Synchronized Virtual Reality Heartbeat Triggers Out-of-Body Experiences 183
Zothecula writes "New research demonstrates that triggering an out-of-body experience (OBE) could be as simple as getting a person to watch a video of themselves with their heartbeat projected onto it. According to the study, it's easy to trick the mind into thinking it belongs to an external body and manipulate a person's self-consciousness by externalizing the body's internal rhythms. The findings could lead to new treatments for people with perceptual disorders such as anorexia and could also help dieters too."
Misleading Headline (Score:2, Funny)
That's not an out-of-body experience.
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That's not an out-of-body experience.
That's because Zothecula [google.com] seems to do a lot of contributing for gizmag.
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That's not an out-of-body experience.
True, not in the "classic" sense that you're thinking, but the VR manipulation described in TFA led to people reporting that their entire body as in a different part of the room. That certainly sounds like the same class of effect as the traditional OBE. It may be that the researchers have hit on the underlying mechanism that drives OBEs. Taken together, I don't find the title to be all that misleading.
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Oh, and as for this being an already known phenomenon -- what's really happening* is that your left cortex, which focuses on detail and anchors the "me" in the surge of signals your brain processes, gets overridden by the right cortex, which tends to ignore localities (like your body) and instead focus on piecing together the bigger picture. So if your right cortex takes over driving your consciousness, your body itself is no longer the predominant frame of reference, triggering OBE.
* best theory on what's
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Oh, and as for this being an already known phenomenon -- what's really happening* is that your left cortex, which focuses on detail and anchors the "me" in the surge of signals your brain processes, gets overridden by the right cortex, which tends to ignore localities (like your body) and instead focus on piecing together the bigger picture. So if your right cortex takes over driving your consciousness, your body itself is no longer the predominant frame of reference, triggering OBE.
* best theory on what's really happening anyway -- one that's been posited and tested over the past decade by neuroscientists.
Explanations of that sort are, unfortunately, pseudo-explanations. The key terms are not defined (e.g. "surge", "signal", "overridden", "driving consciousness", etc) because we don't know what they actually stand for. So such explanations are, at best, a placeholder until we figure out what's really going on. Placeholders are fine, but its important to place minimal weight on them and not fall into the trap of believing them to be any sort of real explanation.
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That is unknown claim. We need a _valid_ frame of reference to compare against. It would be _very_ interesting to find out how this simulated one compares to the real thing by people who have had BOTH.
I'm hoping they open their research up to the general public. I've had a few real OBE's and would love to have first-hand experience & knowledge of just how close it is to the real thing.
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Yeah same here I can have them via meditation but it takes about an hour for a 10% chance. This after a few minutes thing sounds interesting. I'm heading over to see what it says..... I sure would like a short cut like that... but real OBE are a lot more than just feeling alittle like your over there... mine are hard to tell from being in body...
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Wow. 10% that high!? That is amazing! I'm _really_ curious to see what works for you. Have you tried:
* Light & Sound Machines?
* Binaural beats ?
* Any of Robert Monroe's Hemi-Sync meditation music?
* Which Lucid Dreaming techniques are you most successful with?
* Is your meditation active or passive?
* Are you familiar with any of Robert Bruce's work?
* Any daily / nightly activities you do (or don't do) that tend to help?
A favorite of mine is William Buhlman's "Adventure Beyond the Body" music.
i.e. http:// [monroeinstitute.org]
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A couple of milligrams of mescaline, or in a pinch, LSD and you're golden (or C# or slightly corrugated).
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What do you mean by "real thing?"
There is nothing that goes out of the body during an OBE. It's just an incorrect positional assumption, which is what this causes.
I think he means... (Score:2)
that the experience is real. Doesn't mean that you are actually out of your body. (There's a similar effect with lucid dreaming -- the experience itself is very real, but it's a product of your brain.)
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It's completely unrelated to oft-reported experience. It's as simple as that.
It's no different than this click-bait article from 2007 [arstechnica.com] or, from your definition, spinning around real fast for a bit.
There is nothing that goes out of the body during an OBE.
That's not an assumption anyone is making here. Just you ... and the bottom 1% of the "skeptical" community to which the article was intended to appeal.
Just for fun: You have no evidence to support your assertion. Your claim is based solely on an unfounded set of metaphysical assumptions. You're the skeptical eq
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I'm not the parent but I agree with your analysis.
Looks like this is just a "shadow" of the real OBE. :-(
The word you are looking for is "pseudo-skeptic" -- someone whose mind is made up even though they have never experienced it. i.e. Randi.
You'll probably enjoy this excellent essay:
* Debunking PseudoSkeptical Arguments of Paranormal Debunkers, specifically section: Why Randi, Shermer and the CSICOPers are not Real Skeptics
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/Page30.htm#RealSkeptics [debunkingskeptics.com]
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> There is nothing that goes out of the body during an OBE.
Incorrect.
> What do you mean by "real thing?"
Unless you have actually had an OBE (or NDE) you don't have a frame of reference to understand the shift in consciousness.
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Oh, I have. Granted it was at a Dead concert and LSD was involved. But I distinctly recall thinking/feeling that I was floating above the crowd. My mind presented me with the POV of that position. It was fun. I'd love to do it again but Jerry's dead and I'm too old to drop again.
But it's just all software running on meatware. Nothing has gone anywhere.
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You don't need drugs to have an OBE; drugs are a crutch and frack up your etheric body.
Drugs are only a last resort to prove to you that you _already_ have the ability. Why aren't you interested in learning how to have them naturally?
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This was the early 80s. Trust me, I've been drug free for a couple of decades now.
And you lost me at "etheric body." What is one of them?
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> And you lost me at "etheric body." What is one of them?
When your Higher Self "shouts" at you "Drugs fracture your Etheric body" I don't question the nature of reality.
I have been unable to personally confirm the Etheric layer it but here is a pic that I generally agree with to help put things into perspective:
http://www.positivehealth.com/img/phfiles/Issue_184_Articles/auriclayers.gif [positivehealth.com]
It definitely needs more study. Who knows maybe you'll be the first to properly document it?
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It definitely needs more study. Who knows maybe you'll be the first to properly document it?
Why don't you and get a million dollars [randi.org]?
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Because Randi's silly challenge is meaningless nonsense?
To clarify my point, I'll offer my own challenge: One Million Dollars to empirically show that it's possible for someone to dream while asleep.
I know that quite a few people claim to dream while they're asleep, but they're clearly either delusional or money-grubbing attention seekers. I mean, if people really could dream, it would be a cinch to win that million dollars, right? I'm not picky. I'll give you every fair advantage. I'll even work with yo
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Drugs are only a last resort to prove to you that you _already_ have the ability. Why aren't you interested in learning how to have them naturally?
Better living through chemistry.
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Jmc23, go easy on him, please.
> One could think of a number of experiments to test this
Agreed.
I can shed some light on this. I've had a number of OBEs naturally occurring from 2003 onwards. In 2008 I decided to do a personal experiment because I couldn't find an answer (from anyone I knew) to an important question (and it not like you can just ask anyone):
Just _how_ close can one get to the proper natural Out-of-Body experience if they use drugs?
After my first and last experiment in this
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Shouldn't necessarily take years either if you have a structured approach. Logically, becoming familiar first with the disconnection of the mental system from the body during the hypnagogic phase of dreaming makes any further work infinitely easier.
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My 'nads are clean.
I wash them. a lot.
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That we know of.
This is the null hypothesis, and it is a reasonable assumption as there is no evidence (that I am aware of) to the contrary, .
However, a true skeptic must always remember:absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absense.
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<body>I'm not here<body/>
- experience -
Videos become illegal.. (Score:5, Interesting)
So, when does this technique get declared illegal, like all drug-based methods of altering mental states (other than alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine)?
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You can't grow your own 3d video goggles, so even if you buy the (not entirely unreasonable) drug war conspiracy theory, big corporations can still make plenty of money on the treatment.
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I
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They're working on tobacco, though you left sucrose off the list.
Re:Videos become illegal.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude made a fair witticism about the government's overwhelming tendency to legislate down things that are not understood in the interests of 'protecting us' from ourselves, especially where drugs aside from the big 3 are concerned. You respond with 'Keep crying, pothead.' which is so short-sighted it hurts. People like you don't even think two steps beyond themselves and keep themselves locked in an ignorant little hole where they already know all the answers that they ever need. You also vote along party lines every time because you are part of the RIGHT 'club' and people in your club are all on the same side (except when you really start looking at policies and political opinions and voting history and all those little pesky details that you don't concern yourself with).
There is a reason that the majority of the nation has agreed that Marijuana has medicinal functions even though the federal government vehemently denies any medicinal use is possible. This is because they don't want to look like fucking morons for filling our prisons full of non-violent marijuana users so that we can all get buttfucked by the tax man to feed and house people who, most of the time, WERE ALREADY DOING THIS THEMSELVES
Announcing The Sims OR (Score:2)
The most realistic Sim experience ever!
And the survival-selection hypothesis would be...? (Score:2, Troll)
I'll go ahead and read this as "consciousness is designed to remain functional with the associated body being arbitrary".
Sounds like direct intentional design of a functional, physically-reassignable (hence "resurrectable") soul to me.
Someone enlighten me on why this, being merely a "trick", would have evolutionary advantage such that all the neurological complexity required to remap perceptions to arbitrary point in space would
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Not every trait or implication of traits that we have is based on some evolutionary advantage. Some of it is simply accidental.
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Not at all. The same 3-dimensional, interactive, perceptually-complete experience is reported under vastly different circumstances of death, affecting the brain in literally random forms of damage. Cancers, car accidents, asphyxiation, you name it.
The odds, again, if you don't like the PC analogy, is the odds of this--this in its complexity, this in its specificity--occurring after killing random sections of the brain with radiation. It's implausible that this in particular, a phenomenon happening to cor
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Why would one expect "a completely random set of sensations and cognitive inhibition"?
Since we all evolved in the same way, the brain's "experiences" right before it's dead would seem to me to be more likely to be *similar*, just like if you or I trip, we instinctively change our center of gravity to regain balance.
Also, don't some of those "different" causes of death really end up being lack of oxygen in the end, thus making it even more likely the experiences would be similar? Even in a car accident, one
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What one would expect during generic "brain failure", is a completely random set of sensations and cognitive inhibition--much like an LSD trip. That isn't what is reported, and quantified in peer-reviewed studies, such as The Lancet's.
What evidence do you have to support this? As long as we're pulling hypotheses out of our butts, I'd assume that a gradual brain shutdown (over minutes, as in massive circulatory collapse for whatever reason) would follow a stereotypical set of pathways that might well involve memory subsystems and proprioceptive issues. The fact that OBE experiences hew to a specific playbook suggests that indeed, it's hardwired and repeatable.
Nothing more, nothing less. No reason to invoke higher deities, higher consci
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No, there is simply no reason to say that because complex physical things tend to be made by complex beings, that the complex beings must themselves be made by likewise complex beings.
In fact, you deny that right now, with regard to human beings.
Aside from that, saying the universe -logically must- be created by a complex being, is something you are saying, and are the only one here saying it.
Let me make my own arguments, rather than you making them up for me, please. Otherwise you are straw-manning me.
I a
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I'll assume that the sentence fragment is an attempt to invoke Occam's Razor.
While you've misapplied it, as is usually the case, it does have the subjective advantage that Occam was theist.
So, I'll clarify. Occam's Razor in no way specifies what is true, or even more likely to be true. It simply indicates that for the purposes of conceptual economy, when -all else is equal-, the simplest explanation should be used. The slightest difference between two models either on the basis of evidence or reason disq
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it's easy to trick the mind into thinking it belongs to an external body
I'll go ahead and read this as "consciousness is designed to remain functional with the associated body being arbitrary".
Sounds like direct intentional design of a functional, physically-reassignable (hence "resurrectable") soul to me.
Someone enlighten me on why this, being merely a "trick", would have evolutionary advantage such that all the neurological complexity required to remap perceptions to arbitrary point in space would naturally "emerge".
Supposing that a soul-like thing exists and it is the seat of consciousness, then the evolutionary advantage is that you'd be lying down unconscious if you didn't have one. It's much too easy to get eaten that way. So evolution went with souls (or whatever we might call them, supposing they exist).
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Your brain also has the ability to imagine future scenarios, even impossible ones. Some people have had dre
Re:And the survival-selection hypothesis would be. (Score:4, Insightful)
More fundamentally, the process of growing up is a constant adjustment for changing anatomy. Not being able to make that adjustment would result in an incredibly clumsy adult.
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More likely, body identity is a useful evolutionary trait while mis-identifying not-self as self is a disadvantage. Much like experiments with genetic algorithms, the problem was solved by drunkard's walk in an off beat (to us) manner curiously specific to the situation at hand.
It just happens that we have found a flaw in the identification of self that can be exploited to create the sensation of floating outside of self. If this came uop often in our lives AND if it created an evolutionary disadvantage (se
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I think you have the question backwards. The "trick" is that billions of cells somehow perceive themselves as a unitary thing in the first place. Just as with vision, identifying optical illusions reveals the limitations of the trick, but subjecting us to conditions that were rare or unimpo
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An explanation is fairly easy: rapid recovery from brain damage and use of redundant signalling pathways during impairment.
Not that I personally ascribe to the camp who considers an idea of a "soul" to be somehow unscientific, for some definitions of the term, but this is quite frameable as an evolutionary advantage. Also note that not all features of an evolved being necessarily have to be advantageous because random crap can persist in a genome for quite some time before a advantageous trait comes along
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A simpler question, if the brain is 100% responsible for all our actions, perceiving and responding to the environment, then why are we sentient? The brain can process the information that it is being chased by a bear, and process that moving the limbs to run and climb a tree is a strategy for survival. What advantage does experiencing any of this situation give? What's the point of sentience? Sentience is 100% redundant. Yet we are sentient. I have no idea why that is.
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Re: And the survival-selection hypothesis would be (Score:2)
You've got it backwards. The evolutionary advantage is that your brain recognizes it's own body's parts. That recognition uses consistent sensory feedback to figure out what's part of you. Then some scientists come along and screw with that feedback.
Soul? Really? That's a bit of a leap, even compared to the other woo being slung all over these comments, no?
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To deal with damaged and missing limbs, damaged and misconfigured perception systems, and misformed bodies.
We aren't hard wired to have fingertips x centimeters away from the spine, etc. Our brains adapt to our physical circumstances. That permits us to 'hack' the system and have the brain perceive lots of different configurations. It will prove very useful in the future for technology enhanced perceptions.
Doesn't prove a 'soul'.
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Not certain your meaning here, but I'm not arguing there are no other ways to induce the phenomenon. I'm asking why the capacity for the phenomenon came to exist in the first place.
You're a few dozen gnomish-underpants class causal steps between group pastimes and the DNA creating brain structure, if that's what you intended to "explain".
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You have a particular interpretation of the phenomenon, understood. You are still not specifying a rationale of how this would come to be, given your premises.
And, "emerge" is not a causal explanation, regardless of how frequently it used to handwave such without being such.
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Easiest way were it designed, yes.
Definitely not likely as an adaptive selected trait where the situation literally never comes up in a biology-only context.
(Slashdot's new allowed-posts-per-time-unit is ludicrous. It is now directly impossible to have a meaningful thread discussion. Since I can't continue, I won't.)
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You assume it is forever lost, that is. In fact information is never destroyed (well, there's a debate regarding black holes...).
I see no reason not to suppose that like you "could" throw a fastball but cannot because your arm is broken, you "could" think with your highest level capacity, but cannot because of your neurons.
I see no real barrier to why the consciousness, running on "new hardware", could not be reconstructed in full. If there is data redundancy, or the equivalent of "metaphysical backups" (
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Your example is quite appropriate regarding human reconstructability of information--it can be thought of as "lost" if we ourselves as a practical matter can't recover it.
I am using it in the stricter sense of the link above:
This is controversial because it violates a commonly assumed tenet of science--that in principle complete information about a physical system at one point in time should determine its state at any other time
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Sounds like a false dichotomy to me. It is both an argument for the soul, and a necessary conclusion for deterministic materialism.
The particular sub-argument regarding the soul this represents is addressing what might be the means for "addressing" deterioration of the physical neurons and the apparent effects on consciousness per se--and the answer is that given complete information, all the data of all the neurons, all the configuration, all the topology, at any point in time (i.e. the complete conscious
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NDE's themselves are an example of that happening, I submit.
Outside of that, since you're doing that cat /dev/random, I'll suggest that if you are on, say, Amazon's EC2 cloud, you do exactly that any time you create a new server instance from a snapshot. On a more mundane level, the equivalent should be able to be done with a couple PC's, a big flash drive, and a hammer.
For further possibilities, I'd suggest we really don't know the specifics in cases such as recovery from amnesia--but to answer in the br
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Freaky Mind Porn (Score:2, Funny)
I'm putting this out there:
Tactile suit that stimulates you in various points, synchronised to the vision of someone else being stimulated in the same way.
Who is that someone? Someone of the opposite gender? A furry animal? Who knows?
Psychologist advised.
Evidence that body-identification is illusion (Score:5, Insightful)
A common misperception, according to what is taught in classical disciplines that involve serious mind training, like raja yoga or taiji, is that we are not our bodies, nor is our mind and consciousness really seated in our heads. After significant self-development, that illusion eventually dissipates.
What we perceive to be our body is that part of reality that appears to be strongly correlated to our minds. Thus it is easy to mistake ourselves to be our bodies, and our minds for our brains.
The problem with much of this research is that the researchers have not developed a detailed understanding of their own mind before trying to experimentally analyse someone else's. This is akin to trying to study an advanced maths paper when you haven't learned maths past high school level: the result is naive researchers whose qualifications and professional position give an illusion of greater research competence than they have.
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Give the west a break, they're relatively new at this. It's fun to watch them name 'discoveries' after themselves and congratulate each other on their awesomeness when they're just rediscovering things from millenia ago.
or not (Score:2)
Give the west a break, they're relatively new at this...
Or perhaps there is an alternate theory like there is no human understandable concept of self at all (similar to Plato's Republic** TMA which apparently nobody studies anymore)... If it requires a "third" person to distinguish between self and non-self, then it is perhaps the concept of self is contradictory, unless the concept of self exists beyond human comprehension...
**It's a relatively new release, but sometimes the OTA update yields a better end-user experience...
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But the real flaw with his reasoning is being puzzled by encountering relativity paradoxes when reasoning about something with a r
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Although I don't have the energy to argue with this in detail, the general idea of there being multiple descriptions of reality and the illusion of self awareness yielding self control (yoga-style) is probably best an analogy for attempting to "root" your own body processes.
Of course just because someone can hack parts of a system, it doesn't mean that person understands the system, perhaps that person is merely just a wet-ware script-kiddie, following someone else's accidental discovery of a few design pro
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You can live your life playing in the darkness of shadows, or dance with the shadows coloured by the memory of reality when you paused to catch your breath.
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Shiva is an aspect of god that humanity is capable of attaining.
AFAIK Parama-Shiva (or the highest or ultimate understanding of god) is considered in many writings to be beyond human capability of understanding.
There are some that believe Vishnu is Shiva, there are some believe in the trinity. I'm not an expert in either of these belief systems, but my orginal assertion stands: humans have hubris about understanding in spades.
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You know, your condescension is not invisible.
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What should I care which path or how far along some one is? All lead back to self.
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There are several yoga practices that involve introducing drugs and/or poison into the system to exercise ones control over both the computer and mechanical systems. Drink some alcohol and practice making yourself sober. The observer is always sober.
Science knows that form follows function. The energetic patterns a system goes through in interacting with reality under the influence of gravity dictates the physical form of the e
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You had me at "Feeling one with your instrument".
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Nah, he was just posting from a projected body.
Teledildonics (Score:3)
There's another application that is being overlooked: Porn videos. Now you can have an "in another body" experience. -_- And to think, we thought we'd have to wait for holodecks....
Out-of-body is not near-death (Score:3)
This news item and the gizmag.com link both confuse the study's method of tricking the body into being confused about where the body is and the near-death experience of being outside the body completely.
get to work, developers (Score:2)
I want an app for that. Please get right on it.
We have bluetooth heart-rate monitors, so it shouldn't be all that hard.
might be bad for other conditions (Score:2)
I'm wondering how this would work for agoraphobia -- the fear of going outside.
Or what if someone with stage fright watched himself giving a speech to a crowd of people? Harder or easier? -shudders-
Does anyone else already have 3rd person nightmares involving xenomorphs?
Dieters? (Score:2)
also help dieters too
Get read for the "30lbs in 30 days... Don't just be out of your body... transform your body!"
What happens if they skip the body? (Score:2)
What if they don't bother with the video of the person's back, and just flash the light in sync with the previously recorded heartbeats?
It's not like flashing light by itself can't affect someone's brain.
Besides, how familiar is anyone with what their own back looks like that it matters that the video is of them?
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I find a lot of liquor helps.
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Just match your breathing and heart rate to the doctor, you will then be giving the prostate exam!
..um, not sure that's any better..
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Can't people think for themselves anymore?
Just match your breathing and heart rate to the doctor, you will then be giving the prostate exam!
..um, not sure that's any better..
also may take a lot longer...
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but the machine may lead to religious experimenting with grave consequences.
Suppose this VR apparatus is extensively tested, and some of the test subjects having out-of-body experiences see things that would be impossible to see from the (real) body's location. What then?
Like, the subject is lying down in the left side of the room, there is a divider in the middle, and through the VR goggles he is tricked into thinking his body is in the right side of the room. Now place an object in the right side of the r
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Then we would have a repeatable phenomenon which we could investigate (assuming we can exclude plain fraud). However I'm willing to bet that this won't happen.
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If you could do that there is a nice man that will give you one million dollars.
I personally think the more likely outcome is that he gets to keep his money.
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Feel free to demonstrate this under repeatable rigorous conditions and the Randi foundation will give you a million bucks.
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No fair. Share your drugs or don't post stuff like that.
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I advise against it if you have a comfortable life as a 'member' of 'society'.
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People who can't decompress what I say wouldn't even understand it.
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Currently all of science and medicine consider OOB and religious experiences to be hallucinations and that all perception and thought exist in the brain exclusively. If repeatable experiments prove this false, it would open the floodgates.
Just because the person perceive's an OOB experience; doesn't mean their thought ever really left their body.
There may be multiple kinds of OOB experiences, not all the same in nature.
I wouldn't get my hopes up about remote viewing or speaking to the presence or abs
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