SUPPOSEDLY SCIENTIFIC "OUT OF BODY" EXPERIMENTS ARE TOTAL BS

Scientists rigged up a full body version of the old "feel the fake hand trick", and say it proves that so-called out-of-body experiences - (many associated with near death experiences) - and they claim that it proves that there is a natural explanation for the experience, and therefore it is not a spiritual experience of the soul leaving the body. (Stories HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE.)

I SAY THIS IS BUNK.

Why?

Simple: their experiment would not work on a blind person.

NYTIMES:

The out-of-body experiments were conducted by two research groups using slightly different methods intended to expand the so-called rubber hand illusion.

In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a rubber hand set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own.

When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, people wince and sometimes cry out.

The illusion shows that body parts can be separated from the whole body by manipulating a mismatch between touch and vision. That is, when a person’s brain sees the fake hand being stroked and feels the same sensation, the sense of being touched is misattributed to the fake.

The new experiments were designed to create a whole body illusion with similar manipulations.

All these experiments REALLY prove is that proprioperception is HIGHLY influenced by sight. THAT'S IT. (Proprioperception is "body sense" - having a sense of where your body is in space and time and where one part of your body is in relation to other parts.)

We know that blind people have propriperception without sight; therefore we know that proprioperception is not dependent on sight.

The person experimented on merely located the sensation in a place which was not really his own body. He was fooled. That's all.

AND THE FOLKS WHO GAVE THESE CHARLATANS GRANT MONEY WERE FOOLED, TOO!