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hallucination for everyone. Cowan's theory does not explain the bright light at center.
Blackmore & Troscianko developed simpler theory In the cortex there are lots of cells representing the center of visual field but very few for edges this means you can see small things very clearly in the center but if they are out at the edges you can't.
Computer starts with thinly spred dots of light with more towards middle & very few at the edges gradually dots increases mimicking the increasing noise it expands until fills the whole screen. It is known that random movement in periphery of the visual field are more likely to be interpreted by brain as outward than inward movements brain infers our own movement to a great extent from what we see.
Out of body experience are not confined to near death experience. They too can occur when just relaxing & falling asleep with meditation epilepsy & migraine & can "induced at will". These experience seem quite real people don't describe them as dreams or fantasies but as events that actually happened we need theory that involves no unmeasurable entities or untestable other worlds but explain why the experience happen & why they seem real. As perceiving creatures we know our senses tells us what is out there by constructing models of the world with ourselves in it.
The whole of the world out there & our own bodies are really construction of our minds. This construction model of reality is real while other fleeting thoughts we have are unreal we call rest of them day dream imagination, fantasies & so on.
Our brains have no difficulty distinguishing reality from imagination our brain has to make itself by deciding which of its own models represent the world out there. It does this by comparing & choosing the stable one as reality. By comparison when you are almost asleep, very frightened nearly dying the model from the senses will be confused & unstable. If you are under terrible stress or suffering due to oxygen deprivation then the choice wont be so easy, all the models 'will be unstable so tunnel being created by noise in visual cortex will be stable model, so they seem real.
Fantasies & imagery might become more stable than sensory model & so seem real Theory says out of body experience world is only memory model, only match the real world when person has already known about something or can deduce it from available information. Some claim near death experience can actually see things that they could not possibly have known about. e.g. American cardiologist Michael Sabom claims that patients reported the exact behaviour of needless or
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