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Thursday, August 23, 2007 12:00 AM

How virtual-reality goggles create an out-of-body experience

Scientists discover that they can make people feel dissociated from their bodies using tricky virtual reality.

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Thursday, August 23, 2007 07:05 PM

I did this in 1969

Stretched out on my bed with headphones on, listening to the drum solo from "Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida."

Friday, August 24, 2007 12:04 PM

out of body

These results were achieved 20 years ago, by a Japanese roboticist named Tachi. He would have unsuspecting participants use remote viewing through the camera lenses of a robot to guide the robot around a lab, eventually having them bring the robot back to the room they were sitting in, although they did not realize it was that room. Invariably the saw themselves, through the robot's "eyes," as someone else--their sense of self traveled with the robot.

Perhaps the difference is that Tachi did it as a gag and these uberserious Swedes think they are proving something. I find it amusing to observe the presumption of scientists. Not they they are more presumptious than other humans, just that on the whole they pretend not to be.

I referred to the Tachi phenomenon in my 1989 science fiction novel, Nightshade (which was a New York Times best book of the year selection, by the way). In the book I called it a "touchy-Tachi."

The primary conclusion seems to be, as the sages have told us for millenia, that the sense of self is constructed, malleable, and displaceable. It seems, in modern humans at least, to be primarily associated with sight.

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