Very interesting post over at the Memeing Naturalism blog called Displacing the Inmaterial Self. It discusses a recent paper in Science that describes experiments that altered the subject's experience of being a self located in the body (similar to an OBE).
From the abstract:
…we designed an experiment that uses conflicting visual-somatosensory input in virtual reality to disrupt the spatial unity between the self and the body. We found that during multisensory conflict, participants felt as if a virtual body seen in front of them was their own body and mislocalized themselves toward the virtual body, to a position outside their bodily borders. Our results indicate that spatial unity and bodily self-consciousness can be studied experimentally and are based on multisensory and cognitive processing of bodily information.
Interesting implications here.
I remember watching some show a while back that was about OBE. There was some study that wanted to test subjects by writing a message on a piece of paper and putting it high above a subject. If the subject was actually out of the body according to these researchers then they would know the message after floating above their body. I can't remember all of the results but it seemed like there were some people that knew the message. I need to look it up to see if it was debunked in any way.
Ah the good ole mind - body debate is still alive and well. Manifest or scientific image of man? Both? Neither?
The study you're referring to sounds familiar. It sounds like one done by Charles T. Tart in the late 1960's, as I recall, and as I recall, the study involved one person, a woman, who supposedly could read the messages, and as I recall, the results were inconclusive because the study didn't eliminate the possibility that she had some normal -- as opposed to paranormal -- way of reading the messages.
Posted by: holotrope | January 16, 2008 at 06:27 PM