Mod+ OBE Experiences

Jules

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Are out-of-body experiences valid? Dr. Crookall at the University of Aberdeen has written 9 books on out-of-body cases due to the overwhelming amount of evidence in their favour. A survey of 380 Oxford students showed that 34% had an OBE. A separate survey of 902 adults revealed that 8% have had an OBE. In a study of 44 non-Western societies, only 3 did not hold a belief in OBEs. Another study showed that out of 488 world societies, 89% had at least some tradition regarding OBEs. So this phenomenon is familiar and lots of people claimed to have experienced it before, but is there any scientific credibility to this phenomenon?

A fascinating experiment was done by Dr. Charles Tart, who was a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California. He had also served as a Visiting Professor in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and as an Instructor in Psychiatry at the School of Medicine of the University of Virginia. A study he published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research may be the most infamous OBE study ever done.

He documented the out-of-body experience of a young woman who was one of his research subjects. She was in a room with nothing but a bed, a shelf, a clock, and an observation window where Dr. Tart observed from another room. She also had electrical devices hooked up to her head to detect brain wave activities, which can be seen in the diagram below.

OBE-study.jpg


What makes this particular out-of-body experience remarkable is that she was able to leave her physical body as Dr. Tart watched from the other room and read a 5-digit number of 25132 off of a piece of paper that was on a shelf in the corner of the room. The number was at a significant distance above the bed so that she would not be able to read the number even if she was standing, and she reported seeing the correct number him upon return to her physical body which remained attached to the bed as she was being watched. EEGs, REMs, and galvanic skin response were all recorded before and during her OBE which indicated a significant alteration in the readings during the time she left her body. Her OBE a good example of “veridical perception” which is where verified events are observed while in an out-of-body state.

As Dr. Tart concluded: “While the physiological data are limited by dependence on her retrospective report in correlating physiological pattern with the experience, it seems as if her out-of-body experiences occurred in conjunction with a non-dreaming, non-awake brain wave stage characterized by predominant slowed alpha activity from her brain and no activation of the autonomic nervous system. Two incidents occurring in the laboratory provide suggestive evidence that the out of-the-body experiences had parapsychological concomitants. In summary, this brief study.

http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/out-of-body-experiences-validated-by-scientific-study/
 
I'm not objecting to the truthfulness of some OBE's, indeed quite the opposite as I've had one unique OBE myself. However last time I read Tart's 1968 paper that you refer to above "A Psychophysiological Study of OBEs in a Selected Subject", I noted these issues...

1. The target was not secret... the author - who was also monitoring the subject during the night - had knowledge of the number...

"Each laboratory night, after the subject was lying in bed, the physiological recordings were running satisfactorily, and she was ready to go to sleep, I went into my office down the hall, opened a table of random numbers at random, threw a coin onto the table as a means of random entry into the page, and copied off the first five digits immediately above where the coin landed. These were copied with a black marking pen, in figures approximately two inches high, onto a small piece of paper. Thus they were quite discrete visually. This five-digit random number constituted the parapsychological target for the evening."

2. Author provided contextual cueing to the subject...

"She was also told that if she floated high enough to read the five-digit number she should memorize it and wake up immediately afterwards to tell me what it was."

3. Author states that the target was not hidden...

"...we could just make out what the number was...[ ]...in its reflection off the clock surface."

4. The papers author therefore states that the subjects reading of the target number...

"...cannot be considered as providing conclusive evidence for a parapsychological effect..."
 
??? Out of body experience experiences ?
Language can be unwieldy, similarly with LCD displays. Our modern dependence on all sorts of abbreviations can give rise to other inconsistencies, such as whether to write "a LED" or "an LED", each of which could be valid.
 
Language can be unwieldy, similarly with LCD displays. Our modern dependence on all sorts of abbreviations can give rise to other inconsistencies, such as whether to write "a LED" or "an LED", each of which could be valid.
Whoa . . .really? That's what you're bringing? Illustrated with a grammar quirk which has nothing to do with the point? The OP could have titled the thread anything. Anyway it was just a lighthearted dig for fun till you decided to get all pseudo-scholarly about it.
 
Whoa . . .really? That's what you're bringing? Illustrated with a grammar quirk which has nothing to do with the point? The OP could have titled the thread anything. Anyway it was just a lighthearted dig for fun till you decided to get all pseudo-scholarly about it.

Saiko - I have to say, the way you come into threads, I find SO UNHELPFUL. You may intend humour but it FEELS like you are always poking at stuff. And its just NOT funny to me.
 
When I first read about the AWARE study it struck me that separating out the OBE piece for experiments along the lines Jules describes above, was such an obvious thing to do. It's really surprising that nobody has done this. I cant think of a more straightforward, repeatable, inexpensive experiment with such a tremendous potential to upset the Paradigm.

1) Round up people who claim they can repeatably have OBEs.
2) Put them (one of at a time of course) in a room with a camera on them at all times so they cant cheat.
2) put an IPad on shelf up near the ceiling.
3) Have it randomly display words, numbers, maybe photos etc.. for a random length of time and log it. I believe this would make it fully double blind.
4) Record what they say when they come out and check it against the log.

One really solid hit, with the experiment video-documented from beginning to end would essentially disprove current materialist views of brain generated consciousness. It wouldn't matter how many wrong guesses were made given the huge number of word/number/image combinations the IPad app could randomly select from.

Im not saying positive results would cause dogmatic materialists to instantly roll over, but it would have a profound effect on society as a whole.
 
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