With Halloween approaching, you may think that the eerie sensations of an invisible person behind you or someone trying to control your actions are caused by a supernatural presence.
“I haven’t had an out-of-body experience, and I’m not really religious enough to link things like that to spirits or the supernatural which I think a lot of other people believe,” said senior Emmalee Morris.
These feelings, along with the phenomenon of the out-of-body experience, are actually caused by electrical currents in your own brain.
According to The New York Times, Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, has been conducting tests for at least the past three years to help explain these paranormal occurrences.
In 2004, a patient of Blanke’s felt the presence of another body directly behind her while an electrical current passed through electrodes on the left side of her brain.
She claimed that the presence of the “body” was very uncomfortable as it moved with her from a lying position to sitting upright and it tried to interfere with her actions.
In September, Blanke observed similar reactions in women who were being evaluated prior to having epilepsy surgery with electrodes implanted in their brains.
One of the women felt the presence of a body wanting to prevent her from performing certain actions as an electrical current passed through part of her brain, and the other woman felt like she was hanging from the ceiling looking down on her own body.
Each of the sensations occurred when the electrical current passed through a part of the brain called the angular gyrus, where the brain combines vision with bodily sense.
“It seems logical because it seems like a lot of out-of-body experience happens
while a person is dying,” Morris said. “If the person’s heart has to be restarted then there is the electrical current to cause those feelings.”
Blanke said that the feelings are caused when there are conflicting ideas of where the body is physically located (on an operating table) and where it feels like it is located (on the ceiling). To help make sense of these ideas, the brain creates what it considers more realistic scenarios for the situation, like the woman floating upward while observing herself below.
Out-of-body experiences and the feeling of a second body behind you can be caused by things other than artificially created currents.
Some people have felt a presence behind them after having minor strokes and also when they experience sensory deprivation, like mountain climbers at high altitudes.
Schizophrenics and people who have no other diagnosed mental health issues have claimed to have out-of-body experiences for no explainable reason.
“After hearing about the new research, I find it hard to believe in any natural out-of-body experience,” said sophomore Matt Elverson. “However, I still believe in the paranormal.