Friday, October 23, 2009

Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions

This is the first of the scientific journal articles about OBEs which I found on my recent web crawl.

Blanke, O; Ortique, S; Landis, T; Seeck, M.
"Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions."
Nature, 2002 Sep 19; 419(6904):269-70.

"'Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are curious, usually brief sensations in which a person's consciousness seems to become detached from the body and take up a remote viewing position. Here we describe the repeated induction of this experience by focal electrical stimulation of the brain's right angular gyrus in a patient who was undergoing evaluation for epilepsy treatment.

" Stimulation at this site also elicited illusory transformations of the patient's arm and legs (complex somatosensory responses) and whole body displacements (vestibular responses), indicating that out-of-body experiences may reflect a failure by the brain to integrate complex somatosensory and vestibular information."

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