The brain seems to have a model of the body stored somewhere, somehow. Meditators sometimes experience this as seeing the body with eyes closed during meditation, which is interesting because the image of the body never includes the head, only the way the body looks like from the head during waking. It would seem the information for this internal image comes from the visual system, which has that perspective on how the body looks. Out of body experiences have been produced using laboratory methods, so it certainly seems possible that a woo factor need not be involved.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070823141057.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070823141057.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110711081249.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110711081249.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130922205931.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130922205931.htm A spiritual path is just a special sort of illusion, and people who hold to such views do tend to be threatened when those illusions are questioned, or seem to be undermined by science which has been eroding spiritual and religious beliefs for centuries. As for authfriend's beliefs in this regard, as least for the point of argument she sometimes seems to hold some esoteric ideas, but unless she specifically states just what she believes in this regard, I am not sure at all what she believes. Her highly argumentative stance here might just be a product of her personality tendencies, and have less to do with what she thinks is true. After all, if you post something here, it is a near certainly that she will find something wrong with it. It is not an absolute certainty because on rare occasions she has actually agreed with something you have said. I have tendencies too, for example, I will prefer a non-woo explanation over a woo explanation because it is more logically connected to well established physics, chemistry, or biology for which there is wide agreement for many basic functionalities of the world observed in these disciplines. Woo depends a lot on personal, internal, messy, incoherent world views. The human mind does not seem to be naturally adept at creating coherent models of its experience but rather formulates these as the result of evolutionary forces that worked to ensure survival. Now that it is far less likely that an individual will die as a result of being eaten or lack of shelter etc. - the world views that were crazy in the far past were exterminated speedily when they did not work - but now they proliferate at an amazing pace and spread verbally through a society or group. They still bring death. The killing of doctors who perform abortions and 9/11 represent world models that spread from individual minds to a larger group. One only need to look at opposing political parties of any nation to see untested world views in practice. FLL itself shows little conformity between the world views of individuals of our strange little population here. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote: I think what she's trying to say is that the scientists left out The Woo Factor. Cultists always need The Woo Factor. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend wrote: > > This seems like it may explain out-of-my-body-into-somebody-else's-body experiences, but not just plain old out-of-body experiences. > > ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, > no_re...@yahoogroups.com mailto:no_re...@yahoogroups.com wrote: > > http://www.livescience.com/41128-out-of-body-experiences-explained.html http://www.livescience.com/41128-out-of-body-experiences-explained.html >
