Reading

• [Required] Saver and Rabin (1997) "The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience" Journal of neuropsychiatry Vol 9, No. 3.
• [Required] Blanke, Ortigue (2002) "Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions" Nature Vol 419, pp.269-70.
• [Required] Cook CM, Persinger MA (1997) "Experimental induction of the 'sensed presence' in normal subjects and an exceptional subject" Percept Mot Skills Oct;85(2):683-93.
• Peter Fenwick (1997) "Is the Near-Death Experience Only N-Methyl-D-Aspartate Blocking?" Journal of Near-Death Studies Vol. 16, No.1, pp.43-53.
• Persinger, M. A. (1993). Paranormal and religious beliefs may be mediated differentially by subcortical and cortical phenomenological processes of the temporal (limbic) lobes. Perceptual and Motor Skills. Feb; 76(1): 247-51.
• http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.11/persinger.html
• http://www.andrewnewberg.com
• Stephens, G. Lynn, Graham, George (2000) When Self-consciousness Breaks : Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts Philosophical Psychopathology. Disorders in Mind Cambridge, MA MIT Press.
• Austin, James H. (1998) Zen and the Brain : Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press.

Sensed presence

• Electric current generates magnetic field. CRT - 10 mT at 1 ft, Hair dryer on : 20 microT, 10cm from vacuum : 60 microT.
• http://www.laurentian.ca/neurosci/_equipment/conscious.htm
• Subjects press buttons indicating "sensed presence" experience more often when EM 1 microT applied without knowledge (time-varying complex patterns).
• Presence might be felt to be behind.
• Attention to presence induces movement / location.

Alien thought insertion

Thought insertion may be, after verbal hallucinations, the most extensively discussed "positive" symptom of schizophrenia. It sits on Schneider's (1959) influential list of "first rank" symptoms of schizophrenia. One careful survey of the relative frequency of psychotic symptoms found that it occurs in 52 percent of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia (Sartorius et al. 1977). ...

Frith (1992, p. 66) quotes one patient's account:

Thoughts are put into my mind like ''Kill God." It is just like my mind working, but it isn't. They come from this chap, Chris. They are his thoughts.

Mellor (1970, p. 17) quotes a particularly vivid patient report:

I look out the window and I think that the garden looks nice and the grass looks cool, but the thoughts of Eamonn Andrews come into my mind. There are no other thoughts there, only his. . . . He treats my mind like a screen and flashes thoughts onto it like you flash a picture.

Out of body experiences

• OBE induction: Ketamine (blockade of NDMA receptor) - short-acting, hallucinogenic anaesthetic
• OBE induction: Blanke, Ortigue (2002) - Stimulation of angular gyrus (an area on the surface of the brain close to the temporal lobe) image See http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/obe.html
• But not all aspects of OBE or NDE can be duplicated - coherence / positive experience

• Lancet study : "Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: A prospective study in the Netherlands" Pim van Lommel, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, Ingrid Elfferich. The Lancet. London: Dec 15, 2001. Vol. 358, Iss. 9298; p. 2039 (7 pages)
• Veridical perception during OBE? Anecdotal

A reminder

• If we discover that a paranormal experience P has some neural correlate N, it does not follow that P is illusory, e.g. having a perceptual experience as of a tree might correlate with a neural state but it does not follow that there is no tree being perceived.
• However, extra evidence is then needed to support the conclusion that something else is going on - Ockham's razor / inference to the best explanation.