The Physiology of Faith by N. Fakhr - HTML preview

Out-of-Body Experiences

In an out-of-body experience, a person has perceptions that convince them that they have actually left their body. In other words, their interpretation of those perceptions leads them to the conclusion that they know they truly existed outside their body.

We mentioned that some of the individuals whose right temporal lobe of the limbic system was stimulated by Michael Persinger’s Koren helmet claimed to have experienced such a perception. Other studies have also been conducted regarding this phenomenon.

Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist from EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), observed that during the treatment of a patient’s epilepsy, stimulation of the TPJ³ region by electrodes placed on the patient’s head caused the patient to experience an out-of-body experience. The patient felt as though he was outside his body and observing his own body sitting on a chair, as well as other people in the room.

He studied six patients and found that in four patients with complex partial seizures, epileptic episodes caused out-of-body experiences. In complex partial seizures, a person experiences confusion and disorientation and, for several minutes, loses the ability to respond to questions or determine direction and understand their own position.

One of the patients was the same person who experienced an out-of-body experience through electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex, as described earlier. Another patient probably experienced an out-of-body experience as a result of a migraine attack and reduced oxygen supply to a specific area of the brain.

Except for the patient who experienced the out-of-body experience through electrical stimulation, the others had a partial reduction in consciousness during their epileptic or migraine attacks and during their out-of-body experiences.

A patient’s drawing of an out-of-body experience in Blanke’s study

The TPJ region can determine the position of our body by integrating information from the sense of touch, vision, hearing (the vestibular nerve or balance system), and information received from “the position of joints” and “the direction of joint movement”.

Blanke’s studies of his patients’ brain images and functions, along with experiments conducted on volunteers, convinced him that disruption in the functioning of the TPJ region, or disruption in the transmission of information from the mentioned senses to the brain, can produce an out-of-body experience to varying degrees. [1]

In any case, during this experience, a person reaches a state of knowledge and certainty that they are located outside their body; however, this knowledge does not correspond to reality. The images they perceive are constructed by the activity of their own brain.