Out of body experiences

One of the most common reasons cited for religious belief is personal experience.  "God talked to me."  "God answered my prayer."  Another typical one is "I had an out-of-body experience."  New research takes the superstition out of such experiences.


The problem with personal experience is that everything is a personal experience.  Every single experience that you, um, experience, is the result of the behavior of the brain.  Our brains receive information that we perceive through our senses, and translates that into something that we can process.  Every thought, every perception, even consciousness itself, is the product of brain activity.

So when things don't work exactly correctly, it is not surprising that our brains malfunction in consistent, predictable ways.  We don't always understand the details, but "I don't know" has never been a rational justification for "God did it."

At the University of Birmingham's School of Psychology, in the Behavioral Brain Sciences Center, researches have linked out-of-body experiences with instabilities (neuroelectrical anomalies) in the brain's temporal lobes and errors with body representation (your body's sense of itself).  Not surprisingly, it turns out that out-of-body experiences have a neurological basis.