Nottingham at the centre of Out of Body Experience research


Nottingham at the centre of Out of Body Experience research

By Nottingham Post  |  Posted: July 30, 2014

Have you ever had an out of body experience?Have you ever had an out of body experience?
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Nottingham is at the centre of research into a mysterious experience reported by ten per cent of adults. Jeremy Lewis reports on out of body experiences.

 

 

WELCOME to the OBE that involves an astral trip, not a trip to Buckingham Palace.

Out of Body Experiences are reported by ten per cent of people and now Nottingham Trent University is trying to find out more.

And if you believe you have found your conscious self departing your body – and perhaps even inspecting yourself from a perch on top of the wardrobe – you may be able to help.

You have until tomorrow to complete an online questionnaire on www.survey.bris.ac.uk/ntupsychology/obequestionnaire.

It's all part of a project to aid more accurate research into the phenomenon that has fascinated scientists for decades.

"It's all about widening psychological knowledge in this underexplored area," said Dr David Wilde a lecturer in Nottingham Trent University's school of social sciences.

Out-of-body experiences, or OBEs, attract various definitions. They are, according to the Macmillan Dictionary, "situations in which someone feels as if they are outside their own body and can watch what is happening to it."

The Oxford is slightly more specific: "The sensation of being outside one's body, typically of floating and being able to observe oneself from a distance."

The term was coined in 1943 the English parapsychologist George Tyrrell (1879-1952) in his book Apparitions. Tyrrell devoted much of his life to psychical research, conducting experiments into precognition and telepathy. Until then, the sensation had been described variously as an "astral projection" or "spirit walking".

Some out-of-body experiences have included so-called near-death experiences reported by people who have endured serious illness or injury. They include...

Comedy genius Peter Sellers, who had several heart attacks in middle age and reportedly recalled slipping out of his body and observing doctors trying to save him.

Elizabeth Taylor, who recalled doctors pronouncing her dead in the late 1950s and, before returning to her body, encountering her late husband Mike Todd, who had been killed in an air crash.

Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx, who once said that after drug overdoses he went out of body and "saw things I shouldn't have been able to see: the hotel hallway, the ambulance, the limo that was there. I couldn't have seen that because there was a sheet over me."

Were these actual out-of-body experiences, or some- thing slightly different?

The psychologists at Nottingham Trent are carrying out the in-depth study so that they can distinguish between people who have had an out of body experience and those who have had similar hallucinatory experiences.

According to the university, people who have such an experience typically report it as being like a lucid dream, often with a sensation of floating, looking down on one's physical body, or a feeling of travelling to other locations or distant places.

The new study is being funded by the Bial Foundation in Portugal and will involve in-depth interviews with people who claim to have had such experiences, along with a detailed analysis of previous case reports. This groundwork will then be used to develop a screening tool to enable researchers to discriminate between those who have had out-of-body experiences and those who have not.

The team hopes to be able to identify different types of experiences, based on factors such as different triggers and the circumstances under which they occur.

"When we use surveys to study the out-of-body experience we usually give a brief definition of it and ask people to say if they have had one or not," said Dr Wilde.

"However, there are other similar hallucinatory experiences that could be mistaken for an out-of-body experience, so by using only one question to screen for the experience there is some room for error when interpreting the results of important studies.

"The features that characterise the out-of-body experience are also quite rich and varied, but have been typically ignored in modern research in favour of a slimmed down set of 'core' characteristics.

"Previous research has shown that certain out-of-body experiences features can hold a lot of significance for a person and this can affect how they understand and interpret their OBE.

"With this study, we want to be able to more precisely explore what an out-of-body experience is, and whether somebody has really had one.

"This fascinating experience has been of interest to psychiatry and psychology for more than 100 years, but it's clear that more work is still needed if we are to better understand what the OBE is and how it affects different people."

 

 

Paralysed:

A man in his late teens is relaxing in his bedroom, dozes off and then awakes to find that his mind is awake but his body is completely paralysed.

He is unable to move or even call for help and lies there terrified. He suddenly finds himself outside of his body and sitting on a shelf in his room looking down on himself as he lies in bed.

As he continues to look at his body in the bed, his room starts to grow bigger and he finds himself back in his body and awake again and able to move.

Watching:

A young woman reported having half a dozen out-of-body experiences over the course of her lifetime.

Her first happened when she was attending art class at her new school. She remembers enjoying the class and becoming engrossed in her drawing and painting. As she became progressively focused on her drawing she suddenly noticed that she could see her hand and drawing and the whole classroom from a point above her head near the ceiling.

The experience lasted for a few moments and she did not feel frightened.

Case studies supplied by Nottingham Trent University



Read more: http://www.nottinghampost.com/Shedding-light-life-s-great-mysteries/story-22015901-detail/story.html#ixzz38zhLHcfy

Read more at http://www.nottinghampost.com/Shedding-light-life-s-great-mysteries/story-22015901-detail/story.html#DiYRhCVRuKi1dT1M
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