dethalternate | Date: Thursday, 07-May-2015, 11:53 AM | Message # 1 |
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| What happens in the brain when a person has an out-of-body experience? A team of scientists may now have an answer.
In a new study, researchers using a brain scanner and some fancy camera work gave study participants the illusion that their bodies were located in a part of a room other than where they really were. Then, the researchers examined the participants' brain activity, to find out which brain regions were involved in the participants' perceptions about where their body was.
The findings showed that the conscious experience of where one's body is located arises from activity in brain areas involved in feelings of body ownership, as well as regions that contain cells known to be involved in spatial orientation, the researchers said. Earlier work done in animals had showed these cells, dubbed "GPS cells," have a key role in navigation and memory.
The feeling of owning a body "is a very basic experience that most of us take for granted in everyday life," said Dr. Arvid Guterstam, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, and co-author of the study published today (April 30) in the journal Current Biology. But Guterstam and his colleagues wanted to understand the brain mechanisms that underlie this everyday experience.
Read more/full article/source - http://www.livescience.com/50683-out-of-body-illusion.html
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