灵魂出窍不再是天方夜谭式的宗教玄学，神经学实验发现其或与内耳和大脑前庭的受损有关，焦虑抑郁、知觉障碍、特殊的大脑空间感知皆为诱因。本文从科学出发，重新定义灵魂出窍的生理现象和哲学命题。
为什么会有人灵魂出窍?
译者：朱小钊
校对：朱星汉
导读&笔记：
杨婧娴
策划：张鑫健
Why People Have Out-of-Body Experiences？
为什么会有人灵魂出窍?
本文选自 The Atalantic
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A new study links abnormalities in the inner ear to a predisposition for such sensations.
最新研究表明“灵魂出窍”或与内耳损伤有关。
In 1958, Robert Monroe floated out of his body for the first time. It began “without any apparent cause,”
he wrote
. His doctor, finding no physical
ailment
, prescribed tranquilizers. A psychologist friend, meanwhile, told him to try leaving his body again. After all, the friend said, “some of the fellows who practice yoga and those Eastern religions claim they can do it whenever they want to.”
1958年，罗伯特·门罗曾第一次体会到“灵魂出窍”。随后他写到：“出现这种感觉没有明显的原因。”医生认为他并无疾病，便给他开了镇定剂。但同时，他的一位心理学家朋友则建议他再试着“出窍”一次，并说: “一些练习瑜伽以及信仰东方宗教的人都声称可以随心所欲地灵魂出窍。”
ailment
n./elmənt/an illness that is not very serious小病，不适。
Monroe did try it again—and again and again. He recalls these experiences in his classic 1971 book
Journeys out of the Body
, which launched the phrase “out-of-body experiences” into the public conversation. Monroe died in 1995, but the fascination with out-of-body experiences endures.
门罗之后也不断尝试，并在他
1971年出版的经典著作《灵魂出窍之旅》（
Journeys out of the Body
）中回忆了这些经历。同时，这本书让
“灵魂出窍”这个短语进入了公众的视野。1995年，门罗去世，但人们对于灵魂出窍的痴迷丝毫不减。
Out-of-body experience can vary person to person, but they often involve the sense of floating above one's actual body and looking down. For neuroscientists, the phenomenon is a puzzle and an opportunity: Understanding how the brain goes awry can also illuminate how it is supposed to work. Neuroscientists now think that out-of-body experiences involve the
vestibular system
—made up of canals in the inner ear that track a person's locations in space—and how that information gets integrated with other senses in the brain.
灵魂出窍的经历因人而异，但都包含一种灵魂漂浮，俯瞰大地的感觉。这一现象对于神经科学家而言，既是未解之谜，也是一个机会：了解大脑如何出错可以帮助我们更好理解大脑工作的原理。神经科学家们认为灵魂出窍与
前庭系统
（由负责追踪定位的内耳管道构成）有关，也和人在灵魂出窍时前庭提供的定位信息如何与其它感官相结合有关。
In a recent
study
from France, Christophe Lopez, a neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université, teamed up with Maya Elzière, a doctor who sees patient with vestibular disorders. Some of these patients complained of dizziness, with physical causes that ranged from fluid leaking out of the inner ear to an infection of a nearby nerve. Of 210 patients who reported dizziness, 14 percent said they have had out-of-body experiences. In contrast, only 5 percent of healthy participants in the study reported such sensations.
最近，法国艾克斯
-马赛大学的神经学家克里斯多夫·洛佩兹与治疗前庭障碍的医生玛雅·埃尔齐埃合作进行了一项研究。埃尔齐埃的一些病人因某些身体原因，如内耳出现体液渗漏或鼓膜附近的神经受到感染，饱受头昏眼花之苦。在210位头昏眼花的病人中，14%的病人说他们有过灵魂出窍的经历。相比之下，仅有5%的健康参与者有过类似感受。
Among the patients who had out-of-body experiences, some reported “being attracted by a spiral, like in a tunnel.” Others described “entering my body, like in an envelope, from the top.” Lopez says he thinks the out-of-body sensation is a result of the mismatch between information coming from the damaged vestibular system and the normal visual system.
一部分有过灵魂出窍的病人说他们
“当时感觉自己被漩涡吸了进去，像进入一个隧道”，而另一些人将这些经历描述为“从上方进入自己的身体，像进入一个信封里一样”。洛佩兹认为灵魂出窍是因为受损前庭系统发出的信息与正常视觉系统发出的信息之间互不协调。
Olaf Blanke
, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, says that the study “puts previous anecdotal suggestions about a strong vestibular component in [out-of-body experiences] on firm grounds.” Blanke, who has worked with Lopez previously but not on the current study, has also shown that electrically stimulating the brain area that integrates vestibular and visual information can
induce an out-of-body illusion
. Whether the
perturbation
is in the inner ear itself or the brain, the end result seems to be the same: a feeling of having
defied
physics and left one's body.
瑞士洛桑联邦理工学院的神经学家奥拉夫
·布兰科说，
之前传闻发生
“灵魂出窍”与前庭系统有关，而这份研究证实了这一言论。
布兰科曾和洛佩兹有过合作，
但并未参与洛佩兹当前的这项研究
。
他也证明了用电刺激脑内连接前庭信息与视觉信息的区域可以引起
“灵魂出窍”
。无论是内耳的小毛病，还是大脑内部受到轻微的电刺激，
都会让人体产生一种物理学所无法解释，灵魂离开身体的感觉。
perturb
v. /pəˈtɜːb/ to worry you quite a lot 使焦虑; 使不安
defy
v. /,dɪˈfaɪ/to refuse to obey a law or rule, or refuse to do what someone in authority tells you to do违抗〔法律或规则〕；拒不服从〔有权威者〕
But there is still another mystery. While 14 percent of Elzière's patients experiencing dizziness reported out-of-body experiences, 14 percent is not 100 percent. And healthy people appear to sometimes have such experiences, too. A vestibular disorder alone does not cause people to feel like they've left their bodies. “We believe out-of-body experiences might be a combination of several factors,” says Lopez. He also surveyed patients about their mental states, and found that those with anxiety and depression in addition to dizziness were more likely to have out-of-body experiences.
但除此之外，还有一些未解之谜。在埃尔齐埃的实验中，出现眩晕症状的病人中有
14%经历过灵魂出窍，但仅仅只占14%，况且健康的人有时也会灵魂出窍。单是前庭系统紊乱并不会让人感觉灵魂出窍。洛佩兹说：“我们认为灵魂出窍是多种因素造成的。”他在调查了病人们的精神状态后发现，那些除了眩晕还患有焦虑症与抑郁症的病人出现灵魂出窍的可能性更大。
Jason Braithwaite, a psychologist at Lancaster University, has found that people who have other perceptual anomalies—like feeling the unexplained presence of another person or a body part changing shape—are also more likely to report out-of-body experiences.
兰卡斯特大学的心理学家杰森
·布雷斯韦特发现，出现过知觉障碍，比如莫名其妙感到有别人存在或者感觉身体某个部位变形的人，同样很可能灵魂出窍。
The out-of-body experience may have to do with a specific way the brain tries to make sense of a space. One way to explain this, says Braithwaite, is that your brain automatically builds a bird's-eye view of the space around you. Usually, you see things from your own perspective. But when something perturbs the brain and it can't make sense of different streams of sensory information, this bird's-eye model of the world may take over.
灵魂出窍可能与大脑感知空间的某一特定方式有关。按照布雷斯特的解释，大脑会自发鸟瞰周遭的环境。而通常情况下，人都是从自身的视角来观察环境。一旦大脑受干扰，无法处理来自不同感官的信息流，鸟瞰视角便会取代个人视角。
To Braithwaite, studying out-of-body experiences gets at the big questions of self and consciousness. “Twenty or thirty years ago, psychology thought consciousness research was a
flaky
thing, like you get your meditation mat out and light your
joss sticks
,” he says. (The reaction of Monroe's psychologist friend to out-of-body experiences suggests as much.) But, says Braithwaite, “aberrant experiences in all their forms and flavors have a great deal to teach scientists and philosophers about the nature of human experiences, even when they're
