I subscribe to the spirit-mind-body model of existence and experience.
It is an old model, and has never been fully accepted or validated by the scientific community, but has never been disproved.
Recent research using this model has come up with some very interesting possibilities regarding finding more workable truths about human thought and experience. None of this research, as far as I know, has been conducted by actual "scientists."
An example of what this research has discovered is the apparency that creation, or the cycle of creation, starts with the spirit; or more generally, that the physical world has a non-physical but intentional origin. This may appear to only be relevant in cosmology and theology but it has far-reaching implications in the physical and biological sciences.
For instance, this idea presents us with the possibility that life forms are a product of intelligent engineering. This has been validated by the research done so far.
Another ramification of this model is that the mind is essentially a non-material (energy) construct that was designed prior to the design of many of the complex body forms that we are familiar with today. In this model, the mind provides an intermediate control path between the spirit entity and the body (or bodies) it is controlling. This gives us more of a robot analogy for the body. The controller (or programmer) of the robot may exist at some distance from it and still exert control through the intermediate mental connection. Just as you would never expect a robot to originate creative ideas or its own emotions, per this model, you would not expect such manifestations in humans to originate in the body or the brain, but only to be reflected there, as a complex series of responses to what is essentially an exterior command point.
When a person is severely injured or medicated and actually moves away from its body, then decides to return to the body to assist in its recovery, the person may be capable of recalling what happened while they were "away." The great variety of stories that come out of out-of-body-experiences may have many different explanations. This would be an interesting line of research. But if the fundamental model, which I believe is much more workable than the brain-equals-mind model, is rejected as fully as it seems to be rejected these days, then no one in the scientific community will even try to figure out how to test it or how to use it.
I know for sure that this model has been used outside the scientific community with results that could at least be characterized as "helpful." Some would be much more enthusiastic about this than what I have expressed here. We also have, at least, the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson on last-life recalls to give us some encouragement in pursuing this line of research more vigorously.
