Beyond Nature: Exploring the World of Paranormal
Have you ever seen shadowy figures move across your room when the lights are off? Have you ever heard strange noises or even felt someone touching you when no one was actually there? Here comes the tricky part of what people always call paranormal phenomenon or supernatural experiences (encounters that couldn’t be explained by pure science we commonly understand): According to a survey conducted by American analytics and advisory company Gallup in 2005, three quarters of Americans believe in the paranormal, and nearly one in five people claim to have actually seen a ghost (Moore, 2005 cited in Robson, 2014). Psychologists and scientists never stopped investigating the events and experiences people had that can’t be explained by empirical knowledge. Youtube ghost hunters and exorcists nowadays only make the matter more controversial and attractive. Different types of hunting apparatus have been invented for ghost lovers, such as cameras, video recorders, motion sensor, and EMF (detector for change in the electromagnetic field), not only to gain credibility and likes on their videos and articles, but also to continue urging one another to stay curious about what lies in the space and time beyond our ordinary perception. Despite mysteries shrouding people’s cognition, both scientists and psychologists have already unpacked the so-called “spirits or ghosts'' in our real life experiences.
One incident that was hard for me to wrap my head around is a personal story told by an investigative journalist Carrie Poppy on her experience in a dilapidated house in an episode of Ted Talk. After Carrie bought an old house and moved in, she started to experience strange chills and chest pressure with an unexplained feeling of fear rising from herself, which got worse as time went on. Sometimes she even heard strange noises. She then reached out for exorcism, but it had no significant impact on her strange feelings. Some people on the Internet later warned her about gas poisoning, so she finally reached out to a gas company. Using a carbon monoxide detector, they found a carbon monoxide gas leak in her old house. “It’s a really good thing that you called us tonight, because you could have been dead very soon” (TED, 2017). Carrie’s mysterious haunting experience was finally resolved as the symptoms of gas poisoning.
There are definitely mysterious and unexplainable haunting stories like the case of Enfield, England in the 20th century, where a single mother and her children experienced paranormal disturbance in their old house with photographed levitations and tape-recorded noises. However, a mysterious family story can’t provide convincing evidence that the paranormal actually exists, or that they are because of human ghosts. In other words, some ghost hunting experiences can be easily explained by science. Reports on experiencing ghosts seem to be consistent with certain damage to the regions associated with the right hemisphere of the brain responsible for visual processing. Certain forms of epilepsy can also cause spooky feeling and hallucination as if someone is talking to you or seeing a shadowy figure (Robson, 2014). An Italian psychologist was once scared away from his bathroom after seeing an old man staring behind him in the mirror early one morning. His later experiments confirmed that the illusions people have are very common, especially when you stare at your reflection in half light and your brain struggles to construct the contour of the face. It fills in missing information, which could potentially be a skull or other insidious creatures (Robson, 2014).
Other factors such as variations in electromagnetic fields; infrasound; gas poisoning, like Carrie’s experience; and fungal hallucination can all lead to spooky encounters with the so-called ghosts. A Canadian neurologist named Michael Persinger demonstrated that the temporal lobes of the brain could produce a haunting experience that is influenced by a variation in electromagnetic fields to create perceptions like being touched or seeing human-like figures. The famous haunted Hampton Court does have strange magnetic fields in its vicinity (Dagnall, 2016). Infrasound, the audio below the level of human hearing ability, has been a significant contributing factor to the haunting experience as well. Psychological experiments with subjects listening to music with infrasound have reported chills, fear, uneasiness, and sorrowful emotions. Infrasound is capable of hitting the right sound frequency and strong enough to resonate with human eyes that makes people feel they see unnatural sights or hear strange voices, which could be easily misinterpreted when people are situated in a spooky place, like a dilapidated house or a haunted laboratory (Schwarz, 2013 cited in Dagnall 2016). Finally, toxic gases such as carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, and pesticides are responsible for ghostly experiences and are able to induce serious illusionary symptoms after toxification. Fungal hallucinations caused by toxic mould can stimulate related experiences as well. Shane Rogers and his team from Clarkson University found similarities between supernatural experiences and the hallucinogenic effects of fungal spores. This may explain why ghosts are often seen in older buildings with inadequate ventilation and poor air quality. Experts even reported that older books exposed to toxic mold over time might also trigger neurological symptoms and haunting experiences (Dagnall 2016).
The human mind is intriguing. Over the past several years, nearly 37% of Americans have reported being in haunted houses (TED, 2017). A classic experiment conducted a tour in an old building. Participants who were pretold by experimenters that the place was haunted reported a more frequent and intense haunted experience than the other participants who were only told that a new renovation was in progress. Verbal suggestions have significant impact, especially on ghost believers. Tapani Riekki at the University of Helsinki in Finland conducted an experiment on both ghost skeptics and believers to view animations of moving shapes with a brain scanner. The believers had more brain activity in the areas associated with understanding motives and were more likely to observe hidden faces in the pictures, a weaker cognitive inhibition to quash the unwanted thoughts or spooky encounters (Robson, 2014). No matter how skeptical or convinced you are about the existence of ghosts and paranormals, different people have different internal beliefs, or what we call inner truth, towards the existence of ghosts. There are things that our inner truth, belief, or real experiences can be explained by science and turned into the objective outer truth of the world we live in. Humans, a particular species in this universe, have tons of mysteries to uncover and doubts to resolve. Aside from fear and strange encounters, we should somehow appreciate the explanations we already have because they are the products and evidence of human curiosity. We are never willing to admit the universe is completely random because searching for what is beyond the phenomenal world helps us better understand what is currently within.
Links:
https://theconversation.com/the-top-three-scientific-explanations-for-ghost-sightings-58259
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20141030-the-truth-about-the-paranormal