The Dissociated Brain: What do Dissociative Experiences and the Out-of-Body Experience (OBE) tell us about Self-Consciousness

Though typically stable and coherent, there are situations where our self-consciousness and sense of ‘presence’ can become unstable leading to dissociative and hallucinatory experiences of the bodily self. Examples include the out-of-body experience, depersoanlization, and aberrant body experiences associated with schizophrenia and psychosis. These experiences can also occur in the sub-clinical population. New research will be presented showing that many of these experiences are associated with aberrations in emotional / interoceptive processing – even in sub-clinical populations. Collectively, findings from our laboratory are interpreted within recently developed notions of a Predictive coding / Interoceptive inference approach to sensory processing, underlying aberrations in self-consciousness and our sense of conscious presence.

Biography
Dr Jason Braithwaite is a Senior Lecturer in cognitive neuroscience at the Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham UK. He is a world renowned expert on the neurocognition associated with aberrations in human consciousness including; out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences; haunt-type experiences and other disordered states of consciousness. He established and heads the Selective Attention and Awareness Laboratory (SAAL) and the new Aberrant Experience and Belief research theme in the School of Psychology at Birmingham. Dr Braithwaite currently leads a number of funded projects in the general field of aberrant experience / hallucinations with recent publications on: (i) cortical hyperexcitability and the out-of-body experience; (ii) biases in emotional processing and disorders in self-consciousness; (iii) perspective-taking, empathy and hallucinations; and (iv) developing new screening methods for quantifying aberrant brain processes. He publishes regularly in leading international peer-reviewed journals and regularly presents at conferences on cognitive psychology, neuroscience and consciousness.