Survey Finds About 25% Claim an Out-of-Body Experience

How many people report having out-of-body experiences? It is known  that a fair fraction of those having near-death experiences report being outside of their physical body. But the fraction of the population that has had a near-death experience is probably much less than 25%. 

Below are some of the previous reports of the prevalence of out-of-body experiences. 

1. A paper  "Out-of-Body Experiences" by Carlos S. Alvarado tells us on page 185 that according to 5 surveys of the general population, 10% of the population report out-of-body experiences.  The same page tells us that there were 49 studies involving students, which found that an average of 25% reported an out-of-body experience. The same page tells us that there were 10 studies involving members of parapsychology groups, which found that an average of 48% of such people reported an out-of-body experience. 
2. We read on page 376 of the document here ("A NEW SURVEY OF PSYCHIC EXPERIENCES IN ICELAND") of a 2007 survey of 1026 people in Iceland, which found that 23% of the respondents claimed to have had an out-of-body experience.  

A new paper ("Personality Facets Systematically Relate to Nonordinary Experiences") gives us another figure regarding what percent of people report out-of-body experiences. The survey interviewed 424 people, and this was a "sample designed to approximate the general population." People were asked about 30 questions relating to non-ordinary experiences. 

One of the survey questions was: "I went through a situation where I was outside of my physical body and could perceive it as separate from myself." According to Figure 1 of the paper, the percentage who answered yes to this question was about 25%. The study attempts to detect "personality associations" with the answers given, but fails to find much of anything, reporting "mainly weak associations." 

Out-of-body experiences are one of the strongest examples of evidence standing in opposition to "brains make minds" claims. No one has stated any halfway persuasive explanation of why anyone would report being outside of his body, if the mind is a product of the brain. Attempts to explain such experiences as neural experiences are utterly lacking in credibility, and the papers making such attempts tend to be characterized by dishonesty and misrepresentation, as I document here and here. A very important type of out-of-body experience is sometimes called a veridical out-of-body experience. In such experiences a person who claimed to have floated out of his body is able to make observations that should have been impossible unless such a leaving of the body occurred. Many such cases are documented in my post here. 

We are currently in the  "anomaly accumulation" phase described by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the phase corresponding to item 3  in the diagram below. The main ideas of that book are summarized in the infographic below. 

Endless anomalies have accumulated which contradict the "brains make minds" claims of neuroscientists. Endless reports of paranormal phenomena such as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, clairvoyance and telepathy are only some of these anomalies.  A large fraction of the anomalies are cases of high mental function despite a very large loss of brain tissue, cases you can read about in the posts here. 

Such anomalies are the seeds of a new paradigm that may replace the old "brains makes minds" paradigm. The new paradigm may be some conceptual framework wise enough to recognize the necessity of recognizing that human minds and human memory are spirit realities or soul realities that can only be credibly explained by postulating transcendent causation, a reality enormously greater than mere brains.  Or, the new paradigm may be some "halfway house" with many of the same credibility problems as the "brains make minds" paradigm. When a failing old paradigm is replaced, it does not necessarily mean the new paradigm will be something very credible. The replacement paradigm may suffer from many of the problems of the old replaced paradigm.