« Plants with senses? | Main | Studying a Navy Relic, Undisturbed for Nearly 60 Years »

The Paranormal is Normal

In New York Times' most recent edition of the Science section there was an article entitled, "Out of Body Experience? Your Brain Is to Blame." The article briefly highlighted present research being done on people who have out of body experiences, concluding that such experiences are not caused by the workings of celestial beings, but by defectiveness or interference with mulitsensory regions on the body. Through their testing with electrical currents, researchers think they have found the reason for out of body experiences.
To comment on the actual article, though, I think parts of it were very unscientific. For example, when one woman was hooked up to the current, she said she felt like there was someone (most like a man) lying beneath her, then lying beside her, then sitting next to her. Researchers used this information, then, to support their assumption that electrodes trigger out of body experiences, but they were only hypothesizing she was having an out of body experience, assuming she was simply unable to recognize herself. It seems to me like there needs to be much more double blind testing on this topic before any evidence can be used to claim a discovery.

Post a comment

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author. The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.