If you read my newsletter regularly, you’ll know that I hold the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm (Sweden) in very high regard. That’s not to say they are right about everything, but that I trust their honesty—which is more than can be said of any American (or other) university.
I was recently there (July 2015) and here is a picture Viv took of me with very pretty nurse Maja Pavek!
Now researcher Arvid Guterstam, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska and lead author of a new study on out-of-body consciousness has stuck his neck out… and I don’t agree at all with his “interpretations” of this mind and body connection. Observations are one thing but opinions remain only opinions.
He thinks his story is “fact” because, as everybody knows, we are only a brain. There is no such thing as soul, or spirit, or non-material being.
Hooey, Arvid! Where is your data supporting this absurd and unfounded claim?
There is no proof of any kind that soul or self is a product of material events, as in brain function. The only thing that you can say is that interfering with brain pathways can alter our experience of the world. But the fact that switching off a television or changing channel alters our experience of a particular program does NOT mean that all television video films are located inside your TV set!
Duh!
Seeing Yourself From Outside Yourself – A Mind and Body Connection
The phenomenon being studied in this new research is that of seeing another version of yourself…. A doppelganger… yourself from outside yourself. It’s known as an autoscopic hallucination. Notice the term hallucination is right there in the label, as if it could not possibly be really that way.
Researchers at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, have previously studied out of body experiences. Lukas Heydrich and Olaf Blanke of the institute scanned the brains of people who said they have reported seeing a doppelganger, known as heautoscopic hallucinations. They found that these patients typically had damage to the left posterior insula, which integrates visual, sensory, motor and auditory signals.
A doppelganger may be created when abnormalities arise in the integration and the brain has to work out which ‘body’ to associate with the self.
I say nonsense to such dogmas. There are hundreds of thousands, to millions, of cases of people sensing and being outside their bodies. Seeing yourself lying there on the bed, while you are up by the ceiling, can seem like a doppelganger effect.
But it’s easy to understand this mind and body connection, when you realize you are NOT your body or brain. The real YOU is doing the looking and the body on the bed is NOT “another You”.
Elsewhere I have reported at length on people with no discernable brain, who yet behave normally and are no worse for their condition (hydrocephalus). It’s just a rigid and stupid fixed opinion to say we are a function of our brains. The brain is in the mind, not the mind in the brain!
They dress it up with great sounding language and cute descriptions that make it seem like they have run rings round the soul-friendly folks. But they have not.
Consider this (their caps, not mine):
BRAIN SCANS REVEAL WHAT HAPPENS DURING AN OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE: EVENT CAUSES ‘PLACE CELLS’ TO TRIGGER BUILT-IN GPS.
Researchers claim to have devised a devious experiment to trick volunteers into thinking they had left their own body while undergoing brain scans.
They found that specific areas of the brain lit up with activity according to where in the room a person thought they were.
MRI scans revealed that specific areas of the brain lit up (pictured) according to where in the room participants believed they were during an ‘out-of-body experience’. Special neurons known as place cells were involved and research in rats has shown these cells work like the brain’s GPS.
It suggests that abnormal activity in these areas, perhaps under the influence of drugs or when deprived of oxygen, could be responsible for creating out-of-body experiences.
The researchers used video headsets that gave participants a view of the room they were in from another persons perspective – in effect ‘teleporting’ them out of their body to another location.
The illusion made the volunteers in the scanner believe they were actually in a stranger’s body on the other side of the room, looking back at their own body in the MRI machine.
The researchers, whose work is published in the journal Current Biology, asked 15 healthy volunteers to wear head-mounted displays that showed them lying in the MRI scanner from another part of the room, from the perspective of a stranger lying down.
The volunteers could see a pair of legs and feet as if they were lying on their back, but could also see their own legs and feet sticking out of the scanner.
By touching the volunteer’s body with an object at the same time as identical touches were performed on the stranger’s body they were viewing from in the headset, the researchers were able to cement the illusion.
Arvid Guterstam, lead author of the study, said:
‘Our results are important because they represent the first characterization of the brain areas that are involved in shaping the perceptual experience of the bodily self in space.’
Actually Arvid, you need to get out more! Meet more real people! Take Maja for a coffee!
Especially, you need to read my book Medicine Beyond, because in it I describe the phenomenon of adopting an avatar. Humans can easily be persuaded that they are not their body but can become other objects, avatars, or even adopt another person’s body.
THIS IS ACTUALLY PROOF THAT HUMANS ARE NOT THEIR BODY. You’ve disproved your beliefs and validated mine, which are far superior in every way. You didn’t “trick” anybody with perceptions, you merely got them to demonstrate that a non-material spiritual being is located wherever it decides to be located and certainly not stuck inside a skull!
Brain scans taken while this translocation was happening revealed that the activity patterns in the temporal and parietal lobes matched this misplaced sense of self-location. Right… But that does not in any sense prove that the active cells caused the belief of relocation.
C’mon! That’s like saying a TV showing the CNN channel actually causes the CNN channel!
For more amazing insights into a whole new model of reality—one that’s different to this childish science, from the top down—you need to read my book, Medicine Beyond. Great chunks of it come from beyond normal time and space and from the world of non-material being. Because that’s where the mind, soul or being really is!
Reference:
Current Biology, Volume 25, Issue 11, p1416–1425, 1 June 2015