Observations placeholder
Out of body and ketamine use
Identifier
006830
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A great deal of reinvention of the wheel here, this sort of research was ongoing in the 1950s, however, the finding that there is a very high incidence of OBEs from ketamine is interesting........ 192 people is a lot of people........
A description of the experience
Conscious Cogn. 2011 Sep;20(3):943-50. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2011.01.005. Epub 2011 Feb 15. Ketamine as a primary predictor of out-of-body experiences associated with multiple substance use. Wilkins LK, Girard TA, Cheyne JA. Department of Psychology, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Investigation of "out-of-body experiences" (OBEs) has implications for understanding both normal bodily-self integration and its vulnerabilities.
Beyond reported associations between OBEs and specific brain regions, however, there have been few investigations of neurochemical systems relevant to OBEs.
Ketamine, a drug used recreationally to achieve dissociative experiences, provides a real-world paradigm for investigating neurochemical effects. We investigate the strength of the association of OBEs and ketamine use relative to other common drugs of abuse.
Self-report data (N=192) from an online survey indicate that both lifetime frequency of ketamine use and OBEs during ketamine intoxication were more strongly related to the frequency of OBEs and related phenomena than other drugs.
Moreover, the apparent effects of other drugs could largely be explained by associated ketamine use. The present results, consistent with the role of NMDA receptors in OBEs, should encourage future studies of the role of neurochemical systems in OBEs.
Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
PMID: 21324714