fuzzyfelt said:
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":
zoobyshoe said:
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:
https://www.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.
. Finally a forum page I have been looking for. 
