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Friday, August 24, 2007
Why science is cool
Every once in a while a story comes along that really makes you sit back and think "why am I not in that line of work?" This time it involves poking people with a stick in the name of science. From the New York Times:
Studies Report Inducing Out-of-Body Experience
Using virtual-reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — in ordinary, healthy people, according to studies being published today in the journal Science.
When people gazed at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and were prodded in just the right way with the stick, they felt as if they had left their bodies.
The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said one expert on body and mind, Dr. Matthew M. Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University.
Full story here. This research has all sorts of implications for how we understand religious experiences (re: Buddhist meditation, visions of angels, etc.), the classic out-of-body experience during medical procedures, and a host of other mysterious phenomena.
Posted by Will at August 24, 2007 01:54 AM in General Science