is turning to neuroscientific evidence on kinds of experiences that can be
considered relevant for understanding one or another aspect of the tours of
heaven. It is indeed the case that many results and theories shed light on
various details of ecstatic religious experience, that is, religious experience
characterized by extraordinary visions and insights. It is not the task of this
chapter to provide a survey of all relevant research (cf. McNamara, 2009,
pp. 80–130; Marsh, 2010), but I will mention a few important points that are
particularly helpful in studying tours of heaven.
The phenomenon of out-of-body experiences (OBEs) constitutes one of the
most researched topics in neuroscience related to tours of heaven. Strictly
speaking, an OBE is“the sensation of a separation between body and observ-
ing self,”whereas in a broader sense it includes disturbances“in the representation
of information about the current state of one’s body—its posture, kinaesthetics
and gravitational orientation”(Brugger & Mohr, 2009, p. 137). Groundbreak-
ing research on OBEs has been carried out by Olaf Blanke, who studied
experiences including“vestibular sensations (such asfloating,flying, elevation
and rotation), visual body-part illusions (such as the illusory shortening,
transformation or movement of an extremity) and the experience of seeing
one’s body only partially during an [OBE] or [autoscopy]”(Blanke et al.,
2004). Blanke and colleagues (Blanke et al., 2005) found that the right
temporoparietal junction (a brain area on the right side, at the junction of
the temporal and parietal lobes) connects three aspects of self-perception:
visuospatial perspective, self-location, and experienced spatial unity. Neigh-
boring brain areas add other crucial aspects of the self to this picture, such as
vestibular perception (the perception of balance and spatial orientation),
multisensory integration, and the perception of the body and body parts.
Whereas previous research connected OBEs to disturbances in these areas
due to pathologies such as epileptic seizures or migraine, the latest studies
identified tendencies in clinically normal people that are correlated with OBEs,
such as more perceptual anomalies and more proneness to hallucinations
(Braithwaite et al., 2011, p. 849).
Near-death experiences (NDEs) constitute another group of phenomena
that is relevant for the study of tours of heaven. People who had such
experience report“ineffability, overwhelming feelings of peace, seeing a tun-
nel, a sensation of being out of the body, meeting nonphysical beings including
a‘Being of Light,’reviewing one’s life, a border or point of no return, and
coming back to life with marked changes in attitudes and with knowledge not
acquired through normal perception”(Greyson, 2013, p. 471). While OBEs
are related to a relatively well-defined group of neurological processes (the
integration of information about the location and unity of the self and the
body), NDEs involve a diversity of experiential details and neurological
correlates. In fact, out-of-body experience seems to be one aspect of NDE
(Mobbs & Watt, 2011). What about the other reported details? The experience
158 Cognitive Science and the New Testament