http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1253...n-the-mind.html

Out-of-body experiences are 'all in the mind'
19:00 23 August 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Andy Coghlan



By deliberately scrambling a person's visual and tactile senses, it is now possible to give them an "out-of-body" experience.

Two procedures – which are the first to imitate an out-of-body experience artificially – use cameras to fool people into thinking they are standing or sitting somewhere else in a room. They provide the strongest proof yet that people only imagine floating out of their bodies during surgery or near-death experiences.

"The brain can trick itself, and when it is trying to interpret sensory information, the image it produces doesn't have to be a real representation," says Henrik Ehrsson, of the Institute of Neurology, University College London...

(click the link for the full article)

I can only partly agree with their findings.
There are in fact some very genuine experiences that people have, that could not be explained in this way...myself for one.

No matter how hard main stream science tries to disprove the existence of the soul, they will never be successful. Because it does exist.

Another article with a little different information:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/science/...agewanted=print

Really? Could you provide me with some evidence that it exists?

Cogito, ergo sum...Descartes is a good place to start...physical, tangible evidence does not apply to intangible subjects other than by way of effect...logical inferences...provide evidence that is just as strong and valid as any piece of tangible evidence...

But if it's "real" as opposed to a neurological quirk, there should eventually be some tangible evidence turning up, right?

What do you mean 'real'? By its very nature, it is a real transcendental experience...that is...it transcends normal consciousness..irregardless of the mechanism by which it occurs...and it may occur by a variety of mechanisms...determining that it may occur by this one mechanism does not rule out that it may also occur by another mechanism...imo, anyway..

Hah, "eventually"? This is the human spirit in question. Many more centuries of science will most likely pass before anything of tangible substance arises concerning the human soul. And this is, of course, assuming it even exists. If indeed it does exist, I highly doubt the creator of this universe would place a time-limit on how far along mankind must go to discover such an amazing piece of knowledge. Something tells me if it does exist, we may not "eventually" find it at all, until our grasp of science is FAR more developed, and even then, we may never discover if it really exists. If we could prove such a thing exists...I believe life may take a radical turn in the wrong direction, and this precious mystery is all we have that makes life so very tolerable to live in. This is also why a great majority of atheists truly don't believe in atheism as they say they do, because if they did, they could care or less if they had to commit suicide on a dime at any day, because they state that they will just return to a state of "unconsciousness". But deep down, almost all of them fear the very existence of the human spirit, which is why they are also scared of the prospect of death, like most people are.

Anyway, back to the article, yeah, it was b.s. I'll try to go into more depth later.

By "real" I mean something that's not just a neurological quirk...or an illusion.
Like, does your mind/soul/whatever really leave your body, or is it just an illusion?

If your m/s/w really leaves your body, tangible evidence shouldn't be impossible to come by.

Well you are presuming that a m/s/w would occupy some physical location in spacetime..which is, itself, illogical because intangible substances do not do so..you are trying to assign concrete properties to intangible substances...OBEs, imo, are the projection of aspects of awareness into different realities...and, imo, a variety of mechanisms can cause this projection...

Into different realities? What do you mean by that?

ETA:

And a m/s/w might very well occupt some location in spacetime. I think my mind is located in my brain, for example. And I think it's tangible, as well.

Studies on weird stuff that happens after brain damage strongly implies that the mind is the brain, and it exists in the skull.

Indeed.

I have had personnaly experiences back when I was in my teens & twenties.
I described my experience in great detail on a previous thread under this topic.
Search and you shall find.

I am anything but gullable, and am always skeptical about things myself.

I would definately not be a firm believer had I not had a convincing experience.

Evidence? Get real.

Those kind of experiences do not give you tangable evidence you can handle and look at & show to the "Doubting Thomases" out there.
If you want to find out more about it, there was much research and experiments that had been done by both the military and research centers & universities. Google it up.
Beyond that, all I can say is "hope you have an experience like mine someday". I assure you, you too would be convinced.

will just have to wait and see for the truth....70 more years for me ,

As an atheist myself, I have to tell you that you cannot be farther from the truth. The reason that most atheists don't "commit suicide on a dime" is we realize that this is probably the only life we'll ever get. It is pointless to simply waste your life by commiting suicide.

In fact, I would argue that many people who do think life continues do not commit suicide "on a dime" because deep down they are afraid that this really is the only life they'll ever get. Every person should cherish and make the most out of their lives in such a way that they can die knowing they did the best they could. It is a truly selfless thing to do something positive without the motive to please this deity or that deity.

Now, I'm definitely not saying that it's a sure thing that we do not get more lives. I have actually thought up a few philosophical ideas that we may get more lives than just one. However, it wouldn't involve any sort of "spirit" or "soul", nor would it be any type of "afterlife". It would simply mean an infinite string of lives in whatever location, but it would be impossible to know as it is a logical fallacy to believe that we would somehow retain memories from past lives. My reasoning pretty much breaks down to: If we are conscious, we obviously experience things. If we are not conscious, we experience absolutely nothing. It's not as if we are laying in darkness, but an instantaneous "snap" from Point A in time to Point B in time when you become conscious again. You must always be experiencing something. Could it be that when you die, you automatically "snap" back somewhere else as anything from a micro-organism to an intelligent being like a human (although we certainly aren't intelligent in all cases!)? Then again, there are many things in nature that we cannot conceptualize, and yet they are reality...

of course OBE can be brought on by some controlled media (drugs, scrambling visual tactile senses, etc.) but there are circumstance in which it is brought on by some other external force or something deep within the subconscious that allows... the "mind" to "see"... or experience the transcendent.

we don't know why or how. but it does happen. is that proof of soul? no. but it is evidence of something... "More".

especially dependinmg on the nature of the experience and what have been taken from it.

OBE are most definitely real in some occurrences. People also tend to forget that everything "is only in the mind".

EX-FREAKIN-ACTLY. TRUTH. If anything, I feel MORE beholden to life, to love, to work, to honesty. MORE than when I was christian. If anything, because there's no one there watching me, I don't have anything to rebel against. One life, one chance, not wasted on unimportant lies.

I agree, too. Life takes on a different quality of importance once you realise that your time to be in existence is finite and the clock is ticking.

There have also been studies that contradict this.
In fact these studies are mostly by those who conviently chose to ignore or explain those cases where people were able to accurately describe what was happening an a hospitol room when they were thought to be dead and were being worked on to revive.
There have been tests done at the STANDFORD RESEARCH Institute on Astral Projection and those who claimed to be able to do it.They were able to accurately describe the messages and figures on a paper that was up high and hidden from view.
We must also consider that the military took it very seriously for many many years. They spent much on it and they were used to spy on enemy locations.

Can you find a link on one of those studies?

I've gotten the impression that they're just urban legends.