Out-of-Body Experiment

Sometimes I want to write about a subject, such as the out-of-body experience, and I do a little Google research only to find that the subject is not worth writing about.

But in this particular case I will let you be the judge by reading the journal abstract below – this is the latest well-cited effort in the field. Based on my experience as a scientist my assertion is that these guys are:

1. Only using the most subjective of experimental data, i.e. surveys of subjects.

2. Hiding their total absence of a mechanistic proposal in a Krebs Cycle of acronyms.

3. They haven’t done their homework – they are trying to understand the out-of-body experience before the groundwork is done. That is, they are not standing on the shoulders of giants. In which case they are not scientists, so why do they bother with academic journals? They would be better placed to have websites decorated with flowers and sunsets.

“It has been argued that hallucinations which appear to involve shifts in egocentric perspective (e.g., the out-of-body experience, OBE) reflect specific biases in exocentric perspective-taking processes. Via a newly devised perspective-taking task, we examined whether such biases in perspective-taking were present in relation to specific dissociative anomalous body experiences (ABE) – namely the OBE. Participants also completed the Cambridge Depersonalization Scale (CDS) which provided measures of additional embodied ABE (unreality of self) and measures of derealization (unreality of surroundings). There were no reliable differences in the level of ABE, emotional numbing, and anomalies in sensory recall reported between the OBE and control group as measured by the corresponding CDS subscales. In contrast, the OBE group did provide significantly elevated measures of derealization (“alienation from surroundings” CDS subscale) relative to the control group. At the same time we also found that the OBE group was significantly more efficient at completing all aspects of the perspective-taking task relative to controls. Collectively, the current findings support fractionating the typically unitary notion of dissociation by proposing a distinction between embodied dissociative experiences and disembodied dissociative experiences – with only the latter being associated with exocentric perspective-taking mechanisms. Our findings – obtained with an ecologically valid task and a homogeneous OBE group – also call for a re-evaluation of the relationship between OBEs and perspective-taking in terms of facilitated disembodied experiences.”