Here's an interesting article on the search for scientific explanations for so-called out-of-body experiences (via Mind Hacks). A sample from the article follows:
For years brain researchers shied away from exotic experiences such as hallucinations, near-death experiences or “intimations of the divine”, on the grounds that there was no way to study them scientifically. But as consciousness has become an academically respectable topic, it has become harder to ignore “altered states”. If memory and imagination can be linked to the activity of groups of neurons, couldn ’t the experience of being “at one with the universe” just be the result of brain cells firing?
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Now that religious experiences are edging into mainstream neuroscience, theories about what is going on are coming thick and fast. Dr Andrew Newberg, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, for instance, believes that the patterns of activity that show up on the brain scans of people praying or meditating fit well with the sort of experiences they report.
The deeper the meditation, he says, the more active are the areas involved with both attention and powerful emotions. At the same time, an area at the back of the brain that orients you in time and space quietens down. “The result is that the boundaries of the self fall away, creating an intense feeling of being at one with the universe,” he says.