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August 28th, 2009 by Sean“Virtual Out of Body Experiences”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQAc_Z2OfQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xWowv7Qryc

I applaud scientists for investigating the brain and how our vision plays a role in sensing the location of our body parts.

However.

I do not applaud their use of the term “out of body experience”. What they are investigating is not the same thing as the traditional out of body experience.

The term “out of body experience” is broad enough to describe both phenomenon, but using it for these studies implies a relationship between the two phenomenon. There is no relationship between the optical illusion the scientists are playing with, and the OBE state of mind that Monroe and others have investigated.

What bothers me more is that the second video uses terms like “flashes of light” and “vibrations” - however, they’re just talking about the lights and motors attached to the subjects back! Not visions of flashing lights experienced during meditation (thought to be synapses firing in the eye-lids), or the classical vibrations people feel while having an OBE (which have no scientific explanation yet).

The blurring of terminology will create confusion. This means that if someone is genuinely curious about OBEs, they might read scientific articles about this optical illusion, and mistakenly conclude that OBEs are an optical illusion - for no logical reason… just because the terminology is the same.

OBEs might be an illusion - I’m ok with that. But let that discovery come from investigation of OBEs!

Optical illusions are cool - I’m ok with that too. But let’s stop calling this line of work “out of body experiences” because we already have a separate collection of phenomenon that already uses that term.

>:-|

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Science, Dream Phenomenon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

### 2 Responses to ““Virtual Out of Body Experiences””

1. Psikillion Says:
   August 28th, 2009 at 4:36 pm

   So in other words you mean to say that if one were to classify these optical illusions as OBEs, then it would be a category mistake?

2. ClearVision Says:
   August 30th, 2009 at 10:46 am

   What then defines a “real” OBE according to you?

### Leave a Reply

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