Out of Body Experience

An out-of-body experience is defined as the experience in which a person who is awake sees his or her own body from a location outside the physical body.

OBEs have been reported in clinical conditions where brain function is compromised, such as stroke, epilepsy and drug abuse. They have also been reported in association with traumatic experiences such as car accidents. Around one in ten people claim to have had an OBE at some time in their lives.

OBEs have fascinated mankind for millennia. Their existence has raised fundamental questions about the relationship between human consciousness and the body, and has been much discussed in theology, philosophy and psychology. Although out-of-body experiences have been reported in a number of clinical conditions, the neuro-scientific basis of this phenomenon remains unclear.

Dr Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist working at the Institute of Neurology University College London (UCL) has devised the first experimental method to induce an out-of-body experience in healthy participants. In a paper published in Science, he outlines the unique method by which the illusion is created and the implications of its discovery.

The set-up of the illusion is as follows: the study participant sits in a chair wearing a pair of head-mounted video displays. These have two small screens over each eye, which show a live film recorded by two video cameras placed beside each other two metres behind the participant's head. The image from the left video camera is presented on the left-eye display and the image from the right camera on the right-eye display. The participant sees these as one 'stereoscopic' (3D) image, so they see their own back displayed from the perspective of someone sitting behind them.

The researcher then stands just beside the participant (in their view) and uses two plastic rods to simultaneously touch the participant's actual chest out-of-view and the chest of the illusory body, moving this second rod towards where the illusory chest would be located, just below the camera's view.

The participants confirmed that they had experienced sitting behind their physical body and looking at it from that location. Dr Ehrsson said: "This was a bizarre, fascinating experience for the participants - it felt absolutely real for them and was not scary. Many of them giggled and said 'Wow, this is so weird!'".

"The invention of this illusion is important because it reveals the basic mechanism that produces the feeling of being inside the physical body. This represents a significant advance because the experience of one's own body as the centre of awareness is a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness."

Discovering this means of inducing an OBE could also have industrial applications. Dr Ehrsson explains:

"This is essentially a means of projecting yourself, a form of teleportation. If we can project people into a virtual character, so they feel and respond as if they were really in a virtual version of themselves, just imagine the implications. The experience of playing video games could reach a whole new level, but it could go much beyond that. For example, a surgeon could perform remote surgery, by controlling their virtual self from a different location."

To test the illusion further and provide objective evidence, Dr Ehrsson then performed an additional experiment to measure the participants' physiological response - specifically the level of perspiration on the skin - in a scenario where they felt the illusory body was threatened. Their bodily response strongly indicated that they thought the threat was real.

The creation of this perceptual illusion stems from an idea Dr Ehrsson had as a medical student, when he wondered what would happen to the 'self' if you could effectively move your eyes to another part of the room, just a few metres away, so you could observe yourself from an outside perspective. Would the self 'follow' the eyes or stay in the body"

The illusion is different from anything published previously. It is the first to involve a change in the perceived location of the self, relative to the physical body. It is also different from any virtual reality set-up because it examines what happens when you look at yourself, and there is also multisensory information that triggers the illusion. There has been no way of inducing an OBE in healthy people before, apart from unsubstantiated reports in occult literature. It's a very exciting development, and has implications for a range of disciplines from neuroscience to theology.

Article: 'The experimental induction of out-of-body experiences' published in the advance online edition of Science on Thursday 23rd August.
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Non-Critical String Theory Formulation of Microtubule Dynamics and Quantum Aspects of Brain Function arxiv hep-ph/9505401v3
Beyond Virtual Reality: "Out of Body Experiences" @ The Daily Galaxy
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The Colour Purple

Compounds that colour fruits may protect against cancer

Understanding the molecular structures of compounds that give certain fruits and vegetables their rich colours may help researchers find even more powerful cancer fighters.

Anthocyanins, the compounds that give colour to purple, red and blue fruits and vegetables—some of which are also commonly used as dyes—can significantly slow the growth of cancer cells.

“These foods contain many compounds, and we're just starting to figure out what they are and which ones provide the best health benefits,” said Monica Giusti, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of food science at Ohio State University.

Giusti and her colleagues found that in some cases, slight alterations to the structure of anthocyanin molecules made these compounds more potent anti-cancer agents. The finding brings scientists a step closer to figuring out exactly what properties in fruits and vegetables give them their cancer-fighting capacity.

The anti-cancer effects of anthocyanin-rich extracts from a variety of produce were tested. They retrieved these anthocyanins from some relatively exotic fruits and other plants, including grapes, radishes, purple corn, bilberries, purple carrots and elderberries.

The plants were chosen due to their extremely deep colours, and therefore high anthocyanin content. The researchers added different extracts to flasks that contained colon cancer cells. They used an analytical technique called high-performance liquid chromatography – mass spectrometry in order to determine the exact chemical structure of each compound. They used biological tests to determine the number of cancer cells left after anthocyanin treatment.

Researchers found that the amount of anthocyanin extract needed to reduce cancer cell growth by 50 percent varied among the plants. Extract derived from purple corn was the most potent, in that it took the least amount of extract to cut cell numbers in half.

In additional laboratory studies, she and her colleagues found that anthocyanin pigments from radish and black carrots slowed the growth of cancer cells anywhere from 50 to 80 percent. But pigments from purple corn and chokeberries not only completely stopped the growth of cancer cells, but also killed roughly 20 percent of the cancer cells while having little effect on healthy cells.

“All fruits and vegetables that are rich in anthocyanins have compounds that can slow down the growth of colon cancer cells, whether in experiments in laboratory dishes or inside the body,” Giusti said. There may be relatively simple ways to implement these new findings.

“There are more than 600 different anthocyanins found in nature,” Giusti said. “While we know that the concentration of anthocyanins in the GI tract is ultimately affected by their chemical structures, we're just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding how the body absorbs and uses these different structures.”

“It is possible to use natural, anthocyanin-based food colourants instead of synthetic dyes,” Giusti said. “Doing so still maintains the wonderful colours of foods while enhancing their health-promoting properties.”

Previous research at Ohio State found that black raspberries appear to reduce the growth of esophageal and colon cancers tumors.

The team is also evaluating how these pigments interact with other compounds in foods – such interactions could ultimately affect the health benefits of the food or the anthocyanin itself.
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