What are the features of OB vision?
In the late 1960s Charles Tart began the first laboratory tests with subjects
who could have OBEs voluntarily [Tar67, 68]. In addition to his physiological
research he also tested subjects' ability to see a target hidden from their
normal sight. His first subject, Miss Z., was tested in a laboratory where
a target was placed on a shelf about five and a half feet above the bed where
she lay.
The
target was a five-digit number prepared in advance
by Tart and placed on the shelf. Miss Z. slept
in the laboratory on four occasions. On the first
she had no OBE; on the second, she managed to get
high enough to see the clock, and on third night
she had an OBE but traveled elsewhere. However,
on her fourth and last night she awoke and reported
that she had seen the number and it was 25132.
She was right on all five digits which has a probability
of only one in 100,000 of being right by chance.
Tart
himself seemed reluctant to conclude that it was
paranormal. Tart's second subject was Robert Monroe,
who came to the laboratory for nine sessions, but
he was only able to induce an OBE in the penultimate
session, and then he had two.
During
the first of these OBEs he seemed to see a man
and a woman but not to know who or where they were.
In the second he made a great effort to stay 'local'
and managed to see a technician, who was supposed
to be monitoring the apparatus. With her he saw
a man whom he did not know was there and whom he
later described. It turned out that this was the
husband of the technician, who had come to keep
her company. Since Monroe did not manage to see
the target number, no real test of ESP was possible.
In
1971 Karlis Osis began to plan OBE research at
the American SPR. One of the first subjects to
be tested there was Ingo Swann, who went to the
laboratory two or three times a week where Janet
Mitchell tested him to see whether he could identify
a target placed out of sight. A platform was suspended
from the ceiling about 10 feet above the ground
and divided into two. On either side of a partition
various objects were placed and Swann was asked
to try to travel up to see them. The reason for
the partition was to see whether Swann would identify
the correct target for the position in which he
claimed it to be. Bright colors and clear familiar
shapes seemed most successful and glossy pictures
or glass did not work well for the experimental
purposes.
After
his OBE, Swann usually made drawings of what he
had 'seen.' Although these drawings were far from
perfect renderings of the original objects, they
were similar enough that when eight sets of targets
and respondes were given to an independent judge
she correctly matched every pair; a result which
is likely to happen by chance only once in about
40,000 times [Mit73].
The
results of all these experiment were most encouraging.
From Tart's results especially it seemed that although
it was very hard for the subject to get to see
the number, and that if the number was seen, it
was seen correctly.
Further
research showed that OB vision could be just as
confused and erratic as ESP has always seemed to
be.
For
example Osis [Osi73] advertised for people who
could have OBEs to come to the ASPR for testing.
About one hundred came forward and were asked to
try to travel to a distant room and to report on
what objects they could see there. Osis found that
most of them thought they could see the target
but most were wrong. He concluded that the vast
majority of the experiences had nothing to do with
bone fide OBEs. This conclusion means that Osis
was using the ability to see correctly as a criterion
for the occurrence of a genuine OBE.
Much
of the recent research on OBEs has been directed
towards that important question; does anything
leave the body in an OBE? On the one hand are the
'ecsomatic' or 'extrasomatic' theories which claim
that something does leave. This something might
be the astral body of traditional theory or some
other kind of entity. Morris [Mor73] has referred
to the 'theta aspect' of man which may leave the
body temporarily in an OBE, and permanently at
death. On the other hand there are theories which
claim that nothing leaves.
Some
of these predict that no paranormal events should
occur during OBEs, but the major alternative to
consider here is that nothing leaves, but the subject
uses ESP to detect the target. This concept has
been referred to as the 'imagination plus ESP'
theory. This last theory is problematic. The term
ESP is a catch-all, is negatively defined, and
is capable of subsuming almost any result one cares
to mention. How then can it be ruled out? And given
these two theories, how can we find out which,
if either, is correct?
In
spite of the difficulties several parapsychologists
have set about this task. Osis, for example, suggested
that if the subject in an OBE has another body
and is located at the distant position, then he
should see things as though looking from that position.
If he were using ESP he should see things as though
with ESP. This general ideal led Osis to suggest
placing a letter 'd' in such way that if seen directly
(or presumably by ESP) a 'd' would be seen, but
if looked from a designated position a 'p' would
appear, reflected in a mirror. Following this idea
further he developed his 'optical image device'
which displays various pictures in several colors
as in four quadrants. The final picture is put
together using black and white outlines, a color
wheel, and a series of mirrors. By, as it were,
looking into the box by ESP one would not find
the complete picture. To do so can only be achieved
by looking in through the viewing window [Osi75].
Experiments
with this device were carried out with Alex Tanous,
a psychic from Maine. Tanous lay down in a soundproofed
room and was asked to leave his body and go to
the room containing the device, look in through
the observation window and return to relate what
he had seen. Osis recounts that at first Tanous
did not succeed, but eventually he seemed to improve.
On each trial Tanous was told whether he was right
or wrong and was thus able to look for criteria
which might help to identify when he was succeeding.
On
those trials which he indicated he was most confident
about, his results 'approached significance' on
the color aspect of the target. Osis claimed that
this aspect was most important for testing his
theory because some of the colors were modified
by the apparatus and would be very hard to get
right by ESP. The next tests therefore used only
a color wheel with three pictures and six colors.
This time overall scores were not significant but
high-confidence scores for the whole target were
significant and in the second half of the experiment
Tanous scored significantly on several target aspects,
especially the one which Osis claimed required
'localized sensing.'
Blue
Harary, who has provided so much interesting information
about the physiology of the OBE, was tested for
perception during his OBEs, but according to Rogo
[Rog78c] he was only 'sporadically successful'
on target studies and so research with him concentrated
on other aspects of his experience.
Apart
from all these experiments there is really only
one more approach which is relevant to the question
of ESP in OBEs and that is work done by Palmer
and his associates at the University of Virginia
in Charlottesville. They tried to develop methods
for inducing an OBE in volunteer subjects in the
laboratory and then to test their ESP. One can
understand the potential advantages of such a program.
If it were possible to take a volunteer and give
him an OBE under controlled conditions, when and
where you wanted it, half the problems of OBE research
would be solved.
It
would be possible to test hypotheses about the
OBE so much more quickly and easily, but alas,
this approach turned to be fraught with various
problems. First Palmer and Vassar [PV74a, b] developed
an induction technique based on traditional ideas
of what conditions are conducive to the OBE. Using
four different groups of subjects in three stages,
the method was modified to incorporate different
techniques for muscular relaxation and disorientation.
Each
subject was brought into the laboratory and the
experiment was explained to him. He was then taken
into an inner room to lie on a comfortable reclining
chair and told that a target picture would be placed
on a table in the outer room. The stage of the
induction consisted of nearly fifteen minutes of
progressive muscular relaxation with the subject
being asked to heard a pulsating tone both through
headphones and speakers which served to eliminate
extraneous noises and produce a disorientating
effect. At the same time he looked into a rotating
red and green spiral lit by a flashing light; this
stage lasted a little under ten minutes. In the
final stage he was asked to imagine leaving the
chair and floating into the outer room to look
at the target, but here several variations were
introduced.
Some
subjects were guided through the whole process
by taped instructions while other were simply allowed
to keep watching the spiral while they imagined
it for themselves. For some the spiral was also
only imagined and for some there was an extra stage
of imagining the target. When the procedure was
over the subject filled in a questionnaire about
his experiences in the experiment and completed
an imaginary test (a shortened form of the Betts
QMI). Then five pictures were placed before him.
One was the target, but neither he nor the experimenter
with him knew which it was. When he had rated each
of the pictures on a 1 to 30 scale, the other experimenter
was called in to say which was the target.
One
of the questions asked was, 'Did you at any time
during the experiment have the feeling that you
were literally outside of your physical body?'
Of 50 subject asked this question 21, or 42%, answered
'yes.' As for the scores on the targets, overall
scores were not significally different from chance
expectation. When the scores were compared for
the 21 OBEers and the others there was no significant
difference between them. The OBEers did get significantly
fewer hits than expected by chance, but this result
difficult to interpret.
Palmer
and Lieberman [PL75a, b] took the techniques a
stage further. Forty subjects were tested, but
this time they had a visual ganzfeld: that is,
half ping-pong balls were fixed over their eyes
and a light was shone on them so as to produce
a homogenous visual field. Half the subjects were
given an 'active set' by being asked to leave their
bodies and travel to the other room to see the
target, while the other half were given a 'passive
set' being asked only to allow imagery to flow
freely in their mind. As expected more of the 'active'
subjects reported having felt out of their bodies:
13 out of 20 as opposed to only 4 in the passive
condition. The active subjects also reported more
vivid imagery and more effort expended in trying
to see the target, but when it came to the ESP
scores both groups were found to have scores close
to chance expectation and there were no significant
differences between them. However, those subjects
who reported OBEs did do better than the others
and significantly so.
This
result is quite different from the previous ones
and is the opposite of what Palmer and Lieberman
predicted, but it is what one would expect on the
hypothesis that having an OBE facilitates ESP.
Palmer and Lieverman put forward an interesting
suggestion as to why more subjects in the active
condition should report OBEs. Their idea is related
to Schachter's theory of emotions, which has been
very influential in psychology. This theory suggests
that a person experiencing any emotion first feels
the physiological effects of arousal, including
such things as slight sweating, increased heart
rate, tingling feelings, and so on, and then labels
this feeling according to the situation as either
'anger,' 'passionate love,' 'fear' or whatever.
In
the case of these experiments the subject feels
unusual sensations arising from the induction and
then labels them according to his instructions.
If he were told to imagine leaving his body and
traveling another room he might interpret his feelings
as those of leaving the body. Of course this suggestion
has far wider implications for understanding the
OBE than those relating to the evaluation of the
results of these experiments.
In
the next experiment Palmer and Lieberman tested
40 more subjects, incorporating suggestions from
Robert Monroe's methods for inducing OBEs. The
was no ganzfeld and instead of sitting in a chair
the subjects lay on beds, sometimes with a vibrator
attached to the springs. This time time 21 subjects
reported OBEs; and, interestingly, these score
higher on the Barber suggestibility scale, but
they did not have better ESP scores. In the final
experiment in this series 40 more subjects were
tested, 20 with ganzfeld and 20 were just told
to close their eyes [Pal79a]. This time 13 in each
group claimed to have had on OBE, but whether they
did or not was not related to their ESP scores.
This time EEG recording was also used, but it showed
no differences related to the reported OBEs. All
in all it seems that these experiments were successful
in helping subjects to have an experience which
they labelled as out of the body, but not in getting
improved ESP scores or in finding an OBE state
identifiable by EEG.
In
an experiment designed to look at the effect of
religious belief on susceptibility to OBEs, Smith
and Irwin [SI81] tried to induce OBEs in two groups
of students differing in their concern with religious
affairs and human immortality. The induction was
similar to that already described, but in addition
the subjects were given an 'OBE-ness' questionnaire
and were asked to try to 'see' two targets in an
adjacent room. Later their impressions were given
a veridicality score for resemblance to the targets.
No differences between the groups were found for
either OBE-ness or veridicality, but there was
a highly significant correlation between OBE- ness
and veridicality. This result implies that the
more OBE-like the experience, the better the ESP.
All
these experiments were aimed at finding out whether
subjects could see a distant target during an OBE.
Although the experimental OBE may differ from the
spontaneous kind, a simple conclusion is possible
from the experimental studies. That is, OBE vision,
if it occurs, is extremely poor.
