Telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs

  • Thread starter Albert George
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In summary, the link below is part one and two of the secrets of sleep. It is a new documentary produced in 2008 that discusses the potential for telepathy.
  • #1
Albert George
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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.
 
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  • #2


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.
 
  • #3


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.
 
  • #4


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.
 
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  • #5


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.
 
  • #6


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.
 
  • #7


Albert George said:
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.
 
  • #8


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.
 
  • #9


Mammo said:
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.
 
  • #10


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 definately tested it thouroghly
 
  • #11


Stratosphere said:
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 definately 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.
 
  • #12


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.
 
  • #13


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?
 
  • #14


Evo said:
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.
 
  • #15


Stratosphere said:
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.
 
  • #16


humanino said:
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.
 
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  • #17


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.
 
  • #18


ZapperZ said:
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.
 
  • #19


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

ZapperZ said:
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.
 
  • #20


Russell Berty said:
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.
 
  • #21


humanino said:
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.
 
  • #22


Russell Berty said:
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.
 
  • #23


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.
 
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  • #24


Nanook said:
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.
 
  • #25


Are there some references for the first couple of paragraphs in the previous post, too?
 
  • #26
zoobyshoe said:
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 [Broken]
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
 
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  • #27


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
 
  • #28


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.
 
  • #29


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.
 
  • #30


No paranormal claims have been affirmed by science - when real scientists have spared the time to put them to real tests. Call me unconvinced.
 
  • #31


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-
pftest said:
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.
 
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  • #32


fuzzyfelt said:
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.
 
  • #33


zoobyshoe said:
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.
 
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  • #34


Ivan Seeking said:
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.
 
  • #35


zoobyshoe said:
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?
 
<h2>1. What is telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs?</h2><p>Telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs, also known as telepathic dreaming, is the ability to communicate with another person through thoughts and feelings while in a dream or out-of-body experience (OBE). It is believed to be a form of extrasensory perception (ESP) and can occur spontaneously or be practiced and developed.</p><h2>2. How does telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs work?</h2><p>The exact mechanism of how telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs works is still unknown and is a subject of ongoing research and speculation. Some theories suggest that it involves the transfer of information through non-physical means, while others propose that it is a result of heightened intuition and subconscious communication.</p><h2>3. Can anyone learn to use telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs?</h2><p>While some people may have a natural inclination towards telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs, it is believed that anyone can learn and develop this ability with practice and dedication. It requires a deep understanding of one's own thoughts and emotions, as well as the ability to quiet the mind and focus on the intended communication.</p><h2>4. Is telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs scientifically proven?</h2><p>At this time, there is no scientific evidence to support the existence of telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs. However, many people have reported experiencing this phenomenon and there is ongoing research in the field of parapsychology to better understand and validate these experiences.</p><h2>5. What are the potential benefits of telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs?</h2><p>Some people believe that telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs can enhance communication and understanding between individuals, as well as provide access to information that may not be available through traditional means. It may also offer a deeper connection to the subconscious mind and spiritual realm.</p>

1. What is telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs?

Telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs, also known as telepathic dreaming, is the ability to communicate with another person through thoughts and feelings while in a dream or out-of-body experience (OBE). It is believed to be a form of extrasensory perception (ESP) and can occur spontaneously or be practiced and developed.

2. How does telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs work?

The exact mechanism of how telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs works is still unknown and is a subject of ongoing research and speculation. Some theories suggest that it involves the transfer of information through non-physical means, while others propose that it is a result of heightened intuition and subconscious communication.

3. Can anyone learn to use telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs?

While some people may have a natural inclination towards telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs, it is believed that anyone can learn and develop this ability with practice and dedication. It requires a deep understanding of one's own thoughts and emotions, as well as the ability to quiet the mind and focus on the intended communication.

4. Is telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs scientifically proven?

At this time, there is no scientific evidence to support the existence of telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs. However, many people have reported experiencing this phenomenon and there is ongoing research in the field of parapsychology to better understand and validate these experiences.

5. What are the potential benefits of telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs?

Some people believe that telepathy in dreamstate and OBEs can enhance communication and understanding between individuals, as well as provide access to information that may not be available through traditional means. It may also offer a deeper connection to the subconscious mind and spiritual realm.

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