Recently one person asked me why sci-art doesn't deal with the paranormal. I don't know about others but I have done a few works based on these aspects. You can see them here.
Some paranormal experiences are easily explainable, based on faulty activity in the brain. Reports of poltergeists invisibly moving objects seem to be consistent with damage to certain regions of the right hemisphere that are responsible for visual processing; certain forms of epilepsy, meanwhile, can cause the spooky feeling that a presence is stalking you close by– perhaps underlying accounts of faceless “shadow people” lurking in the surroundings. Some of the experiences people describe as encounters with the supernatural had been reproduced in labs by stimulating certain parts of the human brain.
Watch these videos below to know more about this...
Neuroscientists awaken ghosts… hidden in our cortex
Ghosts only exist in our minds, and we know precisely where to look for them. Patients suffering from neurological or psychiatric conditions have often reported a strange “feeling of a presence”. EPFL researchers have now succeeded in recreating this illusion in the lab.
So science is slowly replacing paranormal and the supernatural with the normal and the natural.
Not only are ghosts supposed to be able to do things that science says are impossible, such as turn invisible or pass through walls, but also scientists using reliable research methods have found zero evidence that ghosts exist. But still why do people see shapes of ghosts, hear voices too and experience strange things? - here are some more reasons - 1. When the carbon monoxide content increases in the room ( because of broken fire places, burning things to make rooms warm), mostly due to inadequate ventilation, it affects our brain and we experience hallucination. Before a carbon monoxide gas leak poisons us or actually kills us, it can cause auditory hallucinations, a feeling of pressure on your chest, and an unexplained feeling of dread.
An often-told ghost story from the 1920s about the H family who moved into a new house only to hear footsteps, see apparitions, and feel malicious paranormal presences, turned out to be the result of carbon monoxide poisoning from a broken furnace. We see imaginary objects because of carbon monoxide and when we try to reach them, hurt ourselves and put the blame on ghosts or spirits.
2.Electromagnetic radiation in certain old buildings
It turns out that human physiology is susceptible to all sorts of things, including electrical fields. Again, feelings of dread and of being watched can be produced under lab conditions when people are exposed to certain electrical fields* and also electro -magnetic** radiation. Unlike ghosts, which never seem to make an appearance when experts are handy. Older houses are prone to generating these fields and some people are more susceptible than others.
3. Overstress and fatigue.
4. Movies impact and phobias (fear of ghost), and over-active imaginations. This is the most obvious one, and maybe the one that true believers scoff at the loudest. But many investigations into ghost stories turn out to be little more than just overactive imaginations. People may claim to have spent the night in a haunted hotel, for instance, but never bothered to ask an employee about those strange sounds coming from the walls. When a real investigator just stops to ask an employee, they often learn that these sounds are created by very ordinary things, like people walking up and down a flight of stairs nearby.
5. Molds (Fungi): Breathing in toxic mold can be bad for your respiratory system, but it can also be bad for your brain. Exposure to mold is known to cause neurologic symptoms like delirium, demetia, or irrational fears. So is it a coincidence that the houses we suspect are haunted also tend to be in disrepair and so quite possibly full of toxic mold? Scientists are trying to find if there is a link between the presence of mold and reported ghost sightings. We are still waiting for the authentic results to confirm whether there is really a link here.
6. Many times some notorious real estate dealers, agents, property builders, politicians try to apprehend the dwellers of big bungalows, with ghost story rumors and create strange incidents and then cover up with ghost stories. They do such things, in order to bring down the market price of the bungalows and compel the dwellers to sell it to them as the ghost stories will significantly affect the demand of the property.
7. Very often people create ghost stories out of fun.
8. Gurus, babas and some Godmen endorse such stories for commercial purpose to gain more devotees and keep them occupied with fear of ghosts and control them.
9. Jerks see something strange and make mountain out of rock. Like the story of a chicken. It seems a small leaf fell on a chicken and it ran and created chaos by saying that whole sky fell on him and world is gonna end. Similarly ghost stories were born. There are many more such stories. Some stories are just made up. The inventors of many famous stories, like the Amityville Horror, have come forward and admitted that they made it all up. Many more are turned into huge exaggerations by the time they reach the media because ghost stories sell.
A rustle in the grass. Is it just the wind or is it a dangerous predator? If you assume that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator but it turns out that it is just the wind, you have made a Type I Error in cognition, also known as a false positive, or believing something is real when it is not. That is, you have found a nonexistent pattern. Humans have evolved to make these types of errors.
10. Some tour operators propagate ghost stories of old forts, castles, buildings etc. in their cities/towns to increase the mystery and attraction to visit the place.
11. Some anti-social elements weave horror stories around old and dilapidated buildings to keep people away in order to carry out their nefarious activities.
12. Recently it was fond that infrasound (infrasonic, low-frequency sound), which is lower in frequency than 20 Hz(hertz) or cycles per second - human ears register sounds down to 1vibration per second (1Hz) - can make people hallucinate and feel anxious, discomfort and uneasiness.
(Just as the human eye can only see light at a range of frequencies—for example, we can’tseeradio waves—the human ear can only hear sounds in a range of frequencies. Above ~20,000 Hertz, sounds are too high pitched for our ears to parse them, like the echolocation calls of most bats that fall in this ultrasonic range.
Similarly, human ears have trouble hearing low-frequency sounds below ~20 Hertz—known as infrasound—but such sounds do not go totally unnoticed. In a 2003 study, 22% of concert goerswho were exposed to sounds at 17 Hertz reported feeling uneasy or sorrowful, getting chills, or "nervous feelings of revulsion and fear." In labs it was shown that it is a cause of both optical delusions and feelings of dread and can be caused by all sorts of common household machines such as a fan or other mechanical device.
So what are some of the more ordinary origins of such low frequency sounds? Weather events like earthquakes and volcanic activity or lightning, and communication between animals including elephants, whales, and hippos can all produce infrasound. And if you don’t live by any volcanoes or hippos but still think your house may be haunted? Humans also create low frequency sound via diesel engines, wind turbines, and some loud speakers or chemical explosions.)
And high frequencies of infra sound also can cause people to see optical illusions, get chills, feel anxious, and other effects. In other words, it can make you really sure you've seen a ghost, even if you haven't.
13. Suggestions: Studies suggest that we are more likely to believe in a paranormal experience if someone else who was there can back up our belief. So while we might be able to convince ourselves that we were somehow mistaken about what we saw or heard, we tend to put more stock into someone else’s eye witness account if it also backs our suspicions. So our belief in ghosts can be catching.
14. Neurologists have found that our brains release dopamine, a chemical associated with pleasure, when we are afraid. Exactly how much dopamine and how many receptors we have for receiving it can influence whether you are a person that enjoys being frightened or someone who would rather avoid scary movies or rides altogether. People with high levels of dopamine in the brain are more likely to find significance in coincidences and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none.
So for some, letting our imaginations run wild with the possibilities of cohabitating with ghosts, athough scary, may also produce a bonus euphoric high. Of course, believing in ghosts also allows us to believe in an existence after death, which ultimately can be comforting. These people willfully want to imagine and believe in ghosts and try to get comfort from doing so!
Many reported cases of ghost experiences happen when the person experiencing them is asleep or trying to get to sleep. Many ghost stories are textbook cases of hypnogogic delusions brought on by sleep paralysis. Basically, the person experiences a waking dream where they are unable to move. In addition, stories of OOBE (out of body experiences) and of someone waking to find a man or alien at the foot of their bed are further examples of the brain malfunctioning and playing tricks on us.
15. Even pollution is tied to psychotic episodes in teens such as hearing voices and intense paranoia (4). In several studies in the UK, these teenagers who live in highly polluted areas and also those who live in rural less polluted areas were asked the Qs: Do you feel that you were being watched, followed or talked to? And surprisingly those who live in highly polluted areas answered "Yes!" majority of the time! The researchers said their findings do not indicate that greater air pollution is the only cause for these psychotic experiences, and that there could be other contributing factors like noise pollution and increased stress levels too.
16. Hallucinations are where someone sees, hears, smells, tastes or feels things that don't exist outside their mind.
These can be caused by ... taking illegal drugs or alcohol, a mental illness such as schizophrenia, a progressive neurological condition such as Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease, loss of vision caused by a condition such as macular degeneration – this is known as Charles Bonnet syndrome. Hallucinations can also occur as a result of extreme tiredness ( because of long distance travel) or a recent bereavement ( death of a loved person).
And you can create hallucinations without drugs too. How? Watch this video
As demonstrated by the guys in this video, if you create a situation of intense sensory deprivation using some common household objects, you can induce some really strong hallucinations that mess with both your sense of sight and sound.
What they're doing actually follows the principles of a scientific phenomenon known as the Ganzfeld effect.
The Ganzfeld effect describes how when you're exposed to"an unstructured, uniform stimulation field"- such as seeing blackness and hearing constant television static - your brain responds by amplifying neural noise in an effort to find missing visual signals (5).
This can result in both visual and aural hallucinations like the guys in the video describe.
Of course, every person will experience the effect in different ways.
Even healthy people can be made to hear voices (called verbal hallucination)! (6)
Nutmeg: Nutmeg is a deliriant, meaning it can make you lose touch with reality and experience vivid hallucinations that are hard to distinguish from the real world. You might see things that are not there, hear voices that are not real, or feel sensations that are not happening.
Some people have reported seeing demons, ghosts, or aliens after eating nutmeg.
17. Sleep paralysis: Some people would wake up suddenly from sleep unable to move. Science has a name for it: sleep paralysis. This condition leaves someone feeling awake but paralyzed, or frozen in place. He can’t move or speak or breathe deeply. He may also see, hear or feel figures or creatures that aren’t really there. This is called a hallucination.
Up to as many as four out of every 10 people may have sleep paralysis. This common condition is often first noticed in the teen years. But men and women of any age can have it. During sleep, your body alternates between REM (rapid eye movement) and NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep. One cycle of REM and NREM sleep lasts about 90 minutes. NREM sleep occurs first and takes up to 75% of your overall sleep time. During NREM sleep, your body relaxes and restores itself. At the end of NREM, your sleep shifts to REM. Your eyes move quickly and dreams occur, but the rest of your body remains very relaxed. Your muscles are "turned off" during REM sleep. If you become aware before the REM cycle has finished, you may notice that you cannot move or speak.
If you find yourself unable to move or speak for a few seconds or minutes when falling asleep or waking up, then it is likely you have isolated recurrent sleep paralysis.
During this time, you might 'feel' your dreams are true and if they are nightmarish, you think you are dealing with ghosts, which is not actually true.
Factors that may be linked to sleep paralysis include: Lack of sleep, sleep schedule that changes, mental conditions such as stress or bipolar disorder, sleeping on the back, other sleep problems such as narcolepsy or nighttime leg cramps, use of certain medications, such as those for ADHD, substance abuse.
Also hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations occur in the fuzzy borderlands between wakefulness and sleep, when our conscious brain slips into unconsciousness as we fall asleep, or transitions into wakefulness from sleep. Reality and fantasy blur during this transition periods.
18. Certain types of Meditating: Â Buddhist monks praying and Franciscan nuns indicate strikingly low activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, a region of the brain area where the Orientation Association Area causes them to feel a sense of presence.
19. Brain scans of hallucinating patients with brain damage show that the visual cortex is activated during these phantasms learning them to actually see things that are not there. Fusiform area in the temporal lobe, which is involved in the recognition of faces (people with damage to this area cannot recognize faces, and stimulation of the area causes people to spontaneously see faces).
20. A phenomena experienced by mountain climbers, polar explorers, isolated sailors, and endurance athletes sense-"presence effect ”the sense that someone or something else is with them. Temperature, altitude, hypoxia, physical exhaustion, sleep deprivation, starvation, loneliness or fear could all be the causes.
21. Skeptical and critical thinking are not a hallmark of some people. People who don't use rational thinking are more likely to believe things without evidence.
22. Analysis of hypnotic regression tapes used by therapists who employ hypnosis shows that they ask leading questions and construct imaginary scenarios through which their subjects may concoct an entirely artificial event of something that never happened. Ghost stories can take birth like this too.
Need we say more?
Recently I read one interesting story in the news papers here. It seems some teenage boys wanted to film 'ghosts and spirits' and post the video on You Tube to create some sensation. So about 12 of them went to a grave yard in the middle of the night and waited there for about four hours. When they couldn't find any spirits despite trying their best, they themselves started to act like ghosts by wearing white clothes asking their other friends to film them.
When one of the night police patrolling vans came near the grave yard, they heard strange noises coming from inside. The police went inside to check what the matter was and came out with the whole story and the youngsters who were creating nuisance to create sensational news! They were warned not to do it again by the police.
Imagine what would have happened had the police went another way at that time and didn't find them 'trying to build' false stories!
So?!
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I DID INVESTIGATE THOROUGHLY ABOUT SOME PARANORMAL PHENOMENA PEOPLE DESCRIBE.
I too have some interesting stories to tell. When I was in college, during one of my visits to my grand parents place, one dark night, I was standing on the steps of my grand parents old villa wearing white clothes. There was a power cut and people couldn't see things clearly. Then one of my cousins saw me on the steps, got frightened and went to her home nearby and told everybody. People started coming, trying to see the 'ghost'. They were all peeping through the gate of the compound wall afraid to come near me. I wondered what this commotion was all about and started walking towards the curious group standing outside the gate and whispering about the 'ghost'. They all ran away! I didn't understand what happened. Next morning the story spread like wild fire. Everybody was sure they saw a ghost on the steps of my grand parents villa. I tried to convince them that it was me standing on the steps on the previous night, but nobody was willing to listen to me. Because they knew I was a skeptic and didn't believe these stories so easily. Whenever, I think about this story, I laugh and laugh.
Recently I came across some stories in which it was described how things started falling down from cup boards etc. in homes and shops during nights. People attributed these things to 'ghosts'!
In my home too sometimes some things fall from shelves and cup boards. I don't believe in ghosts. So I really go and investigate the reason for these things. Many times I found lizards that were chasing small insects that move around during nights responsible for these 'strange things' happening around the kitchen. And I have observed some other interesting things too. The tall steel and German silver boxes in which we keep cereals, pulses etc. sometimes go out of shape at the top when they fall down. When you use pressure to put the lid back on them, these misshapen boxes push the lids out and they come out with such force as if somebody has taken them out and thrown on the flour!
And the lift shaft of our building is just next to a cupboard located in the wall of my flat. The vibrations of the lift moving up and down the shaft make things move in the cupboard!
If a room in your house has two doors and it is air tight (with all closed doors and windows), if you open or close one door, the other one too (or the window) tries to move as the air pressure is increased or decreased in the room. This is not because of the ghosts present in the room! You can test this yourself.
Also, opening windows on opposite ends of a room can create a nice breeze, but it can also create cold spots as air flow outside changes, causing cooler air to enter a warmer room, and these drafts make doors and knobs to move and make strange sounds. Drafts ( or a draught is a current of air coming into a room or vehicle ) can also sneak in through chimneys, and spaces between doors and between doors and flour and cause doors to slam or door knobs to rattle. So before you schedule a séance, try closing a few windows and gaps.
One night my niece, who was sleeping next to me, woke me up, and said, "There is some thing outside the window and knocking it. I am getting frightened to sleep here". I knew the night before she saw a horror movie that depicted ghosts. It definitely had an impact on her thinking. I smiled and said, "Wait, while I check what is causing that noise" and opened the window. A pigeon flapped its wings making the sounds my niece heard and withdrew to a corner after hearing the sound I made when I opened the window. So the pigeon that made my niece think there 's a ghost outside my window had made the place her home and I would have to deal with the noises it made every night from then onward!
I remember, both of my mother's natural eye lenses were replaced with artificial ones during her cataract surgery and since then during nights in semi darkness and near darkness her eyes used to shine very brightly like cat's eyes and anybody who didn't know why this happened used to get scared! I had to explain to them the reason and that my mother 's not 'possessed'!
Yes, there aren't any ghosts in my home!
One of my friends, who believes in ghosts and 's afraid of them like hell one day called me and told me there 's a shadow moving across her balcony every night. It 's also making strange sounds that 's robbing her of her sleep and also that of her family members. One day when her husband was not there she asked me to come and investigate. I gladly went to sleep in her house. At about 2 am, she woke me up whispering in my ears, "Krishna, the ghost came!" She was shivering with fear. I got up, took my torch light and much to the horror of my friend, opened the balcony door. And ... what did I see?
Yes, there was a human figure shaped shadow moving to and fro in her balcony. I looked up at the building next to my friend's apartment, towards the source of this shadow and found a man pacing back and forth on the terrace! The shadow that is bothering my friend is this man's! I spoke to him. It seems he suffers from severe insomnia and when everybody around was sleeping, this man walks on the terrace to beat boredom!
And where are the strange sounds coming from? The decorative glass beads my friend hung to her door frame are moving in the breeze and making those sounds!
There aren't any ghosts in my friend's home too!
I asked about six keepers of graveyards who worked there for 60 to 20 years, whether they had seen any ghosts there. I requested them to be honest, and all of them told me they couldn't see a single spirit in their whole lives! Two of them were born and brought up on the 'spirit land'. They had homes there and spent all their time, even nights on the graveyards! 'The stories people tell that ghosts exist here 're not true' was their unanimous answer!
Another story: While I was studying for my M.Sc. final exams ( I used to study with such concentration that all that had been written in the books appeared before me in the examination hall and I didn't miss even a single point and that was how I got all top ranks in all my exams!), a sparrow started flying above me making noises & disturbing my concentration. I got annoyed and looked at the sparrow and said, "Get lost, you are disturbing me!" And as soon as I said those words the sparrow caught in the blades of the running ceiling fan above and got mauled, its feathers scattering all around me and the sparrow fell before me lying dead! I was shocked and moved by the scene! It haunted me for days. I didn't expect this to happen and I definitely didn't mean it! I only wanted the sparrow to go out and not to disturb me. I felt very bad about it for days. People who heard this story said I had paranormal abilities and started fearing me. But I don't believe I have any such abilities. It was just a coincidence but people attributed several such things to me and some even said I was a Goddess and could curse them if they did anything bad to me! I feel all this is rubbish. I definitely don't have any abilities to do things in the way I want if I just only think or say anything about them. But will people listen?! Another example of baseless belief!
It seems intuitive minds are more likely to engage in such “magical thinking”. Intuitive beliefs often interact with emotional processes. Cognitive psychologists have offered one possible explanation; the “conjunction fallacy.” The conjunction fallacy was coined by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and basically describes a reasoning error where people mistakenly assume that specific conditions are more likely than general ones. Recent research (3) has shown that people who espouse paranormal and conspiratorial beliefs are much more susceptible to the conjunction-fallacy. For example, consider the fact that people often endorse multiple (or contradictory) conspiracy theories about the same event, where belief in one conspiracy serves as evidence for belief in another. Yet, the likelihood that two (or many) different conspiratorial explanations about world events are all true at the same time is increasingly unlikely. Similarly, belief in one paranormal phenomenon might quickly lead to the belief that many “magical” things are happening (it can’t merely be coincidence).
Scientists do educated guessing and informed imagination. This is not intuition. I use reason, think critically taking all my experiences and the available parameters into account and guess something would happen. This might come true because the conclusion is based on facts. The ability to know inwardly what will work in any undertaking comes partly with experience. If we’ve repeated an activity for a long time, we will more or less automatically know which choices to make. Experience hones the sharp edge of intuition. That doesn't mean I have any special paranormal abilities! The feeling of inner, intuitive and informed guidance is subtle. This is no magic!
Math Explains Likely Long Shots, Miracles and Winning the Lottery One should not be surprised when long shots, miracles and other extraordinary events occur—even when the same six winning lottery numbers come up in two successive drawings
What we think of as extremely unlikely events actually happen around us all the time. The mathematical law of truly large numbers as well as the law of combinations help to explain why. With only 23 people in a room, the probability that two of them share the same birthday is 0.51—greater than 50 percent.
If your birthday is any day except February 29, you share your birthday with approximately 1/365 of any population (0.274%). Therefore, since the world population till now is estimated at 7 billion you share your birthday with over 19 million people around the world (19,178,082). That is no miracle or magic!
The Bulgarian lottery randomly selected the winning numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, 42 on September 6, 2009. Four days later it selected the same numbers again. The North Carolina Cash 5 lottery produced the same winning numbers on July 9 and 11, 2007. Strange? Not according to probability (Ref 1).
Reflective thinkers are more likely to see the event as a statistical fluke, while intuitive thinkers feel it is magic!
Déjà vu is another startling mental event. The phenomenon involves a strong feeling that an experience is familiar, despite sensing or knowing that it never happened before. Most people have experienced déjà vu at some point in their life, but it occurs infrequently, perhaps once or twice a year at most. Even the blind can experience deja vu!
Memory explanations of déjà vu are based on the idea that you have previously experienced a situation, or something very much like it, but you don’tconsciously remember that you have. Instead, you remember it unconsciously, which is why it feels familiar even though you don’t know why.
This is by no means a memory error. In fact, almost the opposite. Déjà vu occurs when the frontal regions of the brain attempt to correct an inaccurate memory.
The single element familiarity hypothesis suggests you experience déjà vu if one element of the scene is familiar to you but you don’t consciously recognize it because it’s in a different setting like when you see your teacher on the street. Your brain still finds your teacher familiar even if you don’t recognize them, and generalizes that feeling of familiarity to the entire scene.
The gestalt familiarity hypothesis focuses on how items are organized in a scene and how déjà vu occurs when you experience something with a similar layout. For example, you may not have seen your friend’s painting in their living room before, but maybe you’ve seen a room that’s laid out like your friend’s living room – a painting hanging over the sofa, across from a bookcase. Since you can’t recall the other room, you experience déjà vu.
One advantage to the gestalt similarity hypothesis is that it can be more directly tested. Inone study, participants looked at rooms in virtual reality, then were asked how familiar a new room was and whether they felt they were experiencing déjà vu.
The researchers found that study participants who couldn’t recall the old rooms tended to think a new room was familiar, and that they were experiencing déjà vu, if the new room resembled old ones. Furthermore, the more similar the new room was to an old room, the higher these ratings were.
Wwhat happens in the brain during déjà vu? Most of the main competing theories share the same idea: déjà vu occurs when areas of the brain (such as the temporal lobe) feed the mind's frontal regions signals that a past experience is repeating itself.
After this, the frontal decision-making areas of the brain effectively checks to see whether or not this signal is consistent with what is possible. It will ask ‘have I been here before?’
"If you have actually been in that place before, you may try harder to retrieve more memories. If not, a déjà vu realisation can occur.”
Although déjà vu often feels supernatural or paranormal, glitches in the brain might be to blame. One possibility is that a small seizure occurs in brain regions essential for memory formation and retrieval—the hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus, areas deep in the middle of the brain. When you see your grandmother, for example, spontaneous activity in these regions creates an instant feeling of familiarity. With déjà vu, a brief synaptic misfiring might occur in these areas, creating the illusion that the event has occurred before. In support of this idea, studies show that some individuals with epilepsy have a brief déjà vu episode prior to a seizure, with the focal area of the seizure often falling in the hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus.
Other phenomena might also help explain déjà vu, such as inattentiveness. Because we often navigate the world on autopilot, we take in much of our surroundings on an unconscious level. People who text on their cell phones while walking are only superficially aware of the shops and pedestrians they are passing. Perhaps an episode of déjà vu begins during such a moment. When we emerge into full awareness, we might do a perceptual double take. We are struck by a strange sense of familiarity because we saw the scene just moments before, unconscious.
A third possibility is that we have forgotten the prior experience. The psychology literature is replete with stories of adults visiting a notable place, such as a castle, and becoming overwhelmed by an uncanny sense of having been there before.
Our brain is always searching for connections. As a result, we can sometimes make links that simply aren't there. (ref 2)
When I myself have faced some of these things and know that there isn't any truth in them and in the absence of solid proof, I can only do things about what I feel is the right way of putting things i.e., exposing the falsehood and putting facts before people.
People asked me after reading this whether haunting highways exist. It seems some of them experienced, paranormal activities while travelling on the highways. This is what science says about haunting highways ...
Any combination of exhaustion, drugs, alcohol, and tricks of the light could contribute to single, isolated sightings, like that reported by several people. It is easy for some people to imagine strange happenings when they feel unsettled.
Long distance travel on national highways exhaust most people. Some might even face motion sickness making their brains go dizzy sometimes. Highways are usually dark and creepy. All these factors combine to make some people to ‘imagine or hallucinate’ things. Fear of the dark, forests, bushy areas along the highways with no human activity, crimes along the highways, because they are isolated places to easily commit them, heightens brain’s ability to “spot” illusory patterns.
Research has found thatbelievers may have weaker cognitive “inhibition”, compared to sceptics. That’s the skill that allows you to quash unwanted thoughts, so perhaps we are all spooked by strange coincidences and patterns from time to time, but sceptics are better at pushing them aside, not believers, and resolving the issues with critical thinking.
And people who believe in them created the myth of “Haunted Highways”.
We once saw a dead body while travelling on the Vijayawada- Hyderabad national highway. We reported it to the police. Next day the news papers reported that a ghost killed a person on the road. Later police investigation revealed that a chilli merchant was killed for his money by a driver and cleaner while travelling by a lorry and his body was thrown on the highway. We wondered why he didn’t choose a state road transport corporation bus while carrying lakhs of rupees and travelled by a lorry only to get killed.
Mistakes people make! And false reports the media propagates. No wonder, we get into an illusionary world.
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After reading my article, several people sent me messages asking me to add the research information on ghosts. And I added this update...
You hallucinate something and imagine things. These things are mostly based on the stories you hear and fears you face. And you ask science to explain your hallucinations and imaginations and prove them right! What a pity!
How can science explain or prove something that doesn't exist in the first place?
According to live science, the difficulty in scientifically evaluating ghosts is that a surprisingly wide variety of phenomena are attributed to ghosts, from a door closing on its own, to missing keys, to a cold area in a hallway, to a vision of a dead relative. When sociologists Dennis and Michele Waskul interviewed ghost experiencers for their 2016 book "Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life" (Temple University Press) they found that "many participants were not sure that they had encountered a ghost and remained uncertain that such phenomena were even possible, simply because they did not see something that approximated the conventional image of a 'ghost.' Instead, many of the respondents were simply convinced that they had experienced something uncanny — something inexplicable, extraordinary, mysterious, or eerie." Thus, many people who go on record as claiming to have had a ghostly experience didn't necessarily see anything that most people would recognize as a classic "ghost," and in fact they may have had completely different experiences whose only common factor is that it could not be readily explained.
Personal experience is one thing, but scientific evidence is another matter. Part of the difficulty in investigating ghosts is that there is not one universally agreed-upon definition of what a ghost is. Some believe that they are spirits of the dead who for whatever reason get "lost" on their way to The Other Side; others claim that ghosts are instead telepathic entities projected into the world from our minds.
Still others create their own special categories for different types of ghosts, such as poltergeists, residual hauntings, intelligent spirits and shadow people. Of course, it's all made up, like speculating on the different races of fairies or dragons: there are as many types of ghosts as you want there to be.
There are many contradictions inherent in ideas about ghosts. For example, are ghosts material or not? Either they can move through solid objects without disturbing them, or they can slam doors shut and throw objects across the room. According to logic and the laws of physics, it's one or the other. If ghosts are human souls, why do they appear clothed and with (presumably soulless) inanimate objects like hats, canes, and dresses — not to mention the many reports of ghost trains, cars and carriages?
If ghosts are the spirits of those whose deaths were unavenged, why are there unsolved murders, since ghosts are said to communicate with psychic mediums, and should be able to identify their killers for the police. And so on — just about any claim about ghosts raises logical reasons to doubt it.
Ghost hunters use many creative (and dubious) methods to detect the spirits' presences, often including psychics. Virtually all ghost hunters claim to be scientific, and most give that appearance because they use high-tech scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, Electromagnetic Field (EMF) detectors, ion detectors, infrared cameras and sensitive microphones. Yet none of this equipment has ever been shown to actually detect ghosts. For centuries, people believed that flames turned blue in the presence of ghosts. Today, few people accept that bit of lore, but it's likely that many of the signs taken as evidence by today's ghost hunters will be seen as just as wrong and antiquated centuries from now.
Other researchers claim that the reason ghosts haven't been proven to exist is that we simply don't have the right technology to find or detect the spirit world. But this, too, can't be correct: Either ghosts exist and appear in our ordinary physical world (and can therefore be detected and recorded in photographs, film, video and audio recordings), or they don't. If ghosts exist and can be scientifically detected or recorded, then we should find hard evidence of that — yet we don't. If ghosts exist but cannot be scientifically detected or recorded, then all the photos, videos, audio and other recordings claimed to be evidence of ghosts cannot be ghosts. With so many basic contradictory theories — and so little science brought to bear on the topic — it's not surprising that despite the efforts of thousands of ghost hunters on television and elsewhere for decades, not a single piece of hard evidence of ghosts has been found.
And, of course, with the recent development of "ghost apps" for smartphones, it's easier than ever to create seemingly spooky images and share them on social media, making separating fact from fiction even more difficult for ghost researchers.
Many people believe that support for the existence of ghosts can be found in no less a hard science than modern physics. It is widely claimed that Albert Einstein suggested a scientific basis for the reality of ghosts, based on the First Law of Thermodynamics: if energy cannot be created or destroyed but only change form, what happens to our body's energy when we die? Could that somehow be manifested as a ghost?
It seems like a reasonable assumption — unless you understand basic physics. The answer is very simple, and not at all mysterious. After a person dies, the energy in his or her body goes where all organisms' energy goes after death: into the environment. The energy is released in the form of heat, and the body is transferred into the animals that eat us (i.e., wild animals if we are left unburied, or worms and bacteria if we are interred), and the plants that absorb us. There is no bodily "energy" that survives death to be detected with popular ghost-hunting devices.
If ghosts are real, and are some sort of as-yet-unknown energy or entity, then their existence will (like all other scientific discoveries) be discovered and verified by scientists through controlled experiments — not by weekend ghost hunters wandering around abandoned houses in the dark late at night with cameras and flashlights.
According to science, ghosts don't exist, and that reports of ghosts can be explained by psychology, misperceptions, mistakes and hoaxes. There is absolutely no evidence of ghosts.
According to the physicist Brian Cox, 'If ghosts existed, then they would need to be made purely of energy, since by their very definition they can't be made of matter. But if they were made only of energy, they would quickly dissipate, because the second law of thermodynamics proposes that energy is always lost to heat. The only way that they would be able to avoid that would be to have an incoming source of their own spooky energy. But there is nothing to account for that in the standard model of physics or anything we've seen in the particle accelerator.' "We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies."
"If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made, so ghosts definitely don't exist , since CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would have stumbled across one, if they did!"
When I myself have faced some of these things and know that there isn't any truth in them and in the absence of solid proof, I can only do things about what I feel is the right way of putting things i.e., exposing the falsehood and putting facts before people.
So I do works on the supernatural things based on scientific facts!
So, if you don’t try to find answers to the Qs why, how, etc., you just interpret things in strange ways and believe everything, you hear and see. Stop doing that and try to face reality.
This is not over yet. Each story people told us proved to be wrong. We are still investigating, and I am helping several others to investigate. But to tell you the truth, we are getting bored.
Why? People imagine something and ask us to prove or disprove it. Or they hear a story and ask us to disprove it. What type of argument is this? Don't scientists have important work to do? Why should we leave our vital work and indulge in silly investigations that are leading us nowhere?
If you say something, provide evidence for it or don't say anything.
Remember, Burden of proof (also known as onus probandi in Latin) is the obligation on somebody presenting a new idea (a claim) to provide evidence to support its truth (a warrant). If you don't have one, you have been already proved wrong! Period.
In the world of science, they say, either put up (evidence for what you say or believe in) or shut up! It might sound rude but Science only works like that.
*,**:
Electric current is the movement of electric charge through a conductor. For example, an electric charge carried by electrons through a wire.
An electro-magnetic wavedoes not require a conductor. Electromagnetic waves are created by moving electric charges, but once created, they can propagate through a vacuum. Photons are the smallest packets of energy that propagate as electromagnetic waves.
In a vacuum, photons travel without being absorbed and re-emitted by a medium. But if an electromagnetic wave propagates through a medium, photons excite atoms, and this excitation is passed from atom to atom through the medium. The absorption and re-emission of photons slows the wave as it passes through the medium. Therefore the speed of an electromagnetic wave propagating through vacuum is greater than any propagation through a medium.
You can "feel" an electromagnetic wave if it excites the atoms in your body and causes them to vibrate as they absorb and re-emit photons, giving off heat. For example, sunburn is caused by photons from the Sun.
Electromagnetic waves should be distinguished from electro-magnetic fields, which exert force upon electric charges in the vicinity. When an electromagnetic field oscillates, it manifests as the propagation of an electromagnetic wave. When it is static, it manifests only by its effect upon an electric charge.
Finally, anyone who thinks they can prove paranormal activities, Please visit this site List of prizes for evidence of the paranormal - Wikipedia , contact the persons listed there, provide proof and claim the prizes. Please don't just argue with us and waste our time. Thanks.
Never experienced any supernatural thing. For every ‘experience’ in our lives there will be one natural and rational explanation and this can be done only by a scientifically inclined mind that can think critically.
Others can give hundreds of interpretations - each one based on the perception of their mind limitations conditioned by various things like culture, religion, emotion etc. Only when you overcome these limitations, you can see the facts and reality in its true form.
My world is different. It doesn’t have any thing that can’t be explained by Science. So I don’t believe in these things.
Q: Is it true that people travelling along national highways experience paranormal activities?
Any combination of exhaustion, drugs, alcohol, and tricks of the light could contribute to single, isolated sightings, like that reported by several people here. It is easy for some people to imagine strange happenings when they feel unsettled.
Long distance travel on national highways exhaust most people. Some might even face motion sickness making their brains go dizzy sometimes. Highways are usually dark and creepy. All these factors combine to make some people to ‘imagine or hallucinate’ things. Fear of the dark, forests, bushy areas along the highways with no human activity, crimes along the highways, because they are isolated places to easily commit them, heightens brain’s ability to “spot” illusory patterns.
Research has found thatbelievers may have weaker cognitive “inhibition”, compared to sceptics. That’s the skill that allows you to quash unwanted thoughts, so perhaps we are all spooked by strange coincidences and patterns from time to time, but sceptics are better at pushing them aside, not believers and resolving the issues with critical thinking.
And people who believe in them created the myth of “Haunted Highways”.
We once saw a dead body while travelling on the Vijayawada- Hyderabad national highway. We reported it to the police. Next day the news papers reported that a ghost killed a person on the road. Later police investigation revealed that a chilli merchant was killed for his money by a driver and cleaner while travelling by a lorry and his body was thrown on the highway. We wondered why he didn’t choose a state road transport corporation bus while carrying lakhs of rupees and travelled by a lorry only to get killed.
Mistakes people make! And false reports the media propagates. No wonder, we get into an illusionary world.
Q: How do ghosts keep up with technology? To an 18th century ghost, a car would appear as a carriage drawn by ghost horses.
So if you can imagine them, you can imagine their dealings with technology as well.
That ‘s what happened in a ‘story’ I read sometime back. It seems a car was possessed by a ghost and it started moving on it s own. Hmmm.
If you park a car on a slope and don’t take care of it, doesn’t it move on its own?
Self-driving cars are run by ghosts too. Tech ghosts! :)
Funny imaginations and funny explanations.
So you can imagine a male ghost driving a Rolls-Royce Ghost, with his girl friend sitting beside him. You can imagine, the ghost talking into a cell phone and his girl friend warning him.
And you can imagine .... now let me see how many stories you can come up with.
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What does science say about spirit traveling from one body to another? If it is not possible, give some scientific reasons.
Hmmm!
Spirit: the force within a person that is believed to give the body life, energy, and power ( Britannica dictionary)
The overwhelming consensus of science is that there is no proof that ghosts ( or spirits) exist.[1] Their existence is impossible to falsify [1], (because if you really show something we can falsify it but if you imagine something and it is all in your head, we cannot falsify it) and ghost hunting has been classified as pseudoscience [2,3,4] . Despite centuries of investigation, there is no scientific evidence that any location is inhabited by the spirits of the dead.
You want some scientific reasons that ghosts or spirits don’t exist? I gave 22! You can find all the details here:
How can something that doesn’t even have an existence and evidence of existence travel from one body to another? Oh yes, it can in your imagination. If you can imagine something, you can imagine several things about it. Go ahead and have fun. Science and scientists have better things to do than bring up your imaginations.
Footnotes:
http://Bunge, Mario. Philosophy of Science: From Problem to Theory Archived 2023-08-14 at the Wayback Machine. Transaction Publishers; 1998. ISBN 978-1-4128-2423-1. p. 178
http://Regal, Brian (2009-10-15). Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. pp. 75–77. ISBN 978-0-313-35508-0. Archived from the original on 2023-08-14. Retrieved 2017-07-09.
http://Raford, Benjamin (November 2010). "Ghost-Hunting Mistakes: Science and Pseudoscience in Ghost Investigations". Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Archived from the original on 2019-03-28. Retrieved 2017-07-08
http://Levy, Rob; Levy, Stephanie (30 October 2015). "Hearing ghost voices relies on pseudoscience and fallibility of human perception". The Conversation. Archived from the original on 25 September 2018. Retrieved 8 July 2017.
Can you really tell if you’re being watched? The bizarre science of psychic intuition, explained
Surveys suggest up to 90 per cent of us know when someone is staring at us.
The experience of turning around to find someone staring at you, almost as if you had ‘felt’ their stare, is common.
Research into the phenomenon goes back to the early days of scientific psychology at the end of the 19th Century. More recently, the ‘sense of being stared at’ has been studied extensively by parapsychology researchers such as Rupert Sheldrake (a believer) and Richard Wiseman (a sceptic).
Researchers like Sheldrake believe the effect is real and that we really can feel when someone is looking at us. In his experiments, Sheldrake found a tiny but statistically significant effect in support of the staring phenomenon – his volunteers could judge whether they were being stared at slightly better than if they had just guessed at random.
But in similar studies, sceptical researchers such as Wiseman have turned up negative results. What’s more, he and others have noted numerous problems with the studies conducted by ‘believers’. For instance, issues with randomisation of the trials mean that volunteers might have detected a pattern and used this to guide their judgments.
Rather than rewriting everything we know about the nature of the human mind and brain, there is a less exciting explanation for the sense of being stared at. It is that whenever we turn and find someone staring at us, we remember it, but all those times we turn and no one is looking, we don’t.
It’s a similar story for feeling like you can predict when someone is about to text or call you – any time that you’re thinking of someone and they ring, it feels uncanny, as though you foresaw the future. But more likely, it was just a coincidence, and you’ve probably forgotten all the times you were thinking of that person and they didn’t get in touch.
Q: Why do we still see movies being made related to ghosts which assume ghosts to be confined within some house, when they had been released from a body itself?
Krishna: According to science, there is no evidence of ghosts. But people can hallucinate* or imagine* ghosts. So if you can imagine one thing, you can imagine the same thing in several ways. Is there an end to this process? Or are there any rules governing imagination?
*
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Q: What would happen if a scientist sees a ghost?
Krishna: I will ask myself the Q, ‘what is wrong with me, why am I hallucinating like this?’ And then go and see a doctor.
Because I know 22 reasons why people think they saw or felt a ghost. I listed them here:
Math Explains Likely Long Shots, Miracles and Winning the Lottery Why you should not be surprised when long shots, miracles and other extraordinary events occur—even when the same six winning lottery numbers come up in two successive drawings
What we think of as extremely unlikely events actually happen around us all the time. The mathematical law of truly large numbers as well as the law of combinations help to explain why. With only 23 people in a room, the probability that two of them share the same birthday is 0.51—greater than 50 percent.
The Bulgarian lottery randomly selected the winning numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, 42 on September 6, 2009. Four days later it selected the same numbers again. The North Carolina Cash 5 lottery produced the same winning numbers on July 9 and 11, 2007. Strange? Not according to probability.
Haunted house researchers investigate the mystery of playing with fear
what makes fearsome experiences so compelling, and why do we actively seek them out in frightful recreational settings?
New research reveals that horror entertains us most effectively when it triggers a distinct physical response—measured by changes in heart rate—but is not so scary that we become overwhelmed. That fine line between fun and an unpleasant experience can vary from person to person.
By investigating how humans derive pleasure from fear, researchers find that there seems to be a 'sweet spot' where enjoyment is maximized. This study provides some of the first empirical evidence on the relationship between fear, enjoyment, and physical arousal in recreational forms of fear.
For years, researchers have suspected that physiological arousal, such as a quickening pulse and a release of hormones in the brain, may play a key role in explaining why so many people find horror movies and haunted houses so attractive.
Until now, however, a direct relationshipbetween arousal and enjoyment from these types of activities has not been established.Recreational fear refers to the mixed emotional experience of feeling fear and enjoyment at the same time. Fear is generally considered to be an unpleasant emotion that evolved to protect people from harm. Paradoxically, humans sometimes seek out frightening experiences for purely recreational purposes. "Past studies on recreational fear.
when horror fans are watching Freddy Krueger on TV, reading a Stephen King novel, or screaming their way through a haunted attraction, they are essentially playing with fear.
Feel Like You're Not Alone, But You Are? Science Can Explain That Creepy Feeling
4 October 2023
ByBEN ALDERSON-DAY, THE CONVERSATION
If you've ever had the eerie sensation there's a presence in the room when you were sure you were alone, you may be reluctant to admit it.
Perhaps it was a profound experience that you are happy to share with others.
Or – more likely – it was something in between the two.
Unless you had an explanation to help you process the experience, most people will struggle to grasp what happened to them.
But now research is showing this ethereal experience is something we can understand, using scientific models of the mind, the body, and the relationship between the two.
One of the largest studies on the topic was carried out as long ago as 1894. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) published their Census of Hallucinations, a survey of more than 17,000 people in the UK, US, and Europe. The survey aimed to understand how common it was for people to have seemingly impossible visitations that foretold death.
The SPR concluded that such experiences happened too often to be down to chance (one in every 43 people that were surveyed).
In 1886, the SPR (which numbered former UK prime minister William Gladstone and poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson among its patrons) published Phantasms of the Living. This collection included 701 cases of telepathy, premonitions, and other unusual phenomena.
For instance, the Reverend P H Newnham, of Devonport in Plymouth, told the story of a visit to New Zealand, where a night-time presence warned him away from joining a boat trip at dawn the next morning. He later learned that all on the voyage had drowned.
At the time, phantasms was criticized for being unscientific. The census was received with less skepticism, but it still suffered from response bias (who would bother responding to such a survey except those with something to say).
But such experiences live on in homes across the world, and contemporary science offers ideas for understanding them.
Not such sweet dreams
Many of the accounts SPR collected sound like hypnagogia: hallucinatory experiences that happen on the boundaries of sleep. It has been suggested that several religious experiences recorded in the 19th century have a basis in hypnagogia.
Presences have a particularly strong link with sleep paralysis, experienced by around 7 percent of adults at least once in their life. In sleep paralysis, our muscles remain frozen as a hangover from REM sleep, but our mind is active and awake. Studies have suggested more than 50 percent of people with sleep paralysis report encountering a presence.
While the Victorian presences documented by the SPR were often benign or comforting, modern examples of presence triggered by sleep paralysis tend to exude malevolence.
Societies around the world have their own stories about nighttime presences – from the Portuguese "little friar with the pierced hand" (Fradinho da Mao Furada) who could infiltrate people's dreams, to the Ogun Oru of the Yoruba people in Nigeria, which was believed to be a product of victims being bewitched.
But why would an experience such as paralysis create a feeling of presence? Some researchers have focused on the specific characteristics of waking up in such an unusual situation. Most people find sleep paralysis scary, even without hallucinations.
In 2007, sleep researchers J. Allen Cheyne and Todd Girard argued that if we wake paralyzed and vulnerable, our instincts would make us feel threatened and our mind fills in the gap. If we are prey, there must be a predator.
Another approach is to look at the commonalities between visitations in sleep paralysis and other types of felt presence. Research over the past 25 years has shown presences are not only a regular part of the hypnagogic landscape, but also reported in Parkinson's disease, psychosis, near-death experiences, and bereave.... This suggests that it's unlikely to be a sleep-specific phenomenon.
For example, in 2006 neurologist Shahar Arzy and colleagues were able to create a "shadow figure" that was experienced by a woman whose brain was being electrically stimulated in the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ). The figure seemed to mirror the woman's body position – and the TPJ combines information about our senses and our bodies.
A series of experiments in 2014 also showed that disrupting people's sensory expectations seems to induce a feeling of presence in some healthy people. The way the procedure the researchers used works is to trick you into feeling as if you are touching your own back, by synchronizing your movements with a robot directly behind you.
Our brains make sense of the synchronization by inferring that we are producing that sensation. Then, when that synchronization is disrupted – by making the robot touches slightly out of sync – people can suddenly feel like another person is present: a ghost in the machine. Changing the sensory expectations of the situation induces something like a hallucination.
That logic could also apply to a situation like sleep paralysis. All our usual information about our bodies and senses is disrupted in that context, so it's perhaps no surprise that we may feel like there is something "other" there with us. We might feel like it's another presence, but really, it's us.
In my own research in 2022, I tried to trace the similarities in presences from clinical accounts, spiritual practice, and endurance sports (which are well known for producing a range of hallucinatory phenomena, including presence).
In all of these situations, many aspects of the feeling of a presence were very similar: For example, the subject felt that the presence was directly behind them. Sleep-related presences were described by all three groups, but so were presences driven by emotional factors, such as grief and bereavement.
Despite its century-old origins, the science of felt presence has really only just begun. In the end, scientific research may give us one over-arching explanation, or we may need several theories to account for all these examples of presence.
But the encounters people described in Phantasms of the Living aren't phantoms of a bygone age. If you're yet to have this unsettling experience, you probably know someone who has.https://counter.theconversation.com/content/201323/count.gif?distri..." alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" class="CToWUd"/>
Even Healthy People Can Be Tricked Into Hearing Voices That Aren't There
We might automatically associate hearing voices with neurological conditions like schizophrenia. It now turns out most brains can be tricked into hearing voices that aren't there, given the right conditions.
Researchers from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and the University Savoie Mont Blanc in France wanted to investigate howauditory-verbal hallucinations(AVH) might be triggered in the mind: that's where we hear a voice, but there's no speaker present.
Previous studies suggest these hallucinations are caused either by an inability to correctlydistinguish the selffrom its surroundings, or by strongly held beliefs or prior assumptions that outweigh whatever isactually happeningin an environment. The team wanted to put both hypotheses to the test.
While hearing a static-hiss of pink noise, volunteers poked a button that delivered a poke their back after a random delay. (Orepic et al.,Psychological Medicine, 2023)
"Here, we developed a new method of inducing AVH in a controlled laboratory environment by integrating methods from voice perception with sensorimotor stimulation, allowing us to investigate the contribution of both major AVH accounts,"the researcherswrite in their published paper.
The team adapted a techniquethey'd used beforewhere when participants poked a button in front of them, a robotic arm poked them in the back. In this new experiment involving 48 participants, the poke delay was variable, and the volunteers wore headphones playing a mix of waterfall-like 'pink noise', and occassionally snippets of voices – both their own and other people's.
As with the previous push-button test, the participants reportedfeeling a presencebehind them because of the poking – but some of them also reported hearing voices that weren't there through the headphones.
The phenomenon of hearing voices was more common if the volunteers heard someone else's voice before their own, and if there was a lag between the button pushing and arm poking. It was as if those involved in the test weremaking up a voiceto go with the sensation of someone standing behind them.
These outcomes, the researchers think, areenough to suggest both hallucination-trigger theories are correct: participants were failing to correctly self-monitor their surroundings,andwere being influenced by strong beliefs about what was going on around them.
Notably, the frequency of hallucinated voices increased with the length of the tests, so participants were more likely to hear the phantom sounds towards the end of the experimental session.
Ultimately, knowing how these hallucinations can be triggered is important in understanding how they relate to conditionssuch as Parkinson's disease.It's also an indication that if you do hear a voice in your head, it might not be immediate cause for alarm (though if you are concerned, best to see a doctor).
"Besides the novelty and the important methodological impact, these results shed new light on AVH phenomenology, providing experimental support for both prominent albeit seemingly opposing accounts – portraying AVH as a hybrid between deficits in self-monitoring and hyper-precise priors,"writethe researchers.
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