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. Your mind is playing tricks on itself In recent years, neurologists have identified potential bases for the feeling that someone or something is haunting us. Research suggests seizures in the temporal lobe—the area of your noggin that processes visual memory and spoken language—might trigger ghost sightings.
Electrical disturbances in this brain area could make us feel connected to otherworldly realms. Patients who have a history of such problems are more likely to report paranormal beliefs; furthermore, supernatural experiences tend to cluster between 2 a.
Gray matter researchers have also spotted similar activity in controlled laboratory settings. A case study by doctors at a Jerusalem hospital described a patient who had a spontaneous religious experience as physicians stimulated his temporal lobe while treating him for epilepsy. And a paper published in the International Journal of Yoga found that people with supposed telepathic powers exhibited unusual activity in a section of the lobe called the right parahippocampal gyrus—one of a pair of regions that handle memory—when they tried to complete a mind-reading task.
Other sections of our headspace can also fall victim to phantom confusion. In a study, Swiss neuroscientists blindfolded a group of participants, then hooked up their hands to a machine that tracked finger movement.
When the subjects moved their arms, a robotic appendage behind them simultaneously touched their backs in the same fashion. But when investigators delayed the mimicking movements of the animatronic device by just a few milliseconds, several people reported sensing an intelligent presence behind them, as if a spirit were poking them in the back. The researchers think the stalled movements wreak havoc on how the brain times incoming signals in the frontoparietal cortex, which controls inbound sensory and motor cues.
Later imaging on folks who reported sensing paranormal shadows in the past found many had lesions in that exact area of gray matter, affecting its normal functioning. 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.
How could these things be related? Some strange experiences that people blame on ghosts involve unexplained sounds or movements. A window may seem to open all by itself. In one study, French and his colleagues found that people with higher levels of paranormal beliefs and higher tendencies to get absorbed are also more likely to experience inattentional blindness. They also tend to have a more limited working memory. If you have trouble keeping lots of information in your memory or paying attention to more than one thing at once, then you risk missing sensory cues from the environment around you.
And you might blame any misperceptions that result on a ghost. Anyone may experience sleep paralysis, hallucinations, pareidolia or inattentional blindness. But not everyone turns to ghosts or other supernatural beings as a way to explain these experiences.
Even as a child, Dom never thought he had come face to face with a real ghost. He went online and asked questions about what might have happened. He used critical thinking. And he got the answers he needed.
When an episode happens now, he uses a technique that Jalal developed. He just focuses on his breathing, tries to relax as much as possible and waits for it to pass.
I just sleep and enjoy sleeping. She wondered if people with stronger critical-thinking skills might be less likely to believe in the paranormal.
So she and her mentor, psychologist Philip Tyson, recruited students for a study about their paranormal beliefs. The students majored in a wide range of different fields. Students with higher grades tended to have lower levels of paranormal beliefs, this study found. And students in the physical sciences, engineering or math tended not to believe as strongly as those studying the arts.
This trend also has been seen in research by others. According to French, hallucinations are more common among the general population than most people realize, and are sometimes wrongly interpreted as ghosts. He points to sleep paralysis—a phenomenon that occurs when someone wakes up while still in the dream-inducing REM stage of sleep, in which your body is paralyzed—as one example. Studies have shown that around 30 to 40 percent of people have experienced sleep paralysis at least once in their lives, with about five percent of participants reporting visual and audio hallucinations, including the presence of monstrous figures, and difficulty breathing.
The experience has been interpreted as paranormal in several cultures. One example of this is our tendency to see faces in random images, a phenomenon called pareidolia. In a study conducted at the University of British Columbia, researchers Aiyana Willard and Ara Norenzayan found that participants with a higher tendency to anthropomorphize—meaning those that are more likely to assign human qualities to nonhuman things—were also more likely to have paranormal beliefs.
Even though we find the idea of ghosts and spirits scary, in a wider context, they provide evidence for the survival of the soul. With that in mind, I reached out to Apple Inc. Maybe more images like mine will surface and someone will come up with a technical explanation for these spectral iPhone photos.
Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. This temporary paralysis is sometimes accompanied by the hallucination of a figure in the room that could be interpreted as a supernatural being. The idea that this could be a supernatural visitation is easier to understand when you think that when we believe in a phenomenon, we are more likely to experience it.
Consider what might happen if you were in a reputedly haunted house at night and you saw something moving in the corner of your eye. If you believe in ghosts, you might interpret what you saw as a ghost. This is an example of top-down perception in which what we see is influenced by what we expect to see. And, in the dark, where it might be difficult to see properly, our brain makes the best inference it can, which will depend on what we think is likely — and that could be a ghost.
According to the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, belief comes quickly and naturally , whereas scepticism is slow and unnatural. In a study of neural activity , Harris and colleagues discovered that believing a statement requires less effort than disbelieving it. Given these multiple reasons for us to believe in ghosts, it seems that the belief is likely to be with us for many years to come.
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