Scientists have found out how the soul comes out of its own physical body
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
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Scientists have found out why some people experience hallucinations associated with the abandonment of their physical shell. "Get out of yourself" makes them a special part of the brain.
Hallucinations and dreams in which people experience an exit from their own physical body, it is customary to associate with mental disorders. This phenomenon has been studied little, but it is known that such experiences can be caused by mental trauma, dehydration, and the use of psychedelics. Medical practice shows that these hallucinations happen at different times of life and in completely healthy people.
British scientists decided to understand what is happening in the head of healthy people who are familiar with such experiences. According to psychologists, about one in ten healthy people ever experienced what psychologists call "Out-of-body experience (OBE)." Scientists have established, however, that in the student environment, this figure ranges from 20 to 25%.
"It seems that all of us can be divided by the degree to which the work of our temporal lobe is unstable and unstable, and therefore some people are more susceptible to such experiences," explained the study author Jason Braithwaite of the University of Birmingham. The temporal lobe is part of the cerebral cortex that is responsible for the higher nervous activity of a person. It is responsible for the interpretation of signals coming from the senses and other information coming from the body, and correlates it with the "body map". This allows us to always feel inside our physical shell. If this interpretation is violated, a person may feel temporarily abandoned by his body.
In their study, researchers conducted a survey of 63 students, 17 of whom reported that they have experience traveling "beside themselves." The students' answers to special questions showed that those of them who have OBE experience experience unstable work of the temporal lobes of the brain. One such question was: "Have you ever felt the presence of someone else, even if there were no signs of his presence?" Or: "Have you ever felt that your body, or part of it, is changing its shape?" Students were also asked to identify the various parts of the body depicted on the monitor. Those who sometimes "lose their temper", showed the worst results when performing this task.
According to scientists, distorting the perception of us within ourselves is associated either with the conflict of the brain and information coming from the body, or with disturbances in the temporal lobe. "Your self-perception, then, as you feel yourself in space, does not happen automatically. Your brain must process this information constantly. He constantly takes this information, constantly determines your position in space, but sometimes this interpretation fails, "the scientist explained. The work of scientists is published in the journal Cortex.
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