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People experience weird sensations at various points in their lives. When this occurs, some people may think there is something wrong with them, while others think something supernatural has occurred. Since these sensations are out of the ordinary, people may think that they are the only ones who experience them. However, these sensations are fairly common and happen to most everyone at some point in their lives; some may experience them more than others may. Frauds, charlatans, and pseudo masters exploit these sensations and try to make them into something supernatural, when in fact they are just normal body sensations caused in response to abnormal sensory feedback. Some of these sensations are explained below.

Out of Body Experience

This is the disorienting sensation of being outside your body and looking down upon it. To process information properly, the brain needs to receive coordinated feedback from its senses. If one sense is reporting on one sensation while another sense is reporting on a different sensation, the brain gets confused and is unable to process the incongruity.

Neuroscientist Eric Altschuler noticed the following effect while eating in a McDonald’s restaurant and he later published his finding in the journal Perception. To experience a feeling of transcendence, set up two mirrors so that they face each other to form an infinite set of images. Step between them and tilt your head so that, in every other image, you cannot see your eyes. Now stoke your cheek. You will feel as though there is a stranger in front of you who is stroking his or her cheek. Since in every other image you cannot recognize your own face, the brain thinks it is seeing the image of another person.

Déjà Vu

When you get the feeling that what you are currently experiencing has happened before, you are experiencing déjà vu. This is not some type of psychic experience; it is a common sensation.

Biologist Susumu Tonegawa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently located the specific receptors in the hippocampus (a pair of neuronal clusters in the center of the brain) that work to tell similar but different places apart. The hippocampus is the part of your brain responsible for both your sense of direction and the formation of new memories. In mice lacking these receptors, a room they have never seen before evokes the same response as a slightly different room they have seen a lot, a sensation that may be similar to déjà vu. Déjà vu could be simply a temporary disorientation rooted there as your brain confuses a new location with a remembered one. Others have hypostasized that déjà vu is merely a minute delay in communication between the two hemispheres of the brain.

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