For some, hearing voices or experiencing a vision can be an early indicator of medical conditions such as schizophrenia. Some evidence even suggests that people with underlying brain disorders tend to have paranormal confrontations that are more intense and negative than the average brush with the beyond.
Even in those without mental illness, temporary changes in brain activity can lead to run-ins with wraiths. People who experiment with psychoactive drugs like LSD and magic mushrooms frequently report spiritual fantasies.
Furthermore, psychiatrists have deemed many visions the result of sleep paralysis, a poorly understood condition in which the afflicted wake up and find themselves unable to move. Scientists have yet to pinpoint the roots of this phenomenon, but some think it occurs when the brain crosses wires between conscious awareness and the dream-filled REM stage of slumber.
According to a survey in the International Journal of Applied and Basic Medical Research , at least 8 percent of the general population and around 30 percent of people with psychiatric illnesses have reported having one of these nighttime episodes at some point in their lives. Many cultures even have a specific name for the ghoulish occurrence. Sometimes people experience an otherworldly encounter simply because something in their environment is making a strange noise that sends their bodies into disarray.
In the early s, British engineer Vic Tandy was working in the research lab of a medical supply company when a strange feeling came over him. All at once he felt frigid and overwhelmed with a sense of impending doom. As he paced around the room to calm down, he suddenly sensed an ethereal presence. Moments later, he was sure he saw a gray apparition in his peripheral view. When he whirled around, the specter was gone. The culprit turned out to be a fan that hummed at a rate of Waveforms that dwell around this acoustic sweet spot and below are known as infrasound.
In fact, after Tandy published his findings in in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research , For Tandy, the fright left him more curious than ever about ghosts. Consider the rural town of Anson, Texas, where locals long believed that if you drove out to the crossroads nearest the local cemetery and flashed your headlights, a mysterious flicker would bounce back at you.
Legend held that the blink came from the lantern of an ill-fated mother searching for her son. In , a group of skeptics armed with iPhones and Google Maps confirmed a less evocative explanation: Cars coming around a bend on a nearby highway cast the eerie beams of light. Some historians believe that rye bread contaminated with ergot fungus the same microbe from which LSD is derived may have triggered the presumed possessions that led to the Salem witch trials of the late s.
So far, the evidence supporting this hypothesis is pretty thin. You experience it whenever you stare at clouds and see rabbits, ships or faces.
Or gaze at the moon and see a face. The brain also does top-down processing. It adds information to your perception of the world. Most of the time, there is way too much stuff coming in through the senses.
Paying attention to all of it would overwhelm you. So your brain picks out the most important parts. And then it fills in the rest. The same goes for your other senses.
Most of the time, this picture is accurate. And it will most likely continue to mishear those words even after you learn the right ones. This is very similar to what happens when so-called ghost hunters capture sounds that they say are ghosts speaking.
They call this electronic voice phenomenon, or EVP. The recording is probably just random noise. But when you know what the words are supposed to be, you might now find that you can discern them easily. Your brain may also add faces to images of random noise. Research has shown that patients who experience visual hallucinations are more likely than normal to experience pareidolia — see faces in random shapes, for instance.
They recruited 82 volunteers. First, the researchers asked a series of questions about how often these volunteers had hallucination-like experiences. Next, the participants looked at 60 images of black and white noise. For a very brief moment, another image would flash in the center of the noise. Twelve of these images were faces that were easy to see. Another 24 were hard-to-see faces. And 24 more images showed no faces at all — just more noise. The volunteers had to report whether a face was present or absent in each flash.
In a separate test, the researchers showed the same volunteers a series of 36 images. Two-thirds of them contained a face pareidolia. The remaining 12 did not. Participants who had initially reported more hallucination-like experiences were also more likely to report faces in the flashes of random noise. They were also better at identifying those images that contained face pareidolia. In the next few years, Smailes plans to study situations in which people might be more likely to see faces in randomness.
It has to create more of your reality for you. In this type of situation, Smailes says, the brain may be more likely to impose its own creations onto reality. But it can also completely miss things that are there. This is called inattentional blindness. Want to know how it works? Watch the video before you keep reading.
The video shows people in white and black shirts passing a basketball. Count how many times the people in white shirts pass the ball.
How many did you see? Partway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks through the players. Did you see it? About half of all viewers who count passes while watching the video miss the gorilla completely. If you too missed the gorilla, you experienced inattentional blindness. You were likely in a state called absorption.
He is a psychologist in England at Goldsmiths University of London. Some people are more likely to become absorbed than others. And these people also report higher levels of paranormal beliefs, he says, including beliefs in ghosts.
It is at once a deeply personal exercise and always more-than-personal, an engagement within and beyond ourselves. We want something from ghosts, and our engagement with them has stakes ; our presents and futures are tied up with their pasts. Haunting is the way ghosts make their desires known. This means acknowledging two things. These demands are always specific to the ghost. Sometimes these demands are satisfied through acknowledgment, but sometimes they demand action.
We must also entertain the possibility that sometimes ghosts just like to haunt—that the act of haunting is satisfying in itself.
A translucent, hooded figure stands beside a desk. A light glows from behind the desk and from the screens of the laptop and computer monitor on the desk. The entire scene is shrouded in an eerie mist. Their very form indexes that which they represent. Ghosts trouble, inhabit, and mediate the borderlands between life and death, past and present.
As transient beings, they signal to the living that the boundaries we draw—and which we then naturalize—are unsettled as well. To accommodate ghosts, we must make ourselves accountable to the pasts they bring into the present, even when those pasts are painful, and even when they threaten to unsettle our present and futures. They are endlessly elusive, flashing up for brief moments as a whisper, a tap on the shoulder, a hazy specter, a rumor, a scent, or an uncanny feeling, only to disappear again.
Ghostly encounters are often met with both indefinable certainty and nagging doubt: we feel the unsettling reality of what it is to be haunted, but we are left without a concrete image, a fixed meaning, or a cohesive narrative.
We cannot reckon with ghosts without rethinking our contemporary evidentiary schemes and value systems. The arrival of the ghost which is also always a return disrupts linear time, bringing past, present, and future together in unexpected ways.
As the past bursts into the present through and alongside the ghost, it makes demands on the future and forces us to contend with time differently. Ghosts disrupt linear time and trouble progressive historical narratives because they reveal multiple, coexisting temporalities and the complex layering of different pasts onto fractal presents and futures.
Ghosts manifest in times and places where radical change is afoot.
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