Are OBEs Paranormal or Neurological?

or are they both?

like a lot of peeps here, i've had your standard issue obe experience. like, i'm lying in bed, just about to fall asleep. i get bad vertigo, and then i'm standing by the bed looking at my sleeping body. freaks me the # out every time, and i focus on falling back into bed. sometimes merging back into my body is accompanied by a sensation of falling and impact, like i dropped on to the mattress from a couple of feet up.

i've never made any assumptions about it one way or the other, kinda outta my league, if you know what i mean. i was frickin stoked when i read this article.

The Disturbing Consequences of Seeing Your Own Doppelganger



the title is misleading, btw. here's a few excerpts.

Such hallucinations are classified as autoscopic phenomena (from “autoscopy”; in Greek, autos means “self” and skopeo means “looking at”). The simplest form of an autoscopic phenomenon involves feeling the presence of someone next to you without actually seeing a “double” – a sensed presence. The doppelganger effect takes this phenomenon a step further, so that a person may hallucinate that they are actually seeing and interacting with another “me” – a visual double. But probably the most widely experienced and best-known form of autoscopic phenomena is the out-of-body experience (OBE). During a classic full-blown OBE, people report leaving their physical body and seeing it from an outside perspective, say from the ceiling looking down at the body lying in bed...

Some clues come from the work of Olaf Blanke, a neurologist a Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. In 2002, Blanke managed to induce repeated out-of-body experiences in a 43-year-old woman. He had been treating her for drug-resistant temporal-lobe epilepsy. Brain scans did not show any lesions, so Blanke resorted to surgery to figure out the focus of her epilepsy.

tle has been tied to the equally hinky phenomenon of sleep paralysis, too. k, moving on.

It was during such a procedure that Blanke found that he could cause the woman to report some rather weird sensations, by stimulating a single electrode, placed on the right angular gyrus, a small region towards the back of the skull... When the stimulating current was low, she reported “sinking into the bed” or “falling from a height”; when Blanke’s team increased the amperage, she had an out-of-body experience: “I see myself lying in bed, from above,” she said. The angular gyrus lies near the vestibular cortex (which receives inputs from the vestibular system that’s responsible for our posture and sense of balance). Blanke concluded that the electrical stimulation was somehow disrupting the integration of various sensations such as touch with vestibular signals, leading to the woman’s OBE.

so this can be induced, and they've done it in "healthy people", too.

The subjects were scanned during their experiences, and the scans revealed that their sense of being out-of-body was correlated with activity in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), a site that integrates touch, vision, proprioception, and vestibular signals. Here was some objective evidence that the TPJ is involved in the sense of self-location – where you perceive yourself to be.

so, basically, your sense of self as informed by sensory and spatial input goes loopy when you've got too much juice in your tpj/angular gyrus. great, mystery solved.

but is it? just because a phenomenon has a strictly physical explanation, does it necessarily rule out non-physical causes and effects?

i dunno, what do you guys think?

a reply to: ATODASO

Both me and my wife were OoB at the same time once and when we woke up, we remembered it. So I would say its both spiritual and neurological.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

cool, my wife hasn't experienced it, and hasn't shared any of my sp episodes either. she's a very down to earth woman, all business, all science, and a # of a lot smarter than yrs truly. she backs the straight neurological explanation lol.

i dunno, there was a thread asking about shared sleep paralysis experiences recently, and i shared some of my thoughts on a possible physical explanation there.

Is sleep paralysis contagious?

i'm lazy af, so i'll just copypasta my responses.

the brain generates a very weak emf, and most action potential events cycle @ 10-70 hz. i can't find voltage/current figures for what happens when a temporal lobe seizure occurs, but the hertz rate shoots waaaaay up to 140 hz. if the voltage were sufficient, the field generated by the original brain could cause the brain a few inches over to cycle at the same hertz rate, which would mean that they would experience similar, but not identical, effects.

i'll add that maybe some brains are more susceptible (labile) than others, like more sensitive and reactive to em fields?

a reply to: ATODASO

When I have been out of body a couple times I was able to see things happen that were later shown to be true. One a dog was left outside and everyone was asleep including the dog. It was the ONLY time he was ever accidentally left outside. I flew out my window and saw him there, and he woke up and walked over to where I was, but he couldn't see me. He still knew I was there.. I fell back warped to my body.. Went to the back door opened it, and there he was right where I just left him.

Reality is a shifty thing.. Not sure why you would ask is it neurological or mystical.. I see no need to separate. I think the matrix is controlled by our heads, so it's really all the same thing.

a reply to: ATODASO
In my case its a matter of spiritual warfare. I study bible prophecy in a unique way (counting syllables in the Hebrew and Greek text), and as a result, I'm often targeted for sleep paralysis and OoBEs...some really nasty stuff. I never know whats going to happen when I close my eyes. My wife has been able to wake up and stop the attacks a few times. I think guardian angels were involved in that.

a reply to: Reverbs

yeah, i don't see it as necessarily binary either. there's a physical explanation, but it doesn't cover everything, like people knowing and seeing # there's no way they could have known or seen. but, then again, the info brought back from obe experiences has only a slightly better than chance accuracy, afaik.

who's to say there's not some continuity between what goes on physically in the brain and metaphysical cause and effect?

originally posted by: BELIEVERpriest
a reply to: ATODASO
In my case its a matter of spiritual warfare. I study bible prophecy in a unique way (counting syllables in the Hebrew and Greek text), and as a result, I'm often targeted for sleep paralysis and OoBEs...some really nasty stuff. I never know whats going to happen when I close my eyes. My wife has been able to wake up and stop the attacks a few times. I think guardian angels were involved in that.

holy crap, so you get attacked?

OBEs occur when your spirit disconnects (not completely I believe) from your human body. You're not really your body anyway. Your body is merely a companion on your journey through life. If you're interested, read Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls. Those books are probably the best books you'll find on the Spirit World, the true home of souls.

a reply to: ATODASO

Yes. I'm quite used to it now. It doesn't happen every night, its like they wait for me to let my guard down. Knowing the Psalms helps.

a reply to: TheLord

hey bud, thanks for your reply. what do you think of the fact that there's a neurological corollary to the obe experience?

I've been having similar fits from the childhood. At first I was scared to the death but then I began to enjoy such moments. Now if I see me liyng on the bed I would come up to the window and jump from the eleventh floor totaly aware that nothing would happen to my body. It is called "lucid dreams" or controled dreams. Castaneda abundantly wrote on it

a reply to: Boticelli

are you able to "travel" very far? like, you can jump from your window, but do you explore your neighborhood?

thx in advance for following up.

a reply to: ATODASO

Hiya ATO, always good to see you

It's a tough one isn't it? Evidence is all over the place and the consensus says neurological. That's it, nothing more to argue.

When anyone says 'paranormal' they mean weird and unexplained; sometimes they mean unexplainable and go off to 'explain' it. For others using the word 'paranormal' marks someone out as a fringe-thinker, a woo-rider or a person of low education.

For me it's a boundary marker and a placeholder that simultaneously warns us of parts unknown and marks the spot where future science will bring order.

OOBEs and NDEs often overlap and it's the NDEs that pique my curiosity the most. Each suggest a detachment of consciousness from our neurological basis. Like your links show, it's broadly inducible through clinical (sometimes surgical) methods. Then again, some of the NDE accounts leave more questions.

a reply to: Kandinsky

it's good to see you, too, man.

where do you see the demarcation? for me, it's that greater than chance percentage. since the whole thing appears to hinge on electricity and how we interact with and run off it, that's where i tend to drop a derrick.

to me, i'm not sure it's a detachment from physicality, more that there's some kind of continuum between the physical and what is currently characterized as outside the physical. i'm not sure there's a division, but i definitely entertain the idea that we don't have the onboard hardware or the theoretical understanding of the material to decode the "meta" # in a way that is qualifiable.

a reply to: ATODASO

The body can have an effect on the spirit. The point of the human body is to challenge the soul on it's journey through life on planet Earth. The study you posted isn't wrong. If the brain is tampered with, it will certainly have an effect on the soul. The soul is eternal, though. I think knowledge of the Spirit World is reaching humanity now because humans are slowing down their own spiritual progress. We were supposed to accept the challenges of this world in order to become better versions of ourselves. We've become too dependent on pharmaceutical drugs to overcome mental disorders. The souls in each human body have the capability to overcome their genetic hindrances but not without a challenge. Some souls are capable of using their genetic gifts to their true potential, while other souls have a hard time unlocking their genetic potential. In the end, our experiences on planet Earth will ultimately lead us to reconnect with the true God. I am irreligious, but I believe in God. Our understanding of God is really limited on this planet. I honestly do not believe any religion has been able to completely explain who or what God is. I prefer to think of God as the Ultimate Creator. The true potential of every soul is to overcome greed, destruction and violence and embrace benevolence, creation, innovation, invention and unity. In this planet, if we as humans are to find our true selves, we need to help each other.

a reply to: TheLord

cool, meaty reply.

you acknowledge that that the body affects the soul, does that mean that the soul has properties that we can understand and that we can determine the nature of the continuum between the physical and the meta?

a reply to: ATODASO

where do you see the demarcation?

Not sure science has explored the territory enough for anyone to say.

Pretty much any experience can be induced, stimulated and simulated by electrical or instrumental poking at various areas of the brain. That's enough to bet on OOBEs and NDEs being entirely sourced in our grey matter.

There are just those outlier accounts of cardiac arrest patients recalling sounds and sights, whilst technically unconscious, that keep the conclusions at bay. It's like it's always been, people keep thinking that what's known now is all there is to know. Times change and we learn more.

originally posted by: ATODASO
a reply to: Boticelli

are you able to "travel" very far? like, you can jump from your window, but do you explore your neighborhood?

thx in advance for following up.

Yes of course, there is a lot of scenarios. You may soar over the city as long and as far as you want - it is one of the best part, but not the only one. You may come up to the unknown pretty girl and kiss her. Unfortunately it is hardly possible in reality.
But these controlled dreams are very fragile - you may wake up at any moment. I noticed also that to achieve this kind of dream you must by totaly sober - not a drink or a pill on the eve!
One fellow from whom I learned the trick of "watching palms of your own hands" in order to stabilize this sensation says that in his dreams he usually kills his enemies with magic blaster or make love to beautiful women having real orgasms.

a reply to: ATODASO

Let's change the focus because stimulating a portion of the brain is not but some evidence that where in the brain such effects can be activated. Let's look at the much maligned topic of Remote Viewing. It has been fairly well proven by science and the CIA paid millions of dollars to replicate Soviet work and the US Army (backed by the CIA) kept a program alive fore twenty years.

Remote viewing works and the viewer need not get out of their comfortable position, but only need to relax themselves and "go there" to the site and time desired and "look around" to report what isTextseen. Much work has been done on what regions of the brain produce the brainwaves most prominent during the session. We can smugly assume that the government programs also got into using certain drugs to augment if not induce the process. That would have been a natural evolution toward enhancing the process.

In short, shocking a part of the brain to induce an OOB experience proves nothing about what is real or not real about the experience. And we don't really know if tickling that the part of the brain is what is activated in a normal OOB experience. "Course if you want to dismiss psychic phenomena out of hand, you can say "It really is all in the head."

a reply to: Kandinsky

There are just those outlier accounts of cardiac arrest patients recalling sounds and sights, whilst technically unconscious, that keep the conclusions at bay.

and here's where i'm at, if what happens in the brain is electrical, isn't that where we should be looking? interactions at the quantum level, and how info is encoded at the quantum level?