (admittedly, I don’t happen to know if this sensation bears any resemblance to the effects of laudanum or chloral); or, there may be evidence of Dodgson suffering epilepsy; or whatever. Funny this is so well known and read to our kids, performed, updated, and reinterpretted e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gMA9qvphpM&feature=related, itself.


Given this change of subject from debating the matters of post 24 shall I take it as agreed that there were a problems with it that were rationally questionable, and that that debate has been concluded? If so, then the further discussions about the significance of proprioception, hallucinations and personal anecdotes etc. may be better suited to the medical sciences forum or the social sciences forum.

[zoobyshoe]

Given this change of subject from debating the matters of post 24 shall I take it as agreed that there were a problems with it that were rationally questionable, and that that debate has been concluded?
These mentions by you and Ivan of "logical debate" is the perhaps where the problem lies: I'm not debating anything. I'm trying to explain something and I'm meeting with your continued resistance to merely understanding that explanation. And that is a prime source of frustration for me. I suggested above the resistance might be due to your questions being naive, but your response showed you didn't even understand the text of that paragraph, much less the concept it held. All the questions and confusions mentioned in your last post have been previously addressed and clarified. So, I tried a second time to cut to something basic that might, but I don't know, hold the key to your resistance.

So, no. Post #24 is good and to characterize it as having problems that were rationally questionable is to ignore clear indications the problems lie in your attitude of resistance to understanding post #24. I don't think you are at a point of understanding where you are in a position to debate it, but you think you are.

[Ivan Seeking]

Ivan is comparing the OBE to other sorts of hallucinations, the hallucination of a sound, for example, or the hallucination of something in the visual field, saying that the ability to induce such an hallucination does not disprove real sounds or real visual experiences. His train of reasoning is: just because there can be a false OBE doesn't mean there are no real experiences of this sensation. I am pointing out the flaw in that train of reasoning, which is that the proprioceptive failure that is required for an OBE is not a stimulation of a sensation, it is the failure of a sensation: the failure of proprioception to give you internal information about your body. When you have no feel for where your limbs are in relation to each other, no feel for your body position as a whole, it is a situation of sensory deprivation. And it is from sensory deprivation that hallucinations easily arise. Failure of proprioception is not the hallucination of something that isn't there, it's the inability to sense something that is there. It is analogous to blindness or deafness.

Zooby, I haven't followed the details enough to be sure who might be unreasonable here, so be sure that I'm not taking any sides. However, you are completely ignoring the claim of attaining knowledge of a distant place, and instead focusing on the physical element, which is not what's at the heart of the matter. You can argue about theory until pigs fly if faced with actual evidence for real OBEs, such as the ability to retrieve distant information. And one can argue about faith to the same extent if there is no evidence to support the claims. Given no evidence for real OBEs and a reasonable neurological explanation for what people experience, then it would seem likely that there are no real OBEs. However, while I am not about to defend claims of actualy OBEs, there is one absolute fact that you refuse to acknowledge: The ability to induce an OBE does not exclude the possibility that there are real OBEs. That is an unavoidable point of logic.

So-called masters of OBEs can allegedly produce an OBE on demand. Therefore, any claims of that nature could be tested directly and there is no point in debating the issue. The only question that seems relevant for this forum is whether or not anyone has ever produced experimental evidence for an intentional or incidental OBE? For that matter, is there any compelling anecdotal evidence beyond isolated stories from individuals who cannot repeat the experience?

Again, it has been shown that there are good neurological explanations for what people report. Also, we don't know of any physics that could account for the claims made. So if there is no good evidence to show otherwise, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that there are no real OBEs. But we can never have absolute certainty.

At this point I want to limit the discussion to any experimental evidence for real OBEs, that might exist.

[pftest]

The ability to induce an OBE does not exclude the possibility that there are real OBEs.Also, real OBEs may be inducible.

[zoobyshoe]

...there is one absolute fact that you refuse to acknowledge: The ability to induce an OBE does not exclude the possibility that there are real OBEs. That is an unavoidable point of logic.
I acknowledge it. If someone made the assertion: "'real' OBE's have been disproven", I would have disagreed with it. I spent some time trying to get ZapperZ to see that distinction in the case of ghosts in that recent ghost thread, if you recall. Not sure why you thought I wouldn't see the same thing applies here.

The thought "'real OBE's haven't been disproven", doesn't mean much, though. It's a point of logic, as you say, not really grounds for hope. The reasons for giving up belief in a thing once it has been shown the belief probably resulted from an illusion in the first place seem obvious to me. It doesn't seem obvious to some other people, though. I think I am going to gather my thought on that subject and write up a little essay and start a thread with it.

In the meantime I'll allow this thread to get back to discussing experimental evidence for real OBE's.

[Ivan Seeking]

Fair enough.

I did limit the discussion to experimental evidence, but unusually compelling anecdotal evidence would be acceptable as well - this does not include any claims lacking evidence beyond one person's story.

[Ivan Seeking]

One more thing that is fair to add for the sake of full disclosure. When I was in my late teens, I fiddled around with meditation techniques that allegedly can induce an OBE. After practicing for perhaps six months, one night, while in a meditative state and doing what I had done every night for months before, I suddenly felt as though I was leaving my body and rushing upwards into a void of the blackest black I have ever seen. It was all-consuming, seemingly uncontrollable, and terrifying! I could hear a low-pitched buzzing that grew in intensity as, in my mind's eye, things grew darker and darker. Then, in what I would describe as an impulse to protect my life, and with the realization of what was happening - thus breaking my concentration and focus - I snapped back to reality and found myself standing beside my bed. I was aware of jumping out of bed and landing on my feet, but I didn't do it on purpose. It just happened.

It was such a terrifying experience that I never pursued the practice with the vigor that I had before. Eventually I quit the practice altogether. I didn't know what had happened -exactly what I had experienced - but I was convinced that I had touched the edge of the phenomenon reported, and my instincts told me that it was dangerous.

When, some number of years ago, I first read Zooby's explanation for reports like mine, it seemed to be consistent with what I had experienced.

I suspect that one reason it scared me was that I never really expected anything to happen. I wasn't prepared for something that seemed so real.

[fuzzyfelt]

Ok, that was a really interesting discussion. Thanks Zoobyshoe and Ivan Seeking.

[potato991]

Regarding OBE's, specifically the notion of remote viewing, there seem to be some logical inconsistencies with how such a process would work. On the one hand it is claimed that the remote viewing cannot be physically (objectively) confirmed through the use of brain scans/probes, otherwise it would have already been verified. On the other hand it is a fact that what we see is a product of the physical structure of our visual cortex. So how can remote viewing happen without the local 'hardware' in our visual cortex, since it is that very hardware that defines the qualia of vision.

To explain further, if a human blind from birth is suddenly given the gift of vision, they won't see how we see, they have to learn this. If they tried to rely on vision to navigate obstacles, they would fail (http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/11/can_a_blind_person_whose_visio.php). Only with enough experience will brain adapt the necessary edge detection/discrimination so they can comprehend the visual experience, see patterns etc. Humans with synesthesia can experience numbers or letters as colors. Some humans are color blind, while some animals can see ultraviolet light. All this means our visual experience is not some universal modality, it depends on the wiring of our brain. A blind person will have parts of the visual cortex 'reassigned' for auditory processing through brain plasticity, obviously this would impact any restored sight.

So if something can be viewed remotely, completely independent of my brain, it's not logical that the experience would be anything like what I see in waking life. Why would I be restricted to the human-viewable color spectrum, and not see ultraviolet light, when remote viewing?

[Chronos]

I was influenced in my younger days by Robert Monroe - see
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/triggers12.html
Had some creepy experiences and abandoned the practices.

[Ivan Seeking]

Had some creepy experiences and abandoned the practices.

Do tell! Do you mean that you had some creepy experiences, or that Monroe did?

I should also specify that people are still free to share their experiences. But it would not be appropriate to argue that they qualify as even anecdotal evidence that OBEs are real. For that we would need something more substantial.

[Chronos]

Strictly me. The creepy part was this 'rift' of crackling energy that invariably 'opened' a short time into the experience. I had no desire to further explore. I agree, however, that OBE's are not scientifically useful until otherwise unobtainable knowledge is acquired by the practice.

[mXSCNT]

Occams razor is a rule of thumb, not a scientific principle that can be used to draw conclusions.
In its most simplified form, Occam's razor simply says that if you have two models that explain your data equally well, the model whose representation is shorter is more likely to be correct. This makes statistical sense. Suppose you have decided to choose a model from among all those that are m bits long (with some standard representation of a model as a series of bits). There are something like 2^m models that are m bits long. So the larger m is, the greater your risk of selection bias (and hence a false positive).

See also: minimum description length (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length)