Voluntary out-of-body experience: an fMRI study | Hacker News Reader

Voluntary out-of-body experience: an fMRI study

journal.frontiersin.org

14 pointsjjoe9 comments

Interesting. I've skimmed the article and I can easily believe that some people can consciously observe their model of the world from a physical position different from a position of their body.

From a perspective of ML/computer vision, think this way: You take bunch of photos and then build a 3d model. After that, you can construct the image taken from any location within the observed area. And if the model is good enough, you can construct realistic images even outside the visible region.

Yeah, and typical for the human brain is that it will fill any gaps with something made up but plausible.

The brain is remarkably good at working with incomplete data.

It would have to be to operate in this 'infinite' physical environment. A place where we can only theorise about the concept of 'beginning' or 'end' or 'smallest' or 'largest'. We are literally living in an experience we don't have the mental ability to delineate.

Feels like a neat blend of brains ability to dream, memorize, and model physical environments. Can anybody with some more understanding of the brain tell me if any of the brain areas used in these activities are active during the voluntary out-of-body experience?

If so, is it feasible that we could one day use this for entertainment of the weirdest (coolest?) variety safely?

It looks like this girl from that fMRI study can use it for entertainment safely. Alongside with a few other tricks with her visual perception. On the other hand, she had mentioned, that as far as the entertainment goes it is not that much fun.

Could be of use though as a modelling environment. Or at least an awesome memory-access hack. Might come at a cost of some other functions though. So I wouldn't feel too bad about not having it. And would suggest to be extremely careful playing with a single copy of an amazing giga-scale peta-synapse neuronetwork that you have.

This is very exciting.

I know some don't like hearing this, but it's possible that we don't understand how we're mechanically connected to this world, or the physical experience, or what the physical experience actually is, what 'systems' are employed to manufacture an experience within our 'conscious' mind, or what even the consciousness is.

The future is NOT an extrapolation of data we have today, hence our vision of the future in the 1920s was so 1920s looking.

We are using a brain that we could not replicate, it's a complex biological machine we don't understand. We can't pretend to know how it is connected to the world around it. It may be a 'lens' for our consciousness to operate in this physical environment, or just a fancy computer. We don't know.

Some feel this is a big step, we just 'know it' due to whatever network our brain is connected to, or perhaps due to delusion?

TL;DR; we are just starting out, this is a great start.

Really good read! Altered states are a fascinating topic.

I wouldn't mind learning how to do this!

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