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Six Studies of Out-of-the-Body Experiences
Charles T. Tart
[This article is in press with the Journal of Near Death Studies, as of March 30, 1997.]
Abstract
Because of a pernicious confusion between science and scient
ism
, many people react negatively to the idea of scientific
investigation of NDEs, but genuine science can contribute a great deal to understanding NDEs and helping
experiencers integrate their experiences with everyday life. After noting how genuine scientific investigation of certain
parapsychological phenomena has established a wider world view that must take NDEs seriously, six studies of the
authors’ of a basic component of the NDE, the out-of-body experience (OBE) are reviewed. Three of these studies
found distinctive physiological correlates of OBEs in the two talented persons investigated, and one found strong
evidence for veridical, paranormal perception of the OBE location. The studies using hypnosis to try to produce OBEs
demonstrated the complexity of a simple model that a person’s mind is actually at an OBE location versus merely
hallucinating being out, and require us to look at how even our perception of being in our bodies is actually a complex
simulation, a biopsychological virtual reality.
Article
Many people who hear about near death experiences (NDEs) think something like “Wow! I wish I could have that
experience and that knowledge!” Without wanting to have the hard part of coming close to death, of course! As
Atwater (Atwater, 1988) and others have documented, however, it’s often not a simple matter that you start out
“ordinary,” have an extraordinary experience, and then “live happily ever after.” Years of confusion, conflict and
struggle may be necessary as you try to make sense of the NDE and its aftermaths, and to integrate this new
understanding into your life. Part of that struggle and integration takes place on transpersonal
[3]
levels that are very
difficult to put into words, part on a more ordinary level of questioning, changing, and expanding your world view. I’m
not especially qualified to talk from a higher spiritual perspective, but I have gathered some useful information in my
career about the nature of the world that may help with that part of the integration, and that’s my primary emphasis.
I have worked primarily as a scientist for the last 35 years, so I’ll start by discriminating between genuine science and
scientism, and that describe six studies of out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) I’ve carried out and some of the
conclusions I’ve come to that may be helpful in furthering understanding and integration.
Science and Scientism in the Modern World:
We live in a world that has been miraculously transformed by science and technology. This is very good in some ways,
not in others. The negative aspect of particular concern for us today is that this material progress has been accompanied
by a shift in our belief systems that is unhealthy in many ways, viz. a partial crushing of the human spirit by
scientism
.
Note carefully that I said scient
ism
, not science. I am a scientist, which I consider a noble calling that demands the best
from me, and I’m very much in favor of using
genuine
science to help our understanding in all areas of life, including
the spiritual. Scientism, on the other hand, is a perversion of genuine science. Scientism in our time consists of a
dogmatic commitment to a materialist philosophy that “explains away” the spiritual rather than actually examining it
carefully and trying to understand it (Wellmuth, 1944). Those of you who have a negative feeling when I first
mentioned science have probably gotten it from encounters with scientism. Since scientism never recognizes itself as a
belief system, but always thinks of itself as true science, the confusion is pernicious.
The information I want to share here was obtained in my attempts to practice genuine science in areas of mutual
interest to us. Genuine science is a four part, continuing process that is
always
subject to questioning, expansion and
revision. It is a process that begins with a commitment to observe things as carefully and honestly as you can. Then you
think about what your observations mean, i.e. you devise theories and explanations, trying to be as logical as possible
in the process. The next, third step is very important though. Our minds are wonderfully clever, so clever that they can
“make sense” out of almost anything with hindsight, i.e. come up with some sort of plausible interpretation of why
things happened the way we observed them to. But just because our theories and explanations seem brilliant and
logical, that doesn’t mean that we really understand the world we observed, we could have a wonderful
post hoc
rationalization. So the third part of the genuine scientific process is a requirement that you keep logically working with,
refining and expanding your theories, your explanations, and then make predictions about new areas of reality that you
haven’t observed yet. You’ve observed the results of conditions A, B and C, e.g., and come up with a satisfying
explanation as to why they happened. Now develop your theory to predict what will happen under conditions D, E and
F, and then go out and set up those conditions and see what actually happens. If you’ve successfully predicted the
outcomes, good, keep developing your theories. But if your predictions don’t come true, your theories may need
substantial revision or need to be thrown out altogether.
It doesn’t matter how logical or brilliant or elegant or emotionally satisfying your theories are, they are always subject
to this empirical test with new observations. Indeed, if a theory doesn’t have any empirical, testable consequences, it
may be philosophy or religion or personal belief, but it’s not a scientific theory. Thus science has a built in rule to help
us overcome our normal human tendency to get emotionally committed to our beliefs. This is where scientism corrupts
the genuine scientific process. Because people caught in scientism have an emotional attachment to a totally
materialistic view of the world, they won’t really look at data like NDEs that imply a spiritual, non-material side to
reality. They don’t recognize that their
belief
that everything can be explained in purely material terms should be
treated like any scientific theory, i.e. it should be subject to continual test and modified or rejected when found
wanting.
This requirement of continual testing, refinement and expansion is part of the fourth process of genuine science,
namely open, full and honest communication about all the other three aspects. You share your observations, theories
and predictions so that colleagues can test and extend them. Thus you as an individual may have blind spots and
prejudices, but as it’s unlikely
all
your colleagues have the same ones, a gradual process of refinement, correction and
expansion takes place and scientific knowledge progresses.
While I have described this process as genuine science, need I say that it is also a quite sensible way of proceeding in
most areas of life?
Inadequacy of Scientism in Dealing with NDEs:
Now let’s apply these thoughts about science and scientism to NDEs. Scientism, a dogmatic materialism masquerading
as science, dismisses the NDE
a priori
as something that cannot be what it seems to be, viz. a mind or soul traveling
outside the physical body, either in the physical world or in some nonphysical world. So the NDE is automatically
dismissed as a hallucination or, more likely, as some kind of psychopathology. But what if we practice actual science
and look, with an objective as possible view, at experiences like the NDE without prejudging them as impossible?
First, there is the data from a hundred years of scientific parapsychological research that, using the best kind of
scientific methodology, shows us that we can’t simply dismiss the NDE as
a priori
impossible. A world view that
countenances such dismissal is ignorant, prejudiced, or both. It is presumptuous to summarize a century of research in
one paragraph, but as I want to focus on the out-of-body aspect of NDEs, I will make an attempt.
Basically, hundreds of experiments have shown that sometimes the human mind can do things that are
paraconceptual
to our understanding of physical reality, i.e. they make no sense given our current understanding of physics and
reasonable extensions of it, but they happen anyway. They are empirical realities. The four major psychic phenomena,
collectively referred to as
psi
phenomena, that are well established are telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and
psychokinesis (PK). Sometimes a person can detect what’s happening in another’s mind (telepathy), detect what’s
happening at a distance in the physical world when it’s not currently known to another mind (clairvoyance), predict the
future when in principle it’s not predictable (precognition), or affect physical processes just by willing them to be
changed (PK). The reality of these psi phenomena, the Big Four as I often call them (Tart, 1977a), requires us to
expand our world view from a world that is
only
material to one that also has mind as some kind of independent reality
in itself, capable of sometimes doing things that transcend ordinary physical limits. So if in an NDE a person feels
outside her or his body, or claims to have acquired information about distant events, for example, it
may
be an illusion
in a particular case, but you can’t scientifically say it
must
be illusion. You have to actually examine the experience, the
data, not ignore it or prejudicially “explain it away” without really paying attention or being logical. Thus the Big Four
of psi phenomena give us a wider view of reality that calls for a careful look at NDEs, rather than
a priori
dismissal.
Out-of-the-Body Experiences:
Since the beginning of my career, I’ve been fascinated by what used to be a very little known phenomenon, the out-of-
the-body experience (OBE). While the term OBE is sometimes used rather sloppily, here’s how I defined it over two
decades ago:
First, let’s talk about a subtype which I’m tempted to call the
classical
out-of-the-body experience, or dOBE— the
“discrete out-of-the-body experience.” This is the experience where the subject perceives himself as experientially
located at some other location than where he knows his physical body to be. In addition, he generally feels that he’s in
his ordinary state of consciousness, so that the concepts space, time, and location make sense to him. Further, there is a
feeling of no contact with the physical body, a feeling of temporary semi-total disconnection from it. (Tart, 1974), p.
117)
An NDE, on the other hand, usually has, speaking in an oversimplified way, two major aspects. First is the locational
component, the OBE component: you find yourself located somewhere outside your physical body. Second is the
noetic
and
altered state of consciousness
(ASC) component: you know things not knowable in ordinary ways and your
state of consciousness functions in quite a different way as part of this knowing. I separate these components as they
don’t always go together. You can have an OBE while feeling that your consciousness remains in its ordinary mode or
state of functioning. If right this minute, e.g., your perceptions showed you that you were someplace else than where
you know your body is but your consciousness was functioning basically like it is right now, that’s what a classic OBE
feels like. The OBE also seems as real or “realer” than ordinary experience. Reality is more complex than this, but this
distinction between “pure” OBEs and typical NDEs will be useful for our discussion.
Out-of-the-Body Experiences: First Study
I did my first parapsychological experiment in 1957 while I was still a sophomore at MIT, studying electrical
engineering. It was an attempt to produce OBEs with the aid of hypnosis, inspired by several old articles, especially one
by a sociologist turned parapsychologist, Hornell Hart (Hart, 1953).
Basically, I trained several fellow students to be moderately good hypnotic subjects and then guided them in individual
hypnotic sessions, where I suggested that the participant’s mind would leave his body and go to the basement of a
house several miles away, a place in a suburb of Boston they had never physically been to, and then describe what they
saw in that basement.
The target house was the home of two parapsychologists, J. Fraser Nicol and Betty Humphrey, who had deliberately
arranged a very unusual collection of objects in a corner of the basement. I reasoned that if any one of the subjects gave
a good description of these unusual objects, I would know his mind had been there while out of body. Note the implicit
model I had of OBEs, viz. that it was pretty much equivalent to moving your sense organs, especially your eyes, to a
distant physical location. We’ll question this simple model later. I had also placed an electronic device called a
capacitance relay beside the target location to detect and record any disturbance in the electrical properties of the space
right around the targets, hoping that my hypnotized OBE participants might physically perturb the properties of space
while they traveled to the targets, providing further evidence that the mind could actually leave the body. I installed the
capacitance relay before Nicol and Humphrey placed any target materials on the table: I didn’t want to know what the
targets were, that way I couldn’t inadvertently give away any cues about them.
Alas, while I would not call the experiment a failure (I learned a lot from it), things did not work out clearly. The
capacitance relay device had to be abandoned, as it went on and off every time the house furnace did. My participants’
descriptions of the target had occasional resemblances to the target materials, but the comparison was much too
subjective for me to put any reliance on. A “side trip” by one of the participants who was asked to describe my home in
New Jersey, that he had never been to, was similarly suggestive, but not sufficiently so to convince me his mind had
indeed left his body and traveled south. I had not yet learned how essential objective ways of evaluating results in
parapsychology were.
Out-of-the-Body Experiences: Second Study
My next study of OBEs in the mid60s happened through coincidence, although, given some synchronicities that
occurred years later (Tart, 1981), I sometimes suspect that it was Coincidence. While chatting about various things with
a young woman who baby sat for us, I found out that, ever since early childhood, it was an ordinary part of her sleep
experience to occasionally feel she had awakened from sleep mentally, but was floating near the ceiling, looking down
on her physical body. This experience was clearly different from her dreams and usually only lasted a few seconds. As
a child, not knowing better, she thought this was a normal part of sleeping. After mentioning it once or twice as a
teenager she found it wasn’t normal and she didn’t talk about it anymore! She had never read anything about OBEs, as
this was long before Moody’s
Life After Life
(Moody, 1975), so she didn’t have any idea what to make of it. I was quite
interested as she said she still had the experience occasionally.
I told her there were two theories about OBEs, one that they were what they seemed to be, viz. the mind temporarily
leaving the physical body, and the other that OBEs were just some sort of hallucination. How, she wondered, could she
tell the difference? I suggested she could write the numbers one to ten on slips of paper, put them in a box on a bedside
table, randomly select one to turn up without looking at it before going to sleep and then, if she had an OBE during the
night, look at and memorize the number and then check the accuracy of her memory in the morning.
I saw her a few weeks later and she reported that she had tried the experiment seven times. She was always right about
the number, so it seemed to her that she was really “out” during these experiences. Was there anything else interesting
we could do?
Miss Z, as I’ve called her in my primary report on our work (Tart, 1968), had interrupted her college work to earn
needed funds and was moving from the area in a few weeks, but before she left I was able to have her spend four nights
in my sleep research laboratory. I knew about NDEs so I wondered what physiological changes would take place in her
body when she had an OBE: was she physiologically coming close to death? And I wanted to test her apparent ESP
ability to see numbers from outside her body. Each night I recorded brain waves (EEG) in a typical fashion used in
dream research
[4]
that allowed me to distinguish waking, drowsiness, and the various stages of sleep. I measured eye
movements, which are important in dreaming, with a tiny, flexible strain gauge taped over one eye and I also measured
the electrical resistance of her skin, which indicates activity in the autonomic nervous system, using electrodes taped to
her right palm and forearm. On two of the four nights I was also able to measure heart rate and relative blood pressure
with a little device called an optical plethysmograph that shines a beam of light through a finger.
As for ascertaining whether she was, in some sense, really “out” of her body during her OBEs:
Each laboratory night, after the subject was lying in bed, the physiological recordings were running satisfactorily, and
she was ready to go to sleep, I went into my office down the hall, opened a table of random numbers at random, threw a
coin onto the table as a means of random entry into the page, and copied off the first five digits immediately above
where the coin landed. These were copied with a black marking pen, in figures approximately two inches high, onto a
small piece of paper. Thus they were quite discrete visually. This five-digit random number constituted the
parapsychological target for the evening. I then slipped it into an opaque folder, entered the subject’s room, and slipped
the piece of paper onto the shelf without at any time exposing it to the subject. This now provided a target which would
be clearly visible to anyone whose eyes were located approximately six and a half feet off the floor or higher, but was
otherwise not visible to the subject.
The subject was instructed to sleep well, to try and have an OOBE experience, and if she did so, to try to wake up
immediately afterwards and tell me about it, so I could note on the polygraph records when it had occurred. She was
also told that if she floated high enough to read the five-digit number she should memorize it and wake up immediately
afterwards to tell me what it was. ((Tart, 1968), p. 8)
Over her four laboratory nights, Miss Z reported three clear cut incidents of “floating” experiences, where she felt that
she might have partly gotten out of her body but the experience didn’t fully develop, and two full OBEs. My general
impression of the physiological patterns accompanying her floating and full OBE experiences is first, she was in no
way “near death.” There were no major heart rate or blood pressure changes and no particular activity in the autonomic
nervous system. A physician would not call for the crash cart.
Second, floating and full OBEs occurred in an EEG stage of what I would call poorly developed stage 1 EEG, mixed
with transitory periods of brief wakefulness. Stage 1 EEG normally accompanies the descent into sleep, the hypnagogic
period, and later dreaming during the night, but these were not like those ordinary stage 1 periods because they were
often dominated by
alphoid
activity, a distinctly slower version of the ordinary waking alpha rhythm, and there were no
rapid eye movements (REMs) accompanying these stage 1 periods, as almost always happens in normal dreaming. I
had studied many records of sleep EEG records by then and can say the above with confidence. As to what this poorly
developed stage 1 with dominant alphoid and no REMs means…..that is something of a mystery. I showed the
recordings to one of the world’s leading authorities on sleep research, William Dement, and he agreed with me that it
was a distinctive pattern, but we had no idea what it meant. But it has left an idea with me that I’ve never been able to
follow up, but which might prove fruitful. If you could teach someone to produce a drowsy state and slowed alpha
rhythms, say through biofeedback training, would the proper psychological procedures then make it easier to have an
OBE? Indeed I found a report of a sensory deprivation study that reported alphoid rhythms occurring and also reported
some subjects feeling like they had left their bodies (Heron, 1957). I wrote to the researcher asking if these two things
were associated, but never received a reply. Too “far out” a question, I guess.
On the first three laboratory nights Miss Z reported that in spite of occasionally being “out,” she had not been able to
control her experiences enough to be in position to see the target number (which was different each night). On the
fourth night, at 5:57am, there was a seven minute period of somewhat ambiguous EEG activity, sometimes looking like
stage 1, sometimes like brief wakings. Then Miss Z awakened and called out over the intercom that the target number
was 25132, which I wrote on the EEG recording. After she slept a few more minutes I woke her so she could go to
work and she reported on the previous awakening that:
I woke up; it was stifling in the room. Awake for about five minutes. I kept waking up and drifting off, having floating
feelings over and over. I needed to go higher because the number was lying down. Between 5:50 and 6:00 A.M. that
did it. . . I wanted to go read the number in the next room, but I couldn’t leave the room, open the door, or float through
the door. . .. I couldn’t turn on the air conditioner!
The number 25132 was indeed the correct target number. I had learned something about designing experiments since
my first OBE experiment and precise evaluation was possible here. The odds against guessing a 5digit number by
chance alone are 100,000 to 1, so this is a remarkable event! Note also that Miss Z had apparently expected me to have
propped the target number up against the wall behind the shelf, but she correctly reported that it was lying flat.
Whenever striking parapsychological results occur both skeptics and other parapsychologists worry that they might
have been fraudulently produced, or happened through some normal sensory channel, for such things have happened
historically. A colleague and I, Professor Arthur Hastings, who is a skilled amateur magician as well as a
parapsychologist, carefully inspected the laboratory later to see if there was any chance of this. We let our eyes dark
adapt to see if there was any chance the number might be reflected in the plastic casing of the clock on the wall above
the number, but nothing could be seen unless we shone a bright flashlight directly on the numbers. Unless Miss Z,
unknown to us, had employed concealed apparatus to illuminate and/or inspect the target number, which we had no
reason to suspect, there was no normal way for anyone lying in bed, and having only very limited movement due to the
attached electrodes, could see it.
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