Science of the supernatural - out of body experiences

An OBE is not uncommon and one of the most peculiar states of consciousness. Over the past several years we have come closer to understanding this, almost, supernatural experience. Researchers have narrowed down the site in the brain, circled in red on the right, which they believe is responsible for creating the sensation of leaving your body and observing it from afar. OBEs are usually associated with epilepsy, migraines, brain tumours, drug use and near death experiences. However, even people with no neurological disorders can still experience an OBE and in fact 5% of healthy people will have experienced and OBE.

Out-Of-Body experiences
If human mind were simple enough to be understood, we would be simple enough to understand it . Emerson Pugh This article was adapted from an article written in NewScientist 13 October 2009 by Anil Anathaswamy titled Out of your head: Leaving the body behind
Out-of-body experiences (OBE) have always been used to prove the existence of a soul or spirit that can leave the physical body and move about in the immediate space. According to mythology everyone has a spirit or soul known as his or her own doppelgängerthe one who unfortunately sees their own doppelganger knows that death is near. In fact, just days before her death, Queen Elizabeth I of England reported seen her image lying on her bed, pale and still. Belief in this myth was such that when the Russian Empress Catherine II, the Great, saw her image walking toward her, she took no chance and ordered her guards to open fire on it. A doppelgänger experience is the least severe OBE. You sense the presence of or see a person you know to be yourself, though you remain rooted in your own body. This often progresses to stage 2, where your sense of self moves back and forth between your real body and your doppelgänger
An OBE is not uncommon and one of the most peculiar states of consciousness. Over the past several years we have come closer to understanding this, almost, supernatural experience. Researchers have narrowed down the site in the brain, circled in red on the right, which they believe is responsible for creating the sensation of leaving your body and observing it from afar. OBEs are usually associated with epilepsy, migraines, brain tumours, drug use and near death experiences. However, even people with no neurological disorders can still experience an OBE and in fact 5% of healthy people will have experienced and OBE.
The first substantial clues of the involvement of the brain in inducing an OBE came in 2002, when a team of surgeons stumbled across a way to induce a full-blown OBE experience whilst performing exploratory brain surgery on a 43 year old woman with severe epilepsy. When they stimulated a region near the back of the brain called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), the woman reported that she was floating above her own body and looking down on herself. This region of the brain processes visual and touch signals, balance and spatial information from the inner ear, and the proprioceptive sensations from joints, tendons and muscles that tell us where our body parts are in relation to one another. Its job is to process these signals in a way that create a feeling of embodiment: a sense of where your body is in relation to the world around you. Researchers hypothesised that OBEs arise when, for whatever reason, the TPJ fails to process the incoming signals properly (Nature, vol 419, p 269).
Other brain regions, some close to the TPJ have also been implicated. The emerging consensus is that when these regions are working well, we feel at one with our body. But disrupt them, for what ever reason and our sense of embodiment can float away. But how does the brain construct the view of self from an external vantage point? Thomas Metzinger of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany suggests that the brain already has a mechanism by which it already does this. Imagine an episode from a recent holiday. Do you visualise it from a first-person perspective, or from a third-person perspective with yourself in the scene? Surprisingly, most of us do the latter. "In encoding visual memories, the brain already uses an external perspective," says Metzinger. "We don't know much about why and how, but if something is extracted from such a database [during an out-of-body experience], there may be material for seeing oneself from the outside."
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Ask fellow students to imagine a recent holiday scene. Do they see themselves from an external perspective?
Can you tell a person telling the truth from a person telling a lie? Ask students to draw a scene from a situation which they have experienced. Ask the same students to draw a fictitious scene. Compare the drawings. Do you notice anything? A liar will draw the scene from a third person perspective. Try it and see if this is true. Are there other ways you can pick if a person is telling the truth.? Consider hand actions, eye movements, fidgeting?