As it turns out, that was just a bit of wild speculation offered by Susan Blackmore during an interview.

It's amazing how common that explanation is, and how firmly people believe it, even though there's absolutely no science behind it.

And you came to this conclusion ... how? I'm guessing "these are the only two possibilities I can think of, therefore it must be one of these!"

Actually, I asked if I could make those assumptions. Those assumptions were made on previous experiences I've had with non-religious people who seem to desperately need to insert God in to the conversation at every opportunity.

Well, this is Slashdot, so ...

A quick search turns up a few documented cases. You can form your own opinion about them.

There's nothing "documented beyond any doubt" -- that's just anti-scientific thinking.

Can "out of body BS" be studied scientifically?

This isn't complicated.

"Hallucination covers it. No reason to suspect otherwise." is, well, as anti-science a statement as you could make.

Yeah! Who needs science when you can just make assumptions?

It's interesting that you're offended by a large number of completely unfounded assumptions you've made about my opinions and beliefs based on a single sentence which carries no such implications.

Irrational nonsense like this is exactly what I expect from the self-described "rationalists", who assert reverence for logic, reason, and science yet understand nothing about the subjects nor how to apply them.

Can I make such an assumption about you?

I think the parent is referring to veridical experiences.

It's interesting that you're willing to draw a significantly stronger conclusion that the authors of the study.

Spam? Maybe, but OneNote is, well, exactly what our hapless med student seems to want.

Is there an alternative that's as good? Evernote, Remember, and Google Keep are great, sure, but they hardly compare. Hate Microsoft all you want, but OneNote is undoubtedly best-in-class.

Turning into?

If you don't want pay union dues, which are essential for a union to function effectively, then don't join a union.

My father was a union man. His dues more than paid for themselves.

As I pointed out, the majority of their users were completely unaffected. Of those who were, most were out for less than a day. I should also point out, that many of those affected only experienced slowdowns.

The same was true for the Great BlackBerry Outage. The phone still functioned as a phone, as did apps. Messaging (Email and BBM) were really the only services significantly impacted, though every message was ultimately delivered. (The same can not be said for their competition.)

The infamous BlackBerry outage as really very similar to Apples MobileMe outage -- except it was significantly shorter and impacted a significantly smaller portion of their users. Well, and RIM didn't drop a single message -- I can't stress how important that fact is in terms of reliability.

The points? The "BlackBerry is unreliable" bit is absurd as they're dramatically more reliable than the competition. Your carrier is much more likely to be down than BlackBerry. Other companies regularly experience outages far worse and far more frequently than BlackBerry, yet still maintain a reputation for reliability.

There isn't much to argue about here. I contend that the outage hurt RIM far more than similar outages hurt other companies simply because of their absurd reliability. When they have an outage, it's big news. When Apple, Google, etc. have an outage, it's not surprising in the least and thus gets far less press coverage, if it's reported in the media at all.

You could have said the same thing about RIM in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010...

Apple is actually doing significantly less than RIM did when they were on top. If the beliefs about RIM have any truth to them, we should see Apple fall hard over the next few years.

Now ask yourself: What has Apple been doing for the past few years? What are they doing right now?