near death experiences

[Squid]

Just a few quick points I wanted to bring up on the matter.  NDEs and OBEs do not necessarily occur together.  OBEs (out of body experiences) are not documented in all NDEs.  Also some very interesting research has elucidated much surrounding the OBEs.  For instance, much has been published by Blanke on the matter in which he first detailed an experience that he was able to elicit by stimulating the right angular gyrus of a patient (Blanke, 2002).  The angular gyrus is part of the temporo-parietal junction which has the important job of providing us with our sense of space and self - a  kind of filter of what tells us is us and what tells us is other stuff.

This eliciting of an OBE by stimulation of these areas in the TPJ was independently reproduced and imaged (De Riddler, 2007).  It was also elicited on participants using TMS (Tsakiris, Constantini & Haggard, 2008)


References:

Blanke, O. (2002). Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions. Nature 419, 269-270.

De Ridder, D., Van Laere, K., Dupont, P., Menovsky, T. & Van de Heyning, P. (2007). Visualizing out-of-body experience in the brain.  NEJM 357, 1829-1833.

Tsakiris, M., Constantini, M. & Haggard, P. (2008). The right temporo-parietal junction in maintaining a coherent sense of one's body.  Neuropsychologia 46, 3014-3018.