New Scientist explain away the out-of-body experience too easily

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publicerad 14 oktober 2009
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A science writer for New Scientist October 13, 2009 reports on the latest research on claimed malfunctioning brains causing out-of-body experiences but fails to explain all related phenomena by simply not mentioning them. We have seen the same pattern in earlier history of debunkery.

Text: Torbjörn Sassersson 14 oct, 2009

The New Scientist article: ”Out of your head: Leaving the body behind” is yet another attempt to explain away what other researchers and explorers regard as evidence of the mobile mind-body. The article also try to connect the OBE experience with different kinds of brain malfunctions. This is standard procedure within the skeptic mainstream  and when mainstream science reporters follow the lead of maintream debunkery.

Ten years ago the OBE was explained as lack of oxygen in the brain. Now it’s ”temporoparietal junction” failure, epilepsy, migraine or sleep paralysis. Yet science has already profoundly established that the mind is mobile and that it is a natural property. The western scientists just don’t understand how it can happen.

The skill to move the mind/consciousness has since the 1970:th been applicated by governments, NASA, intelligence communities etcetera – for different reasons – to retrieve information using a technique called remote viewing. To simplify; the OBE state is a modus operandi used within remote viewing in order to gain information otherwise not accessible with the ordinary physical senses.

”Brugger and others (researchers) have come a long way towards understanding out-of-body experiences. They have narrowed down the cause to malfunctions in a specific brain area and are now working out how these lead to the almost supernatural experience of leaving your own body and observing it from afar.”
/ New Scientist, 2009-10-13

However parallell research efforts and its extraordinary consequenses is now becoming known in the mainstream world while the old fashioned materialistic brain-body-world paradigm is still grasped by certain science magazines.

One good example of resistance to change is the Wright brother’s attempts to prove to the science world they could fly machines in the air. They were not believed for many years until the president of the US came along.

”The Wright brothers repeatedly did public demonstrations, obtained affidavits from local witnesses, and took photos of themselves in the air. But throughout it all critics like most US scientists, the US military, and even Scientific American insisted the Wrights must be perpetrating a hoax.

Finally, in 1908, President Roosevelt called for a public trial of the invention. It was only then that Wright brothers convinced the skeptics, and the rest of the world learned of the advent of modern aviation.”

When people have OBE sometimes the travelling mind-body appears as a ghostly figure observed by other people perfectly awake and sane. In other cases it has been established that the OBE person actually can cause effects in the physical reality, such as moving objects or influencing electronic equipment besides causing the appearance of an eerie figure.

The New Scientist article does not explain these phenomena by simply not mentioning them at all. So where is the science in that?

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