otherkinnews | Neurological perspective on OBE, shifting (Reply)

Trigger warnings: spirituality and science together.

A study carried out by Dr. Jason Braithwaite and published in the journal Cortex last July showed that instability in the temporal lobe— even in sober, mentally “normal” people— correlate with out-of-body experiences (OBEs) as well as sensations of shape-shifting.

Braithwaite explains that the temporal lobe is the part of the brain that “interprets the sensory and other information coming in from the body and places it on a body map, giving us our sense of being inside our body, of looking out from our eyes. If this interpretation goes wrong, a hallucination can occur …”¹ Braithwaite performed the study upon “63 University students, 17 of whom (26%) claimed to have experienced at least one OBE in their lifetime.”² The subjects were healthy, mentally “normal” people who were not under the influence of drugs.

The questionnaire part of the study included asking the subjects questions from the Cardiff Anomalous Perception Scale (CAPS), which includes in the “body distortion” section the question, “Do you ever have the sensation that your body, or part of it, is changing or has changed shape?”³ The original research article does not state how many subjects answered “yes” to this specific question or scored high in the “body distortion” section of CAPS. However, it does state that subjects who had experienced an OBE were more likely to have experienced body distortion than subjects who hadn’t experienced an OBE.⁴

Braithwaite summarized some correlations found in the study: “OBEers reported significantly more perceptual anomalies … relative to the non-OBEers. … OBEers had a tendency to be more hallucinatory-prone compared to non-OBEers.”⁵

Readers interested in this study can download a PDF of Braithwaite’s original research article via the ScienceDirect database, accessible via your local or school library. Each library’s web-site has a different route to access the article databases; please ask your librarian how.

- O. Scribner

Sources

1. Jennifer Welsh, “Out-of-body hallucinations linked to brain glitch.” July 12, 2011. LiveScience. http://news.yahoo.com/body-hallucinations-linked-brain-glitch-183605205.html
2. Jason J. Braithwaite, Dana Samson, Ian Apperly, Emma Broglia, Johan Hulleman. “Cognitive correlates of the spontaneous out-of-body experience (OBE) in the psychologically normal population: Evidence for an increased role of temporal-lobe instability, body-distortion processing, and impairments in own-body transformations.” Cortex 47:7 (July-August 2011): 839-853.
3. Ibid., p. 843.
4. Ibid., p. 845.
5. Ibid.

“Out-of-body experiences linked to neural instability and biases in body representation.” July 11, 2011. AlphaGalileo Foundation. http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=107999&CultureCode=en