Out of Body Experiences
People talk about an "out of body experience" or OBE. Here we are expected to believe that the mind did a little travel though the physical world to another place, where the people "saw" and "heard" things.
There is another possibility: they simply dreamed it. Dreaming is a kind of imagination except that it is especially vivid and you have the impression that you are really there.
::: tip [Key Takeaway]
An out of body experience is simply the mind imagining the experience, very much like a dream in the way that you feel like you are there. Without the eyes there is no way to account for seeing things, and without the brain there is no way to account for remembering something that happened outside the body.
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Claims
Senses
In an OBE people claim they visit a location different from their body, and they see things. But their eyes and ears did not go with them!
We see things because light bounces off them, reflected back end into our eyes. The eye forms an image on the retina from which the mind sees what is around it. Everyone knows this.
What did the mind that travelled out of the body use to see with? The mind that somehow "drifted" through the universe, how did it collect the light and form an image of what it was seeing?
Some people claim to hear things, and the same problem occurs: how do yu hear without any ears?
If the mind actually did an OBE, it would have no senses with which to experience the world that it is supposed to be traveling through. It left all the senses, and all the sensory processing nerves behind back in the body.
Memory
We remember things because nerves wire together to simulate the past. That is, the smell of cinnamon buns might remind you of your local airport if there happens to be a vendor there. To make that reminding happen, the nerves that fire on smelling cinnamon are wired to the nerves that fire when you see other aspects of the airport. As a memory, the one signal triggers the other: the cinnamon will remind you of the airport, and the airport will remind you of cinnamon.
We know that memories are held by nerves because of numerous things. Stimulating nerves can bring about strong recollections. Blood clots and other damage to the brain can bring about loss of memory as those nerves are disabled. Traumatic brain injury is usually accompanied with loss of memory.
If the mind was to float free of the brain, there would be nothing to record the memories. Your mind would not be able to remember anything: not anything you knew in the past, and it would not be able to record any new memories of your experience.
Plausibility
Almost every morning, when I wake up, I have the lingering memory of a dream. Those dreams often involve imaginary travel sometimes to distant recognizable places. One day I woke up having had a dream I was literally flying over Paris and I had the sudden apprehension that I might not be high enough to make it over the Eiffel tower. I distinctly remember looking down at the Eiffel tower from the top, and barely scraping over the antennae that top the tower.
Was I actually flying over Paris? I dare say I was not. It was merely a vivid dream.
imagined that they floated around. That is about a million times more plausible.
There is another possibility: they DREAMED it. That is, they just imagined that they floated around. That is about a million times more plausible.