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chicagotribune.com >> Nation/World
Out-of-body experiences traced to brain zaps
Scientists: Eerie feelings no mystery
By Sandra Blakeslee
New York Times News Service
Published October 3, 2006
They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes
feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no
one there. A woman feels herself leaving her body and floating in space,
looking down on her corporeal self.
Such experiences often are attributed by those who have them to paranormal
forces.
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But according to recent work by neuroscientists, delivering mild electric
current to specific spots in the brain can induce them.
In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus
resulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down
at her body. In another woman, electrical current delivered to the angular
gyrus produced an uncanny feeling that someone was behind her, intent on
interfering with her actions.
The two women were being evaluated for epilepsy surgery at University
Hospital of Geneva, where doctors implanted dozens of electrodes into their
brains. As each electrode was activated, the patient was asked to say what
she was experiencing.
Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de
Lausanne in Switzerland who carried out the procedures, said the women had
normal psychiatric histories and that they were stunned by the bizarre
nature of their experiences.
The Sept. 21 issue of Nature magazine includes an account by Blanke and his
colleagues of the woman who sensed a shadow person behind her. They
described the out-of-body experiences in the February 2004 issue of the
journal Brain.
There is nothing mystical about these ghostly experiences, said Peter
Brugger, a neuroscientist at University Hospital in Zurich, who was not
involved in the experiments.
"The research shows that the self can be detached from the body and can live
a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experience, or it can
be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a presence," Brugger
said.
Researchers have discovered that some areas of the brain combine information
from several senses. A dog is visually recognized far more quickly if it is
simultaneously accompanied by the sound of its bark.
Real-time information from the body, the space around the body and the
subjective feelings from the body also are represented in multisensory
regions, Blanke said.
Blanke described a 22-year-old student who had electrodes implanted into the
left side of her brain in 2004.
"We were checking language areas," Blanke said, when the woman turned her
head to the right.
The woman said she had a weird sensation that another person was lying
beneath her on the bed. The figure, she said, felt like a "shadow."
When Blanke turned off the current, the woman said the strange presence had
gone away. Each time he reapplied the current, she once again turned her
head to try to see the figure.
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
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