Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [148]
2 In one of the early studies, researchers claim that journals are filled with descriptions of out-of-body experiences that turn out to be accurate. In one study, a researcher analyzed 288 cases in which patients reported events that they could not have seen or heard with their physical senses. More compelling, in ninety-nine of those cases, the patients reported the event before it was verified. In other words, the experiencers could not have simply heard about it from someone else. See H. Hart, “ESP Projection: Spontaneous Cases and the Experimental Method,” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 48 (1954): 121-46.
3 James said this in his Presidential Address to the (British) Society for Psychical Research on January 31, 1897; the address was published in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 12 (1897): 5. My thanks to Bruce Greyson at the University of Virginia for locating this citation for me.
4 The surgery was reconstructed practically to the minute by Michael Sabom, who obtained Pam’s records and wrote it up in Light and Death. I am grateful that he also spent considerable time with me in an interview, walking me through the process.
5 John 20:22. Then, fifty days later, when those same men were huddled together, seeking escape from the Romans, “suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. . . . All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” Acts 2:2-4.
6 G. M. Woerlee, Mortal Minds: The Biology of Near-Death Experiences (New York: Prometheus, 2005).
7 This theory dates back to the 1950s, with the pioneering work of neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield. Before he conducted neurosurgery on an epileptic patient, Penfield routinely stimulated parts of the brain to figure out which parts to cut out and which to leave alone. His patients, who were awake (because the brain does not feel pain), could describe the sensations they were feeling, and where. In this way, he produced out-of-body-like phenomena. More recently, neurologist Orrin Devinsky and his colleagues investigated whether autoscopic experiences—body displacement similar to out-of-body experiences—occur when people suffer epileptic seizures. They studied ten of their own epileptic patients and thirty-three others who reported floating out of their bodies. Their conclusions: “Autoscopic seizures may be more common than is recognized; we found a 6.3% incidence in the patients we interviewed. The temporal lobe was involved in 18 (86%) of the 21 patients in whom the seizure focus could be identified.” O. Devinsky et al., “Autoscopic Phenomena with Seizures,” Archives of Neurology 46 (1989): 1080-88.
8 Or consider the case of a forty-three-year-old Swiss woman who came into the University Hospital in Geneva for a neurological evaluation. She had suffered for more than a decade from seizures that originated, it turned out, in the right temporal lobe. Neurologist Olaf Blanke opened her head, began stimulating parts of her brain, and suddenly, the woman felt herself leave her body. At first she reported that she was “sinking into the bed” or “falling from a great height.” But when Blanke raised the voltage, he produced an out-of-body experience: “I see myself lying in bed from above,” she said, “but I only see my legs and lower trunk.” Upping the voltage gave her the sensation of floating about six feet above the bed, but the next turn of the dial was less fun: “She reported that her legs appeared to be moving quickly towards her face, and took evasive action.” I would, too, if my neurologist sicced my legs on me. Olaf Blanke et al., “Stimulating Illusory Own-Body Perceptions,” Nature 419 (2002): 269-70. From this and from a later study involving five other people, Blanke theorized that a certain spot in the brain—where the temporal lobe and parietal lobe meet—was command central for out-of-body experiences. Scientists believe