Are people who have greater imagery skills more likely to have OBEs?
OBEs might be expected to be more frequently experienced by people with the most highly developed skills of conceiving mental images if the experience is one constructed entirely from the imagination. Irwin [Irw80, 81b] was interested in whether OBEers differ from other people in terms of certain cognitive skills or ways of thinking, including imagery. He found 21 OBEers and to these he gave the ‘Ways of thinking questionnaire’ (WOT), the ‘Differential personality questionnaire’ (DPQ) and the ‘Vividness of visual imagery questionnaire’ (VVIQ). For each he compared the scores of the OBEers with those expected from studies of larger groups of the population. The imagery questionnaire a self-rated measure of vividness of just visual imagery. The scores of these few OBEers were unexpectedly found to be lower than normal, and significantly so. It seems that they had less, not more, vivid imagery than the average. The next test, the WOT, aims to test the verbalizer-visualizer dimension of co
