Disturbed Self-Processing Does Not Disprove Out-Of-Body Experiences (OBEs)
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Previous related article: Materialism is Contradicted by Medically Verifiable Statements from Out-of-Body Experiences — The Common Caveat
Previous related article: Physicalism is Unsupported by Similarities Between Drugs and Near-Death Experiences — The Common Caveat
“So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.”
This article discusses a 2005 report called, “The Out-of-Body Experience: Disturbed Self-Processing at the Temporo-Parietal Junction”. It was written by Olaf Blanke and Shahar Arzy, two researchers who have made substantial contributions to the field of neuroscience.
They assembled reliable data about out-of-body experiences (OBEs), which involves the feeling of separation from the physical body and viewing oneself from outside the body. Their data seems to strongly support the premise that out-of-body experiences (OBEs) can be intentionally induced in patients. However, their ending conclusion that OBEs are illusory is questionable, because it does not cleanly follow from the available data/evidence. This seems to be a commonplace non-sequitur fallacy in conversations about this topic, and it deserves closer examination.
Later, I will discuss how that non-sequitur fallacy is exposed by the work of Janice Miner Holden, who is a “near-death experience & transpersonal pioneer researcher” with “over 50 refereed journal publications and over 100 national and international presentations.”
Blanke and Arzy’s work
The two authors remark that OBEs challenge our ordinary intuitions about having a self and body that are spatially unified into a single entity holding the experience. The temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is responsible for coherence in self-perception and body awareness. If it becomes unsettled in its process of coherently combining information from various sensory modalities (vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, etc.), it cannot properly represent the body’s position in space. This will also affect a person phenomenologically and cognitively, thus generating what they call “illusory reduplication, illusory self-location, illusory perspective, and illusory agency that are experienced as an OBE.”
However, the word 'illusion' seems to be dubious in explaining the basis of OBEs. Surely, anecdotes about OBEs include features that disagree with the physicalist/materialist conclusions. But the word ‘illusion’ (i.e., an interpretation of sensory signals that disagrees with actual reality) cannot describe what is actually happening here if Janice Miner Holden is correct in her professional work analyzing some cases in which people with OBEs had veridical (accurate) perceptions of what was happening during their experience.
I will discuss Janice Miner Holden’s work later…
For now, I need to clarify some things…
I want to summarize disembodiment and autoscopy (i.e., seeing one’s body from an elevated perspective) based on a quote from Harvey J. Irwin’s book Flight of Mind:
“I was in bed and about to fall asleep when I had the distinct impression that ‘I’ was at the ceiling level looking down at my body in the bed. I was very startled and frightened; immediately [afterward] I felt that, I was consciously back in the bed again.”
It seems reasonable to say that OBEs consistently occur across cultures, as suggested by a number of professionals. Blanke cites many professionals in the field of OBE research who have further suggested that atypical neural activity must be the cause for these OBEs as altered representations of self.
Between the late 1950’s and early 2000’s, various professionals have reported cases in which OBE patients with brain damage involved both the right and left hemispheres of the brain and all four lobes (frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital). Epileptic seizures and migraine headaches have been included in the etiology. Two OBEs were attributed to a dysembryoplastic neuroepithelial tumor (DNET) which is infrequent and non-cancerous in people but stemming from the formation of anomalous neural tissue. Another OBE was attributed to focal electrical stimulation (i.e., currents applied for research and therapeutic purposes).
If there is any temptation to hastily conclude that OBEs can be causally boiled down to brain damage, you should consider the fact that Olaf Blanke and other professionals admit that OBEs are reported among healthy people along with neurological patients.
How can the cause for an issue in healthy people be the same cause for the same issue in unhealthy people?
Olaf Blanke and others have found all OBE patients to have episodic disturbances in the vestibular system which is responsible for maintaining balance. It manifests as sudden vertigo, dizziness, and unsteadiness. Günther Grüsser and Michel Landis (1991) suggested this as a possible cause.
Blanke mentions perception of gravity and the otolithic organs in the inner ear that detect linear acceleration and head tilt. These things are likely relevant to the feelings of being elevated or inverted in the air, beyond the immediate physical self. Blanke writes that such experiences can occur in healthy people who journey to outer space or participate in the microgravity phase of parabolic flights, which is a zero-gravity environment generated by high-angle maneuvers that involve free-falling and the appearance of weightlessness. Such a thing may explain the patient’s feeling of being inverted in extra-personal space.
I will get to the relevance of Holden’s work in a minute. Just hold your horses.
It seems that Blanke is hoping that OBEs will have a mechanism(s) similar to what can be found in paroxysmal visual body-illusions (i.e., distorted perception of limb movements and transformations) and supernumerary phantom limbs that involve sensory input from non-existent limbs. This is supported by the fact that electrical stimulation to the right TPJ produced the OBEs and illusions of transformed body parts. It is worth noting that the OBE patients of Blanke’s and others were lying down, telling me that they intended safety for their human participants.
Blanke seeks a plausible phenomenological link between OBEs and visual body-part illusions. He settles with the suggestion that OBEs result from proprioceptive, tactile, and visual information failing to combine into a central representation of one’s own body. Furthermore, the report suggest that OBEs involve sudden, transient disturbances occurring at the boundary between the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain.
Accurate perceptions from people with OBEs
If OBEs are essentially illusory, according to the definition of that term we should be unable to find veridical NDE perceptions.
On page 186 of The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, Janice Miner Holden provides a definition: “Veridical NDE perception refers to any perception—visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and so on—that a person reports having experienced during one’s NDE and that is later corroborated as having corresponded to material consensus reality.”
To exemplify this, Holden mentions a story I have heard repeatedly: a girl saw her stepfather while she was unconscious. She saw him grabbing a candy bar from a vending machine in spite of himself being a nutrition enthusiast. She later told her mother, after becoming conscious again, and the mother was able to corroborate that what her daughter saw was true. These are called veridical NDE perceptions, because they were accurately achieved without sensory organs and the principles of logic.
Holden also discusses the apparently non-physical veridical NDE perception (AVP). Its definition is difficult to distinguish from veridical NDE perceptions. However, AVPs seem to really emphasize that a patient’s reported knowledge of specific events and objects should be impossible due to the patient’s physical condition and position at the time. An example of an AVP, according to Holden, is when an NDEr is unexpectedly faced with a loved one who he/she thought was alive, but in fact had passed away around the time of his/her NDE, and the NDEr does not learn about that loved one’s passing until after the NDE.
In response to AVP critic, Keith Augustine, who argues that OBE anecdotes are hallucinatory, Holden gathered narratives published prior to 1975, the beginning year of the widespread recognition of this paranormal phenomenon. She also gathered narratives published between 1975 and 2006 with a heavy focus on “scholarly periodical literature” detailing in-depth analyses of NDEs. She included case studies but excluded anything not peer-reviewed and not giving NDEs a systematic handling. This means that she removed all post-1975 fluff intended for the general public instead of specialists.
On page 193 & 196 of The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, she says:
“I found a total of 107 such cases gleaned from 39 publications by 37 different authors or author teams. Then I analyzed each anecdote for various factors. Categorizing anecdotes, I found 89 material, 14 transmaterial, and 4 that included perception of both aspects. Anecdotes in the material category included a variety of corroborated details of NDErs' rescues, resuscitations, and other events during their NDEs, including NDErs facilitating the recovery of lost objects. Anecdotes in the transmaterial category consisted primarily of the experiencer encountering someone in the NDE whom they did not know at the time was deceased; it also more rarely included cases of acquiring other information, such as the location of secretly hidden documents, and of spontaneous healing.”
She separated the anecdotes into one category as those corroborated by only the NDEr and another category as those corroborated by human witnesses to the event, whether they be practitioners during the event or medical records. The anecdotes were further classified according to being totally accurate, partly accurate-inaccurate, and mostly or totally inaccurate.
Holden provides a table outlining her data (that I do not want to visually reproduce here, to avoid possible copyright infringement). Of the 107 cases she found, complete accuracy was found among 13 cases in which the NDEr alone reports on what they witnessed during their rescue, resuscitation, and assistance of reclaiming lost objects. None from that category were found to be partly accurate-inaccurate. In the category of human witnesses “per report of the experiencer”, complete accuracy was found in 38 cases while some inaccuracy was found in only 2 cases. In the category of “objective sources” which could include medical records, complete accuracy was found among 35 cases, some accuracy-inaccuracy was found among 4 cases, and only 1 case was found totally inaccurate.
For the anecdotes of the trans-material category, that include seeing a deceased loved one not known to have passed prior to their NDE, those of the “experiencer only” category involved 3 completely accurate cases and only 1 that was partly accurate-inaccurate. 7 cases with other human witnesses were found to be completely accurate and none that had any inaccuracies, while only 1 case was completely inaccurate and 6 were completely accurate in the category of “objective sources.”
Therefore, Holden writes:
“To Augustine’s credit, I found only one case involving an apparent error that he had not included in his review. Nevertheless, cases involving AVP clearly outnumbered substantially those involving erroneous perception. In particular, whereas 8 percent of material and 11 percent of transmaterial cases involved even some error, 38 percent of material and 33 percent of transmaterial cases involved complete accuracy of perception that the authors corroborated through objective means.”
It is understandable for NDE critics to argue that anecdotes are flawed sources for supporting the premise that consciousness can operate apart from the brain. Since the brain can still have life-sustaining functions in a lot of cases not involving cardiac arrest, those patients could have had the corporeal means for building perceptions of what was happening and maybe embellish their memories. Skeptics may rightfully cite the file drawer effect, arguing that NDEs with inaccuracies deserve to be labeled as hallucinatory and locked away as non-evidence for consciousness apart from the brain and a possible afterlife.
However, the mountain of cases collected throughout the past 150 years amounts to something significant that behooves us not to simply dismiss these cases as mere hallucinations. If conscious perception indisputably needs a body to communicate accuracies that satisfy the physicalist and materialist worldview, no disembodied self should be able to report even a modicum of accuracy while unconscious, let alone be able to report accuracies that outnumber the inaccuracies.
“So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.”
The author of this blog post is Matthew Sabatine, who was born in the United States and raised as a Christian but left the faith in his early twenties. He returned to the faith midway through 2022. Matthew has some experience in the mental health field as a direct support professional, caring for people with intellectual and development disabilities and people who were in long-term residency/rehabilitation programs. Though Matthew has no formal undergraduate or graduate degree, he has experience co-facilitating therapy groups under the supervision of licensed counselors. Matthew currently works in sales/marketing by day and blogs on his free time at night.
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