Perceived Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs) and the Mysterious Silver Cord

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. King
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Drew Leder

This chapter undertakes a phenomenology of inner-body experience, starting with a focus on visceral interoception. While highly personal, such experience also reveals a level of the lived body that is pre-personal, beyond our understanding and control. In contrast to exteroception, elements of the visceral field can be inaccessible, or surface only indistinctly and intermittently to conscious awareness. Nonetheless, interoception is more than just a series of such sensations. This chapter argues for the “exterior interior”—that is, we interpret inner body experiences through models drawn from the outer world, and interoception itself is bound up with emotion, purpose, and projects. In the West, we tend to valorize the interiority of rational thought; by contrast, experience of the inner body is a kind of “inferior interior,” often overlooked or overridden, yet inside insights—gained from attending to messages from the inner body—may preserve our health and wellbeing.


2021 ◽  
pp. 263183182198992
Author(s):  
Mohmad Iqbal

Background: A human body keeps changing physiologically, biologically, and psychologically from birth to death. There is always a change in all human faculties. But adolescence is a phase earmarked where a human body experiences drastic changes among all these faculties. And any such bodily change carrying baggage of shame, insecurity, stigma, and concealment demands on-time awareness and intervention. Aim: The aim of the study is to understand the knowledge and level of awareness regarding sexual and reproductive health among the school-going adolescents of Kashmir Valley where majority of the population belongs to Muslim conservative culture. Methodology: Due to COVID-19 lockdown, the inability of access to schools and children gave the researcher the opportunity to utilize the alternate places and a total of 550 students from classes 8, 9, and 10 were selected for the purpose. The permission was sought from the respective teachers and then the parents. The sample was a combination of boys and girls, students from both private and government-run schools. The researcher collected the data and it was tabulated systematically and analyzed using Microsoft Excel. P value was evaluated by using an application “P Value: A Statistical Tool” from Play Store. Results and Conclusion: The results depicted that higher the level of class, more the knowledge they had about the matter. Girls had a little knowledge about sexual and reproductive health than boys. This study felt a dire need of educating both parents and adolescent boys and girls regarding sexual health. The shame does not lie in educating the children but in the mishaps that may result due to unawareness about the same.


2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-26
Author(s):  
Hans Goller

Neuroscientists keep telling us that the brain produces consciousness and consciousness does not survive brain death because it ceases when brain activity ceases. Research findings on near-death-experiences during cardiac arrest contradict this widely held conviction. They raise perplexing questions with regard to our current understanding of the relationship between consciousness and brain functions. Reports on veridical perceptions during out-of-body experiences suggest that consciousness may be experienced independently of a functioning brain and that self-consciousness may continue even after the termination of brain activity. Data on studies of near-death-experiences could be an incentive to develop alternative theories of the body-mind relation as seen in contemporary neuroscience.


1983 ◽  
Vol 57 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1255-1262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Persinger

Mystical and religious experiences are hypothesized to be evoked by transient, electrical microseizures within deep structures of the temporal lobe. Although experiential details are affected by context and reinforcement history, basic themes reflect the inclusion of different amygdaloid-hippocampal structures and adjacent cortices. Whereas the unusual electrical coherence allows access to infantile memories of parents, a source of god expectations, specific stimulation evokes out-of-body experiences, space-time distortions, intense meaningfulness, and dreamy scenes. The species-specific similarities in temporal lobe properties enhance the homogeneity of cross-cultural experiences. They exist along a continuum that ranges from “early morning highs” to recurrent bouts of conversion and dominating religiosity. Predisposing factors include any biochemical or genetic factors that produce temporal lobe lability. A variety of precipitating stimuli provoke these experiences, but personal (life) crises and death bed conditions are optimal. These temporal lobe microseizures can be learned as responses to existential trauma because stimulation is of powerful intrinsic reward regions and reduction of death anxiety occurs. The implications of these transients as potent modifiers of human behavior are considered.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrico Facco ◽  
Edoardo Casiglia ◽  
Benedikt Emanuel Al Khafaji ◽  
Francesco Finatti ◽  
Gian Marco Duma ◽  
...  

Inducing out-of-body experiences in hypnosis (H-OBEs) offers an almost unique opportunity to investigate them in a controlled condition.OBEs were induced as imaginative task in resting conditions (I-OBE) or in hypnosis (H-OBE) in 15 high hypnotizable subjects. A 32-channel EEG was recorded and the spectral power and imaginary coherence were calculated. At the end of each session, the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (PCI) was administered to check the phenomenological aspects of their experience.Significantly higher scores in the Altered State, Positive Affect, Altered Experience and Attention subdimensions of the PCI were reported in H-OBE than in I-OBE, which were associated to a significant decrease of power in beta and gamma band activity in right parieto-temporal derivations. Our result suggest that H-OBE may be an appealing model of “true” OBEs, including an alteration of multisensory integration in right parieto-temporal brain areas.


Author(s):  
Konstantinos Christos Daoultzis ◽  
Sophie Alida Bogemann ◽  
Yoshiyuki Onuki ◽  
Martijn Meeter ◽  
Ysbrand Van Der Werf

Body ownership reflects our ability to recognise our body at a certain location, enabling us to interact with the world. Emotion has a strong impact on memory and body ownership; interestingly, skin temperature may at least in part mediate this impact. Previous studies have found that out-of-body experiences (OBE) impair memory encoding and cause skin temperature to drop. In the present study a new method for inducing OBE was designed and their impact on a different stage and type of memory processing (emotional memory consolidation) and on skin temperature was investigated. In our experiment, we presented three types of emotional pictures (neutral, pleasant, unpleasant) before inducing OBE and testing our participants’ recognition memory in a retrieval session. Throughout the whole experiment, both neck and hand skin temperature were measured using iButtons. Participants’ performance was calculated using d-prime and statistical analyses included one-way ANOVA, probing the relationship between the score on the OBE questionnaire, performance and skin temperature; we also compared the differences between the experimental and a control group. Results showed that OBE favour emotional memory consolidation and cause a temperature increase, supporting the embodied cognition theory as proposed by Anderson (2003). Future studies should expand our findings, to rule out that participants experiencing OBE could have a better memory at baseline or that temperature could be increased due to other reasons.


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