Out of body experiences can be created artificially now in the lab. Cool!

Normally, I see what I see and feel what I feel – and that is that. But recently, a university in Stockholm has created a method for consistently fooling the senses in such a way as to trick the person into believing they are out of their own body. We call it “out of body experience” (OOBE). This is SO cool!

People who have come close to death sometimes report what are known as out of body experiences, in which they have seen themselves from somewhere else in the room – usually from above their body. Scientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have now come up with a technique that recreates this sensation in fully conscious healthy volunteers (I told you this was cool!). They hope that this technique will enable them to study the relationship between the body and the ‘self’ in the laboratory environment – allowing for more consistent results.

“The idea for the study came to me several years ago”, says Dr Henrik Ehrsson, research leader in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience. “I wondered what would happen if you moved a person’s eyes to somewhere else in the room. It has been found that the visual perspective is crucial in determining how the ego is experienced.”

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Directing a person’s eye movements or attention in specific patterns can also aid in solving complex problems.

A new study appearing in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, is the first to show that a person’s ability to solve a problem can be influenced by how he or she moves.

“Our manipulation [of the body] is changing the way people think,” said University of Illinois psychology professor Alejandro Lleras, who along with Vanderbilt University postdoctoral researcher Laura Thomas, conducted the study. “In other words, by directing the way people move their bodies, we are – unbeknownst to them - directing the way they think about the problem.”

“The results are interesting both because body motion can affect higher order thought, the complex thinking needed to solve complicated problems, and because this effect occurs even when someone else is directing the movements of the person trying to solve the problem,” Lleras said.

According to Lleras, this type of consciousness, “embodied cognition,” describes the link between body and mind in a new and insightful way.

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According to an article in the August 2007 issue of Scientific American, micromovements of the human eye give us the capacity for vision – and a window into the mind.

“As you read this, your eyes are rapidly flicking from left to right in small hops, bringing each word sequentially into focus. When you stare at a person’s face, your eyes will similarly dart here and there, resting momentarily on one eye, the other eye, nose, mouth and other features. With a little introspection, you can detect this frequent flexing of your eye muscles as you scan a page, face or scene.

But these large voluntary eye movements, called saccades, turn out to be just a small part of the daily workout your eye muscles get. Your eyes never stop moving, even when they are apparently settled, say, on a person’s nose or a sailboat bobbing on the horizon. When the eyes fixate on something, as they do for 80 percent of your waking hours, they still jump and jiggle imperceptibly in ways that turn out to be essential for seeing. If you could somehow halt these miniature motions while fixing your gaze, a static scene would simply fade from view.”

(Windows on the Mind; August 2007; Scientific American Magazine; by Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik)

In addition, “Microsaccades may have significance beyond vision. These little eye movements may also help expose a person’s subliminal thoughts.” (pg 62)

What was that again?!

Your eyes can betray your thoughts?!

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“There are reasons to believe that the brain has evolved mechanisms to detect things in the environment that signal threat. One of those signals is a look of fear,” David Zald, associate professor of psychology and a co-author of the new study, said. “We believe that the brain can detect certain cues even before we are aware of them, so that we can direct our attention to potentially threatening situations in our environment.”

Researchers set out to determine if we become aware of fearful, neutral or happy expressions at the same speed, or if one of these expressions reaches our awareness faster than the others.

The team found that subjects became aware of faces that had fearful expressions before neutral or happy faces. They believe a brain area called the amygdala, part of the emotions-processing limbic system, shortcuts the normal brain pathway for processing visual images.

“The amygdala receives information before it goes to the cortex, which is where most visual information goes first. We think the amygdala has some crude ability to process stimuli and that it can cue some other visual areas to what they need to focus on,” Zald said.

Zald and his colleagues believe the eyes of the fearful face play a key role.

“Fearful eyes are a particular shape, where you get more of the whites of the eye showing,” he said.”That may be the sort of simple feature that the amygdala can pick up on, because it’s only getting a fairly crude representation. That fearful eye may be something that’s relatively hardwired in there.”

“We are interested in now exploring what this means for behavior,” Yang said. “Since these expressions are being processed without our awareness, do they affect our behavior and our decision making? If so, how?”

The research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health. Blake and Zald are Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development investigators. Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology, and Eunice Yang, doctoral student, were co-authors of the study, which appeared in the November 2007 issue of Emotion.

Memories – such fleeting things sometimes. And yet, other memories seem to last and last – flush with details. Researchers at Duke University led by neuroscientist Roberto Cabeza, Ph.D. have discovered that information retrieved from memory is simultaneously processed in two specific regions of the brain, each of which focuses on a different aspect of a past event. The medial temporal lobe (MTL), located at the base of the brain, focuses on specific facts about the event. The frontal parietal network (FPN), located at the top of the brain, is more likely to process the global gist of the event.

What does this mean for us "ordinary folks?"

It's back to the eyes. When you move your eyes, you tend to focus attention in your brain in an opposite direction. For example, when you look to the left, you tend to activate right hemisphere areas of your brain; when you look up, you tend to focus attention on lower brain areas, etc. It is as though you have a line-of-sight fulcrum inside your head with the fulcrum center-point in the very center of your brain (at eye level, of course). When you swing your gaze to the left, the other end of the fulcrum swings right, etc.

Consider this process to fully recall a memory:

First, look down, activating the FPN to get the gist of the memory. Cast your eyes side to side while looking downward to gain further information from the cerebral hemispheres associated with the FPN. When you feel ready to recall the details of that memory, swing your eyes upward and side-to-side. The upward gaze will tend to activate the MTL portion of your brain while the side-to-side action will tend to activate right and left hemispheres associated with the MTL.

Now, one more thing…

When you access a brain region, it wants something to DO. I recommend that you consider blinking – it's a simple and easy thing to do that creates huge fluctuations in light (from all to nothing and back). What you'll probably find is that by looking up and blinking, you'll activate the details-oriented MTL – and you'll stop blinking automatically as the details of a memory come to mind. Same goes for the FPN. And my guess is that if someone were to be looking at your eyes while you do this, they'd see small but perceptible jumps in the size of your pupils as memory gist and details come to mind.

Perhaps someday some curious scientist will seek to investigate my theory that one can consciously access memory aspects better with eye movement and blinking. Rapid Eye Technicians and their clients are already aware of the connection between eye movement, blinking, and memory – and the discharge of emotional energy tied up in certain types of memories.

Although some consider Rapid Eye Technology to be a spiritual process, the movement and blinking of the eyes is a physical aspect of a psychological process of memory that can be personally experienced by anyone – and when done in a controlled fashion can enhance memory while separating memories from their emotional charge. Further, the basic processes and techniques of Rapid Eye Technology take advantage of the connection between physical, emotional, and mental aspects of memory.