Observations placeholder
Out of body during migraine
Identifier
006831
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The conclusions can be ignored as they do not logically follow on from the findings, but it is the findings that are interesting of 562 sufferers, 7 had OBEs.
A description of the experience
Cephalalgia. 1999 Dec;19(10):886-96. Out-of-body experiences and related phenomena in migraine art. Podoll K, Robinson D. Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Technology Aachen, Germany.
In a collection of 562 migraine art pictures, seven pieces illustrate various elements of out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and related phenomena, including the somesthetic sensations of a duplicate or parasomatic body and the visual experiences of perceiving the own body, i.e. autoscopy, and its environment from a vantage point out of the body.
Phenomenological features of the OBEs depicted are compared with 17 similar case reports reviewed from the literature.
It is concluded that OBEs can occur as migraine aura symptom, which supports the notion that OBEs represent a preformed functional response of the brain. This neuropsychological theory supplements existing psychological theories of OBEs, which consider the said phenomena as representing hallucinatory experiences based on imagination and memory.
PMID: 10668108