I get these occasionally, sometimes with multiple nested dreams, and the sensation of waking is highly realistic. It can last a subjectively long time until some detail tips me off that it's not real (usually attempting to read and the text reading like Markov chain output). If I'm capable of generating all this highly believable imagery it seems only a minor change to also generate a model of my own body.
It's interesting how you sometimes can't tell if you are awake or not, when you are sleeping, but you can ALWAYS tell if you're awake when you're awake. Looks like some faculties are working robustly when you are awake which aren't when you are asleep.
That said, I've had dreams where characters in my dream knew things I didn't, and even made fun of me. When I woke up, I realized that they were actually quite interesting, fully developed characters with their own personalities and knowledge! And they would develop over several months of dreaming. Sometimes I also awoke with a solution to a problem I had been thinking about the night before.
I've had lucid dreams on and off for several years. I remember one particular dream where I was visiting a friend, and he showed me a project he was working on in his back room. It was a hand-cranked machine that looked like a mashup of an astronomical orrery and an automatic transmission with the case taken off. Before I woke up, I was able to examine it for some time, and as far as I can recall, I could see each piece, in motion and interacting with its adjacent parts, with perfect resolution.
Now, the problem is that there was never an image of that machine on my visual cortex, so it must have originated somewhere further up the stack in some kind of symbolic form, which got used to synthesize the image I thought I was looking at. IMHO, it's a little bit backwards for my brain to have to repaint memories on an imaginary canvas so the little man in my head can look at them and reparse them over and over. (But apparently it does, and it's damned good at it.)
I'm very much familiar with that stuff, so I without any real purpose followed the link, lazily reading what's in that article, and then I see
> A common false awakening is a "late for work" scenario
And it just suddenly strikes me how fucked up it is. I mean, think about it: common stressful scenario in your dreams isn't the flood, or fire, or someones death, not some real danger or actual bad thing, but being late for school or work, because you overslept. I understand why it is so, but it is kinda sad, if you actually think of it.
I had an interesting experience a few days ago: I was walking to my office, through a small cluster of other buildings in the same complex, and I ended up walking perpendicular to someone who I immediately recognized, based on body shape, face, hairstyle, dress, and shoes, as myself. Of course my rational bits knew it was just some other guy who looked a lot like me, but it was a close enough match that my recognition bits would intermittently "lock on" and tell me I was watching myself from 20 feet away. And that was disturbing as hell.
Anyway, now I know I have a doppelgänger working two buildings over, so I need to figure out what team he's on so I can crash his next office unwinder.
When I was in high school, my girlfriend texted me a photo of me kissing some girl (not her) who was sitting in a swing.
At first I thought "Woah who is taking secret pictures of me?!" but then I realized I didn't recognize the girl I was kissing in the photo.
So at that point I'm really confused -- there is a photo of me kissing a girl I don't know, in a park I've never been to. Photoshop? Is this a prank?
My girlfriend then quickly follows up with "Weird right? I met this couple at the park and he looks just like you from the side. From the front he has a bit of a wider face, though. And he's Italian."
Had she not told me that, I would have completely believed that I'd been photoshopped into a photo. I couldn't spot a single dissimilarity.
I wonder if any relationships have ended because someone's significant other saw what looked like them with another person.
Phenotype space is probably not continuous given genome structure. So it appears like you can vary features almost arbitrarily, as you see in the Oblivion video game, but in fact you see a lot of genetic collisions due to a much smaller search space combined with the birthday paradox.
Story time. When I was 4 or so, I fell asleep at my aunt's house on the couch. I recall being above my body, looking down. I then looked over to the table where the adults were, still looking down. I could look down upon the table and its contents, something I could not see normally (hey, I was 4 and small, I could not see over the edge of the thing). This is the first time I ever saw square pizza. From Dominoes. The experience of being out of body was not meaningful to me at the time, but, man, square pizza?! I remember thinking that was quite novel.
I've heard enough of these stories to have no doubt this is a real experience, but what could a scientific explanation of this possibly look like? I take coherence of worldview very seriously and will rewrite my entire ontology if necessary, but I'm having difficulties here. I don't want to accept the cognitive dissonance and say you're making it up or are fabricating the memory, or simply dismiss this comment altogether. On the other hand, it seems a very difficult hallucination to conjure.
This one has an easy explanation. The child was making noises while sleeping, perhaps having a bad dream, prompting an adult to pick him/her up. The child was exceptionally sleepy, groggy, slipping in and out of awareness. The adult walked back over to the other adults, and the pizza, while holding the child.
If you've ever seen how out of it a very tired child can be, you understand that's more than enough to explain the sense of out of body + seeing above the table. We're talking about a four year old after all, their comprehension of the awake/asleep line in that circumstance would be extremely low. Even for an adult, it can be easy to confuse whether you're still in a dream briefly upon waking.
There;s a pretty good chance this is the answer, but even if the child couldn't see the table from above but only reach and see things near the edge, if they could interact with objects on the table at all they'd still have some kind of mental model of the objects on the table and their positions and orientation. That could be enough to be able to generate an impression of seeing the table from above.
When my eldest was about 6 or 7 she woke us up because the was wandering around upstairs opening all the doors. I lead her to the toilet and when she'd finished took her to bed and tucked her in. The next morning she told me she'd had a weird dream that she'd been going around the house opening all the doors looking for something, but had no memory of me or going to the toilet.
You're quite likely right. My three year old wakes most nights in some sort of semi-aware panic. It's a fairly bizarre state - sometimes coherent, sometimes not, sometimes eyes open, sometimes a little zombie.
Not sure why you don't want to think that it could be a false memory; those are pretty common, particularly when you're dealing with a very young child and a very old memory (also seems to be common when dealing with dreams). Of course there are other possible explanations as well. Another user user points out it could have been a groggy child being carried. It could also be a groggy child that either saw for a few moments or heard people talk about the square pizza, and then incorporated that into their dream.
Giving possible scientific explanations for supernatural phenomena on HN: It's like asking for downvotes. There's very little social approval of that behavior here.
The problem is you're using "supernatural" as a semantic stop sign (http://lesswrong.com/lw/it/semantic_stopsigns/). Would it help if I rephrased it as: given this natural phenomenon reported by thousands of people in a wide array of circumstances, what is a possible scientific explanation?
Excellently put. "Supernatural" around here is just shorthand for "bullshit", something is only "supernatural" until it is explained, and then it just "natural" and no one has a problem with it. But where I think this is harmful is for rationalists who don't want to acknowledge that some things may be true but ultimately unprovable or unexplainable because of the limited human perspective. That's what I think is interesting about philosophy and metaphysics—the ability to play around and ask what-if about things which probably are unknowable. This opens you up to a much wider world of ideas than that which is reasonably tractable by today's science.
I submitted that article awhile back, never made it anywhere. The incredibly unyielding trust in scientific measurements on HN is amazing to me. I agree that science has proven itself an amazing tool of mankind, but I also believe the true nature of the universe, spacetime and the human mind is beyond the reach of human science... or rather, when that truth presents itself to us we'll have to throw out so many things we thought were constants that the result will have us giving up on science all together. In the same way modern scientists look at history's voodoo & whichcraft... some future scholars will laugh at the concept of science.
While I appreciate that mind should be given room to flow I find searches for provable and explainable things far more fruitful than pure metaphysical constructs. Mainly because we are so good at fooling ourselves and our thought processes are so full of errors that I'm highly skeptical of the "truth" value of any thought process that does not perform stringent reality checks from experimental data or mathematics.
Then again, to find new interesting points of view mind should be given the capability to flow freely - but to actually utilize those fantasies in finding new truths requires also hard labor.
A rationalist who cannot find value in marginalizing errors in decision-making by some process has no grounds to accept that process as meaningful or valid. And dreaming up ideas about things you believe to be unknowable is exactly that.
That this opens you up to a much wider world of ideas is not surprising. As soon as you abandon the constraints of fact, you are free to think about any number of fictions. However, these fictions don't provide you any real advantage, which is why they are called fictions to begin with.
I've heard about these out of body experiences frequently (a roommate in college was a really smart talented guy named Pete Sanders who has now written books and been on television talking about some of these things, see for example, http://www.freesoul.net). Yet, I remain skeptical.
Seeing a scene from an unusual perspective would require reception of the light wave at a location other than ones body. Are there disembodied eyes, floating above the room looking down? If there are why can't those in the room see these floating eyes? If they can't be seen, then we know that the eyes aren't absorbing or refracting any light. It the floating eyes do refract any light, necessary to focus on anything, then from high school physics we know that there will be refections at the interface between the materials of different indices of refraction. These reflections would be visible by outside observers in the room. Invisible float eyes that nevertheless can see without absorbing light. How is this supposed to be working? The floating, the seeing, the invisibility, the transmission of information to the eyes' owner, all require complex, supernatural, to date undiscovered phenomena that would invalidate not only the results of many scientific discoveries but important, fundamental science. Or ... it could just be a dream.
Square cut, anyway, for their thin crust. IIRC square-cut cracker crust is a style claimed by various parts of Iowa/Illinois, and lots of places serve it. Locally, the regional chain Northern Lights, which is maybe the best fast-food-class pizza I've had, serves a thin in that style.
Little Caesar's Bigfoot pizza (and whatever that new thing that looks like it is called) was square, you're right. Well, rectangular, anyway. Square-cut as well, of course. A Detroit-style, or at least a bad imitation of the style.
Could be either, depending on what you mean by "square pizza", I guess.
[EDIT] now with links!
Looks like square-cut cracker crust is St. Louis style, though it's only really STL style if you get that disgusting (St. Louis natives who had their taste buds ruined as children would call it "divine") Provel "cheese" on top. Strip-cut is the Quad Cities style I had in mind, not square cut. I ought to have known better. Mmm, Harris Pizza.
Most pizza places will cut square if you ask, but only the better class of pizza places uses delicious Provel cheese. TIL Quad Cities is known for something... b^)
All that happened a long time ago, but in 2001 I went to a event in the next bigger town.
There were lots of people strolling around, suddenly a girl greeted me a little bit too enthusiastic.
I didn't know her at all, but greeted her and started small talk with her.
She was obviously bugged and asked me if I didn't know her ?
I declined, but she didn't give up. She thought she knew me from a party from a town about 15km away and had an affair with him on this party. She was very angry, that I didn't recognise her and didn't remember any thing. She even knew which school this guy went to (different school) and some things about his friends.
She didn't trust me that I wasn't this guy and was pretty angry that I didn't recognize her.
Never met this guy. Don't know if he was really so similar to me, but it was a really strange experience.
Doing a sensory deprivation experiment once gave me an OOBE. It was pretty wild, didn't have enough time to start doing research though. One of the experiments I would run is have an assistant go into another room and write or draw something on a pad, then do your OOBE, go over to the room and read the pad, then come back into your body, wake up and tell them what they wrote (or reproduce it). That was a claim made by the Eckankar[1] people, back in the 70's, I wanted to test.
The interesting bit from this research is that it adds a bit of credence to the notion that you can at least perceive you are outside your body, given the right conditions. The question being then how you do this to yourself on demand without sticking an electrode into your head in order to do some research on it.
>That was a claim made by the Eckankar[1] people, back in the 70's, I wanted to test.
I take it you were unable to reproduce any psychic claims! :)
If you could, it would be a trivial way to win $1M: http://web.randi.org/the-million-dollar-challenge.html The fact that the James Randi challenge has existed (in one form or another) since 1964, and no psychic in over half a century has ever passed the challenge, well, that should speak volumes about psychic/paranormal/parapsychology claims.
To play devil's advocate, it could also indicate Randi is using a god of the gaps type play and psychics have given up knowing he won't part with the money.
He works with the psychic to agree on a test of what the psychic claims to be able to do, with low enough probability that you can't pass by chance. (I believe the threshold is somewhere below 1/million.)
Doesn't matter what ability you think you have. A test can be set up and agreed to.
A number of psychics have wound up concluding that their abilities won't work under the influence of unbelievers. But nobody that I know of has complained that Randi was not willing to set up a fair test.
I guess its his test, his rules.. pity rational people mischarecterise it as Scientific.
In the words of Chris Carter, author of Parapsychology and the Skeptics:
If Randi were genuinely interested in testing unusual claims, then he would also not insist upon odds of at least one million to one against chance for the results. Anyone familiar with scientific studies will be aware that experimental results against chance of say, 800,000 to one would be considered extraordinary; but results this high would be, according to Randi, a “failure.”
Different disciplines accept different probabilities of Type I error. 8000000 to one against would not be considered worth reporting in particle physics. Any confirmed supernatural phenomenon would be a change in our understanding of the universe more dramatic than any particle physical discovery, so really it should be held to even stricter standards. Randi is being generous.
To be fair most people who claims to have psychic power also claim that, even if not perfect, have a statically significant success rate.
I mean if you really had a psychic power that worked 1 in 800,000 trials, a single life wouldn't be long enough to discover it. By comparison, we only live about 30,000 days.
I would not hire a water diviner finding water with such low success rate.
Anyway, the only way a tester can prove their point is by running the tests at their own expense and they need a fair number of them.. but Randi restricts them to just a few and set the rules on who, how its done and who witnesses it..
Which means even on successful tests, he and his skeptic friends will assume that they were tricked and then use fraud to mess with the results.. They are judge and jury, no witnesses. Randi is self-confessed fraudster and has been caught red handed as well.
This was an extract from a Randi Volunteer who saw the light :)
I realize that there is almost no interest in holding Randi and the MDC to the standards that they claim for themselves. I’ve always been in a ridiculed minority when I make these suggestions. It is clear that the Challenge is not about allowing people to demonstrate their claims, but rather about providing examples for our ridicule – partly for education, partly for group-bonding (my guesses). I am in the process of moving on from the idea of trying to persuade anyone to care to that of trying to get the JREF and Randi to be more upfront about this instead, in order to thwart criticism. I fully realize that this will be a futile effort as well. I also continue to tell people to quit smoking. (…)
Robert Monroe wrote 3 books on OOBEs. He used to try to correlate his experiences out of body with things in the real world.
He did one set of tests several times. His wife put a number of nails in a locked box next to his bed and he'd put his phantom hand inside and try feel the number that were inside. He never got it right enough to be statistically significant.
He also tried something similar with an object downstairs, but he said he'd have such weird experiences even going downstairs OOB that repeated tests were impossible. He suggested the process of trying to test something skewed the results or made his subconscious resist in someway.
On the other hand there were one or two things that were very unusual, specific events that correlated very strongly, so it's tricky to discount the phenomenon as completely fabricated.
I think that whether they're objectively true experiences or not, if you could get deeper into your subconscious and look around it'd be fascinating.
This story reminds me a lot of the Dostoevsky novel "The Double". Does anyone know if Dostoevsky himself suffered an incident like this, or of any similar incidents at the time that he may have heard about?
He definitely used his own experiences with epilepsy and pre-epileptic visions when writing The Idiot, but that was much later. I think The Double had more purely literary antecedents. Doppelgängers were an established trope by then, which Dostoevsky got from the German romantics—people like E.T.A. Hoffmann, who specialized in stories with weird phenomena that could have a natural explanation (e.g. the mentally ill hero's delusional imagination) but are uncanny and probably magical all the same.
The Double was only Dostoevsky's second novel but it was one of the best things he ever wrote. It's fabulous! And short.
There is a good foreign film about a doppelganger called "The Double Life of Véronique" by the great European director Krzysztof Kieślowski. It's one of the few times I've watched a foreign movie more than once.
I've seen pictures of a guy that was once a college student in our city. Though I never met him, my sister walked up to him and started a conversation - convinced it was me. When his voice didn't match she still thought it was me trying to prank me. Finally she called me at work and heard my voice while he was talking to someone else. I wish I'd have bumped into him while he lived here.
I don't view the "electrode stimulation and see what happens and then believe it's probably the same as patients experiences" as something scientific.
Given that we don't exactly know how the brain works, what if out of body experiences are real and the scientific explanation just tries to fit it in the general accepted world view as a brain bug just because it's too strange?
Nobody's disputing that OOB experiences are “real”. What's at issue is the mechanism(s) by which they occur. The hypothesis in the article is that it's a psychological effect that can be exacerbated by brain injury. And the evidence outlined, such as experiments that can reliably produce equivalent effects, and similar brain lesions accompanying the most extreme examples provides some, although not overwhelming, evidence for the hypothesis.
If you're suggesting that people's perceptions and consciousness are actually physically separating from their body, well then that's just another hypothesis. One that needs supporting evidence and a proposed mechanism before it can be taken seriously. That is how science works. Simply saying “this phenomenon is strange” doesn't change anything. It doesn't make it immune to scientific inquiry, and it doesn't lower the standard of proof required of explanations. Science has successfully explained many phenomenon far weirder than OOB experiences.
>> One that needs supporting evidence and a proposed mechanism before it can be taken seriously.
IMHO it only needs supporting evidence - good solid evidence. A proposed mechanism is nice but is it really necessary? Do they really know how aspirin works? If so, did they prior to widespread use? Does anyone have a mechanism for quantum physics? Did Kepler have a mechanism for planetary motion?
I think a lot of science is actually people looking for the mechanism to explain accepted phenomena.
That's a good question to ask, but AFAIK the answer is 'we tried that and so far have been unable to exploit it.'
If OBE's involved some unsuspected extension of physical reality, then when someone is outside their own body, it should be possible to learn things that would not be knowable otherwise, eg to report an item placed under a bed, out of view of the experimental subject lying in the bed. I don't know if that's been tried, but there was extensive research into psychic phenomena in the 1970s that failed to yield any useful results. If you could gather hidden information during an induced out-of-body-experience that would be massive scientific breakthrough, and such an experiment would be trivially easy to design, so why hasn't it happened?
I am sympathetic to the idea because I've had chemically-induced experiences, including during surgery, that seemed extremely real, as well as certain experiences with precognition that I am unable to explain (ie trying to apply the most rigorous observational standards to an unfalsifiable situation; I am honestly unable to explain the phenomenon but I can't exclude the possibility of an episodic delusion, so scientifically it's almost worthless).
Well, it would be pretty simple to test if they have access to information "out of body" that they didn't before. Put them in the scanner or whatever, put out a card with a freshly-invented message, see if they remember it when they come out.
My understanding is that OOB experiences where the person gets access to information that could not conceivably be related by their physical bodily senses are quite common. There seems to be a sort of "barrier" for many people who will absolutely refuse to believe evidence of this sort.
It is really hard to "do science" to a phenomenon which seems to be willing to accommodate the faith of the tester. People who won't see it don't but if you are at all open to it it's easy to reproduce. YMMV
(BTW, if you see your body in bed don't jump out the window, jump into your body.)
> People who won't see it don't but if you are at all open to it it's easy to reproduce.
So, have someone who is "open" to it go and view something that they haven't otherwise had a chance to perceive in person, then when they wake up tell the experimenter what it was. If it's easy to reproduce, then they should be able to do that, and it should be easy to verify that they had an out of the body experience.
Instead, you just get anecdotes, of people repeating past experiences with no controls to blind it. Human memory is surprisingly faulty, people can fill in details later on in their memory, and so on. So it's very easy to think that you had a dream in which you saw something for the first time, and then later recognize it while you're awake; but it's also possible that you brain just filled in the memory when you saw it later. Or maybe you had seen it in the past but didn't have conscious recollection. And so on.
Simply hearing people say that they had OOB experiences in which they saw things that they never saw in person is not particularly credible.
It's pointless to argue, but here's another anecdote for the files...
One day, out of the blue, I had a vivid daydream. James Brown lay dead on the floor and three Gospel singers were wailing over him in the old way, mourning and crying out. That was December 24th, 2006, and I can be so certain because the next day was the day James Brown died.
It so happens that I am a huge James Brown fan. It would have been very hard for me to deal with his passing but some grace granted me a tiny kindness and eased my sorrow.
Now, these are incontrovertible facts, however subjective, and admitting such doesn't mean we must now believe in astrology or anything like that. But how could you expect to reproduce something like this in a lab? Nevertheless an attitude that dismisses such extremely common incidents seems to me to be unscientific.
The more we learn about the brain the more amazing/frightening it becomes. What if this type of experience can be triggered on purpose via drugs or other mechanisms. It would make a scary as hell weapon.
Will these insights induce the next paradigm shift in the science of torture? Simply hook the victim to a brain stimulator and alter his perception of reality. Can be administered by the press of a button and is even cleaner than water-boarding.
I get these occasionally, sometimes with multiple nested dreams, and the sensation of waking is highly realistic. It can last a subjectively long time until some detail tips me off that it's not real (usually attempting to read and the text reading like Markov chain output). If I'm capable of generating all this highly believable imagery it seems only a minor change to also generate a model of my own body.