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4493485
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Neurologically, OBEs are a form of bodily illusion arising from a temporary dissociation of visual and proprioceptive representations--normally these are coordinated, so that one views the world, including one's body, from the perspective of one's own eyes, one's head. OBEs, as Henrik Ehrsson and his fellow researchers in Stockholm have elegantly shown, can be produced experimentally, by using simple equipment--video goggles, mannequins, ru..
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Oliver Sacks |
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0b9c87e
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Only in the realm of mishearing--at least my mishearings--can a biography of cancer become a biography of Cantor (one of my favorite mathematicians), tarot cards turn into pteropods, a grocery bag into a poetry bag, all-or-noneness into oral numbness, a porch into a Porsche, and a mere mention of Christmas Eve a command to "Kiss my feet!"
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Oliver Sacks |
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989ca78
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But one almost always emerges gradually from a coma; there are intermediate stages of consciousness. It is in these transitional stages, where consciousness of a sort has returned, but not yet fully lucid consciousness, that NDEs tend to occur. Alexander
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Oliver Sacks |
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0a1bba6
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But we know from the experience of Tony Cicoria and many others that a hallucinatory journey to the bright light and beyond, a full-blown NDE, can occur in twenty or thirty seconds, even though it seems to last much longer. Subjectively, during such a crisis, the very concept of time may seem variable or meaningless. The one most plausible hypothesis in Dr. Alexander's case, then, is that his NDE occurred not during his coma, but as he was ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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b9d51a6
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To deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific--it is antiscientific. It precludes the scientific investigation of such states.
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Oliver Sacks |
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0791004
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Nelson feels that the "dark tunnel" described in most NDEs represents constriction of the visual fields due to compromised blood pressure in the eyes, and the "bright light" represents a flow of visual excitation from the brainstem, through visual relay stations, to the visual cortex (the so-called pons-geniculate-occipital pathway"
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Oliver Sacks |