Many people, including your correspondent, have wondered whether apparitions and out-of-body experiences might be evidence of a world beyond the grave. Skeptics respond that such experiences are likely to be merely neurological hiccups (which is not necessarily inconsistent with the world-beyond-the-grave hypothesis). Today’s New York Times reports on recent work by neuroscientists showing that such experiences can sometimes be artificially induced by electrical stimulation:
They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no one there. A woman feels herself leaving her body and floating in space, looking down on her corporeal self.
Such experiences are often attributed by those who have them to paranormal forces.
But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body. In another woman, electrical current delivered to the angular gyrus produced an uncanny feeling that someone was behind her, intent on interfering with her actions.
Sandra Blakeslee, Out-of-Body Experience? Your Brain Is To Blame, New York Times, Oct. 3, 2006 (emphasis added). I’d previously read that the anesthetic ketamine can cause similar effects. For example, here’s an excerpt from a first-person report by a man who had an out-of-body experience when he almost died in an apartment fire, then soon afterwards had a similar experience after taking ketamine:
[…] I was overcome with smoke, and clink!
The next thing it was like white light and then everything going very fast. All these sounds and things sounding far off and very close and far off, then whoosh! You’re out of your body and there was all this light. All this sounds really crap, like one of those 1940s Old Testament films … It all happened so quickly. The next thing, it’s very bright, you’re out of your body, flying through the night and there’s light, there’s light. Er, well, it’s pitch black and there’s light – that’s a better way of describing it.
You go into the light and you just feel that everybody who has ever died is there. Not heavenly choirs as such, but there’s certainly a lot of people around you and you get waves of concern. And the next thing was swoosh! And it was back to the everyday world very quickly. When I came back it was so abrupt, and I was fine really – I had a very narrow escape. Your first impression would be that you fly up in the air but that can’t be. I’d have laughed at myself ten years ago for saying this kind of thing.
So I had an out-of-body experience and then I got hauled out of the flat by ambulance guys who put an oxygen mask on my face. […]
[…] I sat in the front room on a big comfy chair and just took this stuff [ketamine]. Within about 5 minutes I was out of my body. I was still numb after what had happened. It was like being outside of myself but still there. I could smell this perfume she used to wear. I could sense her [his partner who died in the fire] all round me. It was like a way out and it was exactly like the out-of-body thing. It was very upsetting and it did shake my atheism, very much so. It made me aware of it not being the end when all this ends.
I tried K again quite a number of times and the same thing happened every time. It was like this pure consciousness. I hadn’t any shape. You could fly and you could actually travel although you are still in the same place. You are in the place where everybody is who has ever died. It’s this big entity. It’s not like an old guy with a beard. It’s this sense of energy that everybody who has ever moved on is there together and it was like she was looking after me. Precisely the same thing happened with the K as happened in the (burning) flat, which to someone not expecting it would be pretty scary. It was exactly the same. [Emphasis added]
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