Higher states of consciousness

[indigobusiness]

MEDICINE

MARGARET COOK

PICTURE THIS: A 43-year-old lady is being treated for temporal lobe epilepsy in a Swiss clinic. In order to pinpoint the aberrant electrical focus in her brain, electrodes have been implanted under the dura - the membrane covering the brain. When she is wakened, the doctors stimulate different areas and watch the results.

When they activate an area called the angular gyrus on the right side, she reports a feeling of "sinking into the bed". This progresses to "falling from a height". With stronger currents she reports she is "floating two metres above the bed" and actually able to see her own body parts lying below her.

She is having an "Out of Body Experience" (OBE), and hers is a classical description.

Some 10 per cent of the population endure these sensations at some time. These can be terrifying, though mostly brief. Associated with epilepsy and migraine, they also occur in normal people, often in states of altered consciousness. They seem to be closely linked to "Near Death Experiences" (NDEs), which take place in extremis, due to an interruption in the supply of oxygen to the brain: or occur when under the influence of drugs - opiates, ketamine, LSD and other hallucinogens - or of sensory deprivation, or brain stimulation of the right angular gyrus as described above.

http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=4442005

[On the Road]

1. Floating Above Your Body

and being able to look down and see it is a very interesting hallucination. It's complex and is not just a distortion of something you see every day. It makes you wonder why these types of things might be hard-wired.

It is a good indication, though, that the near-death experiences are not conclusive proof of life after death.

[indigobusiness]

2. I agree.

It's not clear what is going on, but something very interesting definitely is.

[On the Road]

3. It Suggests That a Lot of Perceptual Manipulation Goes On

at a very low biological level. Being able to construct an external view of your body from seeing other people combined with what you can see from inside your head is pretty complex. Of course, dreams are as well, and they can be triggered electrically. But it's strange that this ability exists.

[aneerkoinos]

10. TV receiver

TV is a good analogy for brain's functioning as antenna picking up the mental/psi-field and creating the localized individual consciouss experience in spacetime. (The psi of paranormal and psi as the symbol for wave function in quantum physics is remarkable coincidence, isn't it :))

TV is a good analogy also in the other sense, the confabulation of "reality" (done mostly related to the story-telling linguistic left hemisphere of brain).

The numbers about e.g. visual perceptions shown by brain studies are something like 90% of "manipulation" originating in the perceiving system and 10% external feed-in. What we see really is what our conditioning and confabulation tels us to see.

What is also quite remarkable is that many studies show that neurons "anticipate" an experience, which is hard to explain as anything but backward causation in time, implying that our functioning in time has a loop-like or bubble-like quality.

It is truly stranger than strange where the study of consciousness (and quantum&mind and paranormal) seems to be leading. And our confabulating selves can hardly response by anything but disbelief, willfull ignoring, by fabulating the awkward evidence away.

[Az]

4. Its actually a memory device

Think back to an incident in your past. Remember the event and try to picture it. Most people will place a homunculous of themself in their memory of the event to place themself spacially within it. We do not see ourselves during these events but our memory often places us in them.

[On the Road]

6. It Certainly Shows How Untrustworthy Memory is

memories like this are obviously not what you saw at the time, but people treat them like that and may feel that they're a photographic record of what happened until it's pointed out.

I'm under the impression that these kind of memories are more common in childhood. I remember having them, but I don't believe I do it all that much any more.

In any case, maybe the whole reason for this ability is to recall memories. Perhaps memories are not stored in a straightforward way and have to be recreated, so to speak. Constructing yourself would be a part of the process.

[Stunster]

5. Brains and consciousness

The mere fact that all such unusual human experiences appear to involve some brain event/process or other does not prove that they
are non-veridical. After all, all our veridical experiences involve some brain event/process! We would not then infer that every experience was therefore illusory, or non-veridical, would we?

So saying that such-and-such an OBE or NDE involves some brain/event process should not automatically rule them out from nonetheless being veridical.

Millions of years ago, hominid brains evolved in such a way as to enable humans to experience watching a bird fly in the sky, the taste of ice cream, the sound of music, the sound of words, the emotion of fear in the face of wild animals seeking to eat us, etc. That fact says PRECISELY NOTHING about the veridicality of those experiences. Why should a qualitatively similar fact say any more than precisely nothing about the veridicality of OBEs, NDEs, or religious experiences?

It strikes me that this type of argument is utterly idiotic. It also has a name. It is called the Genetic Fallacy.

It might be objected that we never have any human experiences at all without brains, and hence ought to conclude that in the absence of brains, no experience is possible. But one might as well say that we never have any human experiences at all without there being persons or souls or conscious spirit or minds to have them, and hence ought to conclude that unless there's a person or soul or conscious spirit or mind, matter on its own will not generate any experience. The argument cuts both ways.

In other words, it's rationally illegitimate to presuppose the truth of materialism in assessing the nature of OBEs, NDEs, and religious experiences, just as much as it would be to presuppose the truth of supernaturalism or some non-supernaturalistic form of spiritualism.

One can't settle the mind-body problem by fiat. And, as a matter of fact, it's a problem that continues to rage with controversy within contemporary mainstream philosophy.

[aneerkoinos]

11. Good post

I'd just like to comment this:

>>>After all, all our veridical experiences involve some brain event/process!<<<

If by brain event/process is meant electro-chemical neural events, then the one widely reported NDE would be contrary evidence. The patient's brain was IIRC in deep freeze, any case no brain activity what so ever was supposed to be going on. Yet after waking up the patient reported consciouss observations about her surroundings during her OBE/NDE, which according to doctors concurred with what actually happened during the operation.

Mind-body problem is nowadays not just philosophical problem (though philosophy plays a central role), many other experimental and more speculative fields are also heavily involved. I take this as strong evidence supporting the Quantum Mind hypothesis...

[H2O Man]

7. The story of the airplane .....

A group of human beings found something unfamiliar to them. It was an airplane. But they had no idea what an airplane was; all they saw were some comfortable seats. And so they would sit confortably and fully satisfied that they had the most luxurious of seats.

Eventually, one human being figured out how to make the airplane move. This human being was very proud as he drove the airplane from spot to spot around his village, convinced that his comfortable seat had evolved into a car.

And one day a human being found out the airplane could fly.

We are airplanes. Our lives are airplanes. (Even DU is, in a real sense, an airplane being used as a comfortable community sofa.) But the truth is we have the ability to fly.

Now, some people may be mighty comfortable in their seats on the ground, and simply refuse to get off their ass. And others still will insist that science proves that humans can NOT fly, and insist on acting like an ass. But people can fly .... and even more, they can fly outside of the machine.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

8. yep

and there are wonders beyond flying as well.....

[H2O Man]

9. Tao Te Ching .......

Knowing Ignorance
is strength;
Ignoring Knowledge
is sickness.

-- Lao Tse

[indigobusiness]

12. Ignoring ignorance

is all I ask.

[Stunster]

13. Care is needed in thinking about this kind of thing

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=214&topic_id=8846&mesg_id=9061

[Old Mouse]

14. You could talk to ICU nurses and get a lot more anecdotal evidence.

A minor point on the topic heading, OBEs are not a higher state.

If you speak to people who have had an NDE you would discover they often come with multiple instances of remote viewing, which negates the possibility of memory recall, distortion or confabulation as a root cause.

The study of this and related phenomenon are corrupted by social prejudice requiring a particular conclusion.

[indigobusiness]

15. Leaping to conclusions...

and forming finalized opinions, about the less than fully understood, is the province of fools and madmen.