Originally Posted by
Oedipud
I've got this book by Oliver Fox, it was written in the early 1900's, where he did just that. Theosophy was absolutely huge back in those days (Oliver was a big follower of it), and he performed a number of experiments like that with friends to see if he was actually dreaming, or out of his body.
The problem being, of course, that it was only himself and a few collaborators that verified the OOBE's. It was a pretty subjective go at things scientifically. The subconscious is such a ginormous wealth of information that you could say it picks up nearly everything you may attempt. Furthering that, there's speculation that the subconcious may be capable of performing a crude sort of quantum calculation...and if that's the case, OOBE's will never be scientifically validated. If we're at all capable on some level of assessing probabilities based on all the info our subconscious has absorbed from our enivironment, the argument could be made that we just 'calculated' the most probable outcome of a hidden object experiment.
Although, it'd be pretty cool to verify that we had the ability to do something like that. In the end, either result would be astounding...the nonlocality of consciousness or the ability to compute quantum functions.