The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [82]
Sound familiar? These are also the characteristics of a near-death experience (NDE), first popularized in 1975 by Raymond Moody in his book Life After Life, and now familiar to everyone by the unique set of signs that include: (1) a floating or flying feeling in which you can look down and see your body, commonly called an out-of-body experience (OBE); (2) passing through a tunnel, hallway, or spiral chamber, sometimes with a bright light at the end of it; and (3) perhaps seeing loved ones who have already passed away, and/or a Godlike image or divine figure.23 Whinnery was able to induce the first two of these three more than a thousand times in sixteen years of study in the controlled conditions of the centrifuge, even videotaping the pilots when they passed out and noting that this is when they had the experience, leaving no doubt as to the cause: hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation to the cortex.24
Under high g-forces, the blood drains out of the head and pools toward the center of the torso, rendering these pilots into a gray-out phase followed by a blackout state, all within a matter of fifteen to thirty seconds. When G-LOC was induced in a gradual fashion by accelerating the centrifuge in a systematic manner, the subjects first experienced tunnel vision, then blindness, then blackout, which is likely caused by the loss of oxygen first to the retina then to the visual cortex (producing tunnel vision as the neurons shut down from the outside to the inside), leading to total blackout when the majority of the cortex powers down.25 Dr. David Comings, a medical doctor and neuroscientist specializing in altered states of consciousness, notes, “The feelings of serenity and peace are likely to have been produced by the increased release of various neurotransmitters such as endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine,” and that the “NDE proves that when the brain is deprived of oxygen for prolonged periods of time, immediately prior to brain damage a range of physiological events occur that characterize NDE.”26
Even more directly supportive of my thesis that all such disembodied mental phenomena are the result of brain activity may be found in a 2002 study published in Nature, in which Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke and his colleagues reported that they could willfully produce out-of-body experiences through electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus in the temporal lobe of a forty-three-year-old woman suffering from severe epileptic seizures.
With initial mild electrical stimulations of this area of the brain the patient reported “sinking into the bed” or “falling from a height.” More intense stimulation led her to “see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk.” Another stimulation induced “an instantaneous feeling of ‘lightness’ and ‘floating’ about two meters above the bed, close to the ceiling.” The scientists discovered that they could even control the height above the bed that this woman reported by the level of electricity delivered to the temporal lobe. They then asked the patient to stare at her outstretched legs while they stimulated her brain. She reported that she saw her legs “becoming shorter.” When they had her bend her legs prior to electrical stimulation, “she reported that her legs appeared to be moving quickly towards her face, and took evasive action.” The same thing happened with her arms when the experiment was duplicated.
Blanke’s team concluded: “These observations indicate that OBEs and complex somatosensory illusions can be artificially induced by electrical stimulation of the cortex. The association of these phenomena and their anatomical selectivity suggest that they have a common origin in body-related processing, an idea that is supported by the restriction of these visual experiences to the patient’s own body.” Since the primary function of the brain is to run the body, a displaced body schema may not only help explain the sensed-presence effect, it may generate a sense of the body schema being outside of itself. Blanke and his colleagues conjectured: