In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body. In another woman, electrical current delivered to the angular gyrus produced an uncanny feeling that someone was behind her, intent on interfering with her actions.
The two women were being evaluated for epilepsy surgery at University Hospital in Geneva, where doctors implanted dozens of electrodes into their brains to pinpoint the abnormal tissue causing the seizures and to identify adjacent areas involved in language, hearing or other essential functions that should be avoided in the surgery. As each electrode was activated, stimulating a different patch of brain tissue, the patient was asked to say what she was experiencing.
Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland who carried out the procedures, said that the women had normal psychiatric histories and that they were stunned by the bizarre nature of their experiences.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
So, deliberate electric currents sent into specific sites of the brain can create the same sorts of experiences which people think are proof that our minds and our "selves" are not really physical in the first place. This sort of evidence is how science demonstrates that paranormal and supernatural "explanations" of such experiences are simply not valid. The fact that the experiences can be induced is not yet an explanation, though. We need to understand how and why these experiences can happen in the first place...
There is nothing mystical about these ghostly experiences, said Peter Brugger, a neuroscientist at University Hospital in Zurich... "The research shows that the self can be detached from the body and can live a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experience, or it can be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a presence," Brugger said. ...
Real-time information from the body, the space around the body and the subjective feelings from the body are also represented in multisensory regions, Blanke said. And if an electric current directly simulates these regions, as in the cases of the two women he studied, the integrity of the sense of body can be altered.
Feelings of self that are detached from our bodies occur in a manner which everyone has probably heard about: phantom limb syndrome. People who have lost feet, hands, legs, or arms sometimes feel as though they are still completely whole. They even feel itches and pain which they cannot alleviate because there is nothing there to scratch or soothe. How is this possible? For just the reason Peter Brugger stated: sometimes our brain's ability to remain in sync with the reality of our bodies isn't 100% effective all the time.
In one experiment, a woman had electrodes implanted into the left side of her brain and she started to experience the feeling that there was another person underneath her on the bed:
"We were checking language areas," Blanke said, when the woman turned her head to the right. That made no sense, he said, because the electrode was nowhere near the area involved in the control of movement. Instead, the current was stimulating a multisensory area called the angular gyrus. ...
Because the presence closely mimicked the patient's body posture and position, Blanke concluded that the patient was experiencing an unusual perception of her own body, as a double. But for reasons that scientists have not been able to explain, he said, she did not recognize that it was her own body she was sensing.
Her body was in one place but the electrical stimulation in her brain was confusing the internal signals, telling her brain that her body was actually in a different position. Just as a person with phantom limb syndrome imagines that their hand is still in place and itching, this woman imagined that her own body was displaced in space by a short distance. Her brain perceived a body a short distance from her and since it couldn't "really" be her, then it must have been someone else. She became her own double.
How many cases of people meditating and perceiving the presence of an "Other," labeled by them as God or some other being, are really cases of people perceiving a displaced version of themselves which their brains are simply misinterpreting? We don't have the interpretive tools necessary to work out way through such a confusing situation, so of course our brains will reach for and settle upon the simplest, easiest explanation: there is someone else there with us.
When otherwise normal people experience bodily delusions, Blanke said, they are often flummoxed. The felt sensation of the body is so seamless, so familiar, that people do not realize it is a creation of the brain, even when something goes wrong and the brain is perturbed.
Yet the sense of body integrity is rather easily duped, Blanke said.
And while it may be tempting to invoke the supernatural when this body sense goes awry, he said the true explanation is a very natural one, the brain's attempt to make sense of conflicting information.
It's interesting how often defenders of the paranormal and the supernatural insist that scientists will not find any way to explain the experiences and sensations people in these situations have. They deny that any scientific, naturalistic explanation is possible even though they themselves have never tried to develop one. They have no basis for this claim other than pure faith: the faith that there exists some realm beyond our natural one and that it must be responsible for all the interesting things they see.
The truth, however, is that science has always managed to develop reliable, accurate explanations of what we see around us. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes there are errors made along the way. Some day, perhaps this won't happen and the scientific method will fail. We cannot assume that it will ever happen, though, when we haven't really tried very hard. Everything we know tells us that we should assume that we will succeed. The paranormalists and supernaturalists are trying to give up before they even start.
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the truth is that you manufacture your reality within your brain every day, all day, on a basis of Until You Finally DIE. And what happens then? Can’t measure everything. There’s always going to be more to measure, in this place. Infinity. Forever. And never, too, the duality is really quite perplexing and amazing.
Science explains the how of the situation but not the metaphysical, never the why. And that’s the BIG question out there. Moootive. What’s behind the picture that we’re given each day. If we can realize that we manufacture the universe in our heads can we alter it? And what would that make us to other people? A nothing? A phantom?
Crazy? That ridiculous societal standard, as if the largest amount of something should be considered the most normal.
Order is only perceived and you invent it. The God guy that everyone is talking about, it’s your MIND. And you’re still asleep. You haven’t woken up yet. Still butting heads with a physical world when your true nature is spirit.
We’re a shitty species. A virus with t-shirts. I’m glad this experiment is ending.
have you ever been in a near death experience? if not stop castigating those who say they,ve been out of thier body. scientist say, scientist say, who are these scientist by the way? i have been in a near death experience and i absolutely know that there is no justification in saying that “God guy” exist only in your mind. for once try to see beyound the physical and start understanding the fact that no man has a correct explantion for the things which he did’t create
The near-death out-of-body experience is a common reaction when the blood flow to the brain is reduced and the brain kicks into “self-preservation” mode. It has been induced hundreds of times, or more, by NASA when they put trainee astronauts into a centrifuge. They are, quite simply, a physiological reaction, not supernatural.
Apparently, drugs or electrical stimulation are no longer needed to reliably trigger an out-of-body experience (OOBE). I recently read of a mirror-based contraption that can bring on an OOBE based solely on visual cues. So much for Eckankar…
We now know that all so-called “religious experiences” are based on human brain states, many of which are easily explained an/or replicated. From LSD-like ergot poisoning (the product of a fungus known as rye smut, common in the past) to temporal-lobe epilepsy and near-death experiences (leading to “lightning storms” in the brain’s personality center), to the now easily-mapped brain activity associated with meditation or “speaking in tongues”, it has become clear that the human brain is “wired” for religion as a by-product of evolution– religion has now been exposed as a highly potent mix of pareidolia, anthropomorphism, environmental poisons, brain damage, confirmation bias, tradition, and peer pressure.
~~ ScienceMikey
Great article. It’s always good to get specific counter-points to the “magic is real” arguments of religionists.
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