First-hand accounts of out-of-body experiences are frequently
cited pieces of supposed evidence of the paranormal. Historically,
we've interpreted these experiences to be visitations from
gods, angels, aliens, Thetans,
or what have you. Many well-educated people who should know
better cling fiercely to these stories. This is why I think
it's important that people be hip to a new development in
the brain sciences. What follows is a summary of and my reaction
to an article from the New York Times, October 3 ,2006, entitled
Out-of-Body
Experience? Your Brain Is to Blame by Sandra Blakeslee.
Say you awaken one night to feel yourself leaving your body
and floating in space, looking down on your body from above.
Or maybe you've awakened to the feeling that someone else
is in the room with you, controlling your body. Maybe you've
even had this experience. My wife has. I haven't, and I never
hope to. I'd imagine that if something like this happens to
you, it's bound to get your attention. People naturally want
an explanation for this kind of thing, and historically we've
told each other stories about encounters with supernatural
forces or beings.
But so check this out: respectable people in lab coats have
recently discovered that you can induce an out-of-body experience
with a mild electrical current to the angular gyrus, a part
of your brain. They discovered this by talking to wide-awake
surgical patients being evaluated for epilepsy surgery. While
receiving a zap to their angular gyri, people reported sensations
of hanging from the ceiling, looking down at their own body,
or that there was a being in the room with them, touching
them. The angular gyrus is involved in your sense of your
own bodily orientation - it collates the information it gets
from your muscles, bones, inner ear, eyes, etc. Usually, all
of this information agrees - my eyes, inner ear, muscles and
so on are all telling me that I'm sitting in a chair right
now. But when you throw the delicate electrical workings of
the angular gyrus into temporary disarray, you misperceive
your own body orientation and location. Your proprioception
conflicts with your outward-directed senses, leaving you to
wrap your head around the contradictory evidence as best you
can. Your body always extends away from you in the bottom
half of your field of vision, but if you feel upside-down
while still seeing that rightside-up body, you can feel like
you're looking at your own body from above.
As for the illusion of a shadowy presence: A distressed
angular gyrus can misrepresent your body as not even belonging
to you. Instead, you perceive your body as another person's,
a presence felt uncomfortably close to you or touching you.
This presence might loom over you, or be directly behind and
beneath you, and so on. These sensations are intriguingly
similar to schizophrenics' experiences of imaginary people,
disembodied people, vast secret conspiracies, the sense of
being a puppet, etc. The shadowy presence is also intriguingly
similar to the experiences people have during certain types
of seizure. When we think of epilepsy, we think of grand mal
seizures, collapsing on the floor and jerking etc. But seizures
lie on a long continuum of severity that runs down to the
small and barely perceptible. Mild
seizures are more common and more varied than you might think.
People who are usually fine can still have the occasional
mild neurological episode. Susan
Blackmore attributes
the UFO-abduction meme to sleep paralysis, a seizure whose
perceptual effects include the shadowy presence, along with
Spielbergian bright lights and roaring in the ears. Anna's
own 'alien abduction' episode was brought on by violence to
her circadian rhythms from doing too much air travel.
From the NY
Times article: "When otherwise normal people experience
bodily delusions... they are often flummoxed. The felt sensation
of the body is so seamless, so familiar, that people do not
realize it is a creation of the brain, even when something
goes wrong and the brain is perturbed. Yet the sense of body
integrity is rather easily duped...And while it may be tempting
to invoke the supernatural when this body sense goes awry,
he said the true explanation is a very natural one, the brain’s
attempt to make sense of conflicting information."
This is the kind of research finding that makes people uncomfortable,
not to mention angry. The Bush Administration, for example,
takes a dim view of publically-funded science that delivers
unsettling threats to the idea of a soul. But I join the estimable
Dr Blackmore in asking: Is it terrible news to discover that
alien abductions and visitations by the
Archangel Gabriel are memeplexes accruing around terrified
epileptics trying to make sense of electrical disturbances
in their angular gyri? I think the natural world is a lot
more exciting and mysterious than the various versions of
the supernatural one. The natural world contains people having
seizures, and many other people with vivid imaginations passing
the stories around afterwards, building up the memeplex with
each slightly exaggerated retelling.
What about all those people who have near-death experiences,
where they've coded out on the operating table, and they report
floating above the room, looking down at their body, before
moving toward a bright light? Carl Sagan has a great hypothesis
for this one, from (I think) Cosmos:
Every human being, without exception, has already shared
an experience like those of travelers who return from the
land of death; the sensation of flight; the emergence from
darkness into light; an experience in which, at least perceived,
bathed in radiance and glory. There is one common experience
that matches this description. It's called birth.
There are a lot of forces and events in the world that we
don't know about, and we have a natural tendency to fill in
the blanks with wishful thinking and anthropomorphic imagery.
People are extremely emotionally attached to their particular
vision of the supernatural, and well they should be. Your
self is in large part built on your internal hypotheses of
the world and its many complexities. Those hypotheses are
built on abstractions of abstractions of memories of your
body state, so it's natural to anthropomorphize every phenomenon
you encounter until you have a good reason not to. You develop
emotional attachments to your angels or river gods or ancestor
spirits, attachments that are as real as the ones you have
to your favorite movie characters as they exist in your head.
Belief in the afterlife, with the attendant idea of a disembodied
soul, is certainly an attractive proposition to anyone staring
death in the face, and ultimately, that includes all of us.
I'm in the increasingly common position of having been raised
in a jagged cacophany of differing supernatural worldviews:
Dad's parents were severely Protestant; Mom's were semi-skeptical
Jewish; my various parents and stepparents have been unanimous
in their scientists' atheism; and between my liberal education
and life in NYC, I've had at least a glance at every major
world religion. If I suffered some severe crisis and wanted
to turn to a spiritual leader, I wouldn't have the faintest
idea where to turn. It puts me in this 'anthropologist from
Mars' situation with religious people, almost always observing
from the outside. I
came to the Darwinian scientist/skeptic position not out of
any ill will towards Jesus or Moses or anyone; it's just that
the Darwin story makes much stronger intuitive and emotional
sense to me than the Bible etc. When I read the Old Testament,
it makes my head hurt, because it's full of factual-sounding
assertions that I know couldn't possibly be true, like Noah
living to be nine hundred years old. When I read a book by
Richard
Dawkins, it generally agrees with my lived experience
and observations, trips to the Museum of Natural History,
etc.
Can I really be so confident as to assert that there are
absolutely, positively no UFOs or angels? I can. It looks
to me vastly more likely that we invented them to fill a particular
gap in our knowledge. The mind is a vast continent of unfathomable
complexity, with consciousness hugging the coasts, doing its
best to make sense of everything going on in there, and I'd
expect the interior to be producing imaginative constructs
at least as crazy as angels and UFOs. I'd be disappointed
if it didn't. The UFO or angel hypothesis is suspect because
it's a wish-fulfillment story that people are eager to believe,
and even more eager to report to others, perhaps adding romantic
flourishes along the way. Hollywood is only too happy to assist
with imagery if it'll bring people into the theaters.
To me, coming to regard UFOs and angels as imaginative constructs
doesn't mean we have to abandon them as ideas. Instead, it's
a reason to show the epileptic
seizure the respect it's due, as the inspiration for UFOs
and angels and a great many other flowerings of the human
imagination besides. Knowing more about the brain
as a natural system designed without foresight by natural
selection is going to help us use it as a better and more
accurate imaginative tool down the road. I, for one, am looking
forward to the groovy out-of-body video games Nintendo will
be making ten years from now.
© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase
| back to top