How science explains experience of supernatural presence – 04/14/2023 – Science

Have you ever had the creepy feeling that there was a presence in your room, even though you were sure you were alone?

If the answer is “yes,” you may be reluctant to admit this experience. Or maybe it was something so profound that you happily share it with others. Or – which is more likely – the experience could have been somewhere between these two extremes.

Unless there was an explanation to help process what you experienced, most people have a hard time understanding what happened. But research is showing that this ethereal experience is something we can understand using scientific models of the mind, body, and the relationship between them.

One of the largest studies on the subject was carried out in 1894. The British entity called the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) published that year its Census of Hallucinations (“Census of Hallucinations”, in free translation) – a survey which involved more than 17,000 people from the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe.

The aim of the study was to find out how often people receive seemingly impossible visits announcing death. SPR concluded that these experiences were too common to be the work of chance – one in every 43 people surveyed.

Among the society’s patrons were former British Prime Minister William Gladstone and poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

In 1886, the SPR published Phantasms of the Living (“Ghosts of the Living”, in free translation) – a collection of 701 cases of telepathy, premonitions and other unusual phenomena.

An example reported in the work was the case of Reverend PH Newman, of Devonport, in Plymouth (England). He told the story of a trip to New Zealand, where a nocturnal presence advised him to cancel a ship trip the next morning. The Reverend later learned that all the passengers on that trip had drowned.

At the time, ghost stories were criticized for being unscientific. The census was met with less skepticism, but still suffered from response bias (only those with something to say would bother to respond to the survey).

But these experiences are present in homes all over the world and contemporary science offers some ideas for understanding them.

THEY ARE NOT SO SWEET DREAMS

Many of the reports collected by SPR sound like cases of hypnagogia – hallucinatory experiences that happen on the edge of sleep.

Studies have suggested that several religious experiences recorded in the 19th century had their origin in hypnagogia. The presences are particularly strongly related to sleep paralysis, which affects about 7% of adults at least once in their lifetime.

In sleep paralysis, our muscles are frozen as a remnant of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, but our mind remains active and awake. Studies have shown that more than 50% of people with sleep paralysis report having encountered some presence.

The presences in the Victorian era, documented by the SPR, were often benign or comforting. But modern examples of presences caused by sleep paralysis often express perversity.

Societies all over the world have their stories about nocturnal presences. Examples range from Fradinho da Mão Furada, in Portugal, who managed to infiltrate people’s dreams, to Ogun Oru, from the Yoruba ethnic group, in Nigeria. His victims were believed to have been bewitched.

But why would an experience like paralysis create a sense of presence?

Some researchers have focused on the specific features of waking up in this unusual situation. Most people find sleep paralysis a frightening experience, even without hallucinations.

In 2007, sleep researchers J. Allen Cheyne and Todd Girard argued that if we woke up vulnerable and paralyzed, our instincts would make us feel threatened and our minds would fill in the gaps: if we are prey, there must be a predator.

Another approach is to look for common features between visits during sleep paralysis and other types of attendance.

Research has shown over the past 25 years that presences are not just frequent in the hypnagogic setting. They have also been reported in cases of Parkinson’s disease, psychosis, near-death experiences and bereavement.

These findings indicate that this is unlikely to be a sleep-specific phenomenon.

MIND-BODY CONNECTION

We know, through neurological case studies and brain stimulation experiments, that presences can be elicited by cues from the body.

In 2006, for example, neurologist Shahar Arzy and his colleagues managed to create a “bulge” that was perceived by a woman whose brain was electrically stimulated at the left temporoparietal junction (JTP). The figure seemed to mirror the position of the woman’s body – and the JTP combines information about our senses and our bodies.

Several experiments also demonstrated in 2014 that breaking down people’s sensory expectations appears to induce a sense of presence in healthy people.

The procedure used by the researchers tricked people into feeling as if they were touching their own back, synchronizing their movements with a robot directly behind them.

Our brain perceives the synchronization, deducing that we are producing that sensation. And when the synchronization breaks (making the robot’s ring slightly out of sync), people can suddenly feel that someone else is present: a ghost in the machine.

Changing the sensory expectations of the situation induces something similar to a hallucination.

This logic can also be applied to situations such as sleep paralysis. All of our usual information about our body and our senses is destabilized in this context, so that the feeling that there is “another person” there with us is not surprising.

We may feel like it’s another presence, but it’s actually us.

In my research in 2022, I tried to track the similarities between the presences seen in clinical cases, spiritual practices and endurance sports – all known to produce a range of hallucinatory phenomena, including presences.

In all these situations, many aspects of the sense of presence were very similar. The patient felt, for example, that the presence was directly behind him.

The three groups described presences related to sleep, but also presences caused by emotional factors, such as mourning and loss.

Despite originating centuries ago, the science of felt presence is actually just beginning. Scientific research may eventually provide us with a comprehensive explanation, or we may need several theories to clarify all these instances of presence.

But the encounters described in Ghosts of the Living are not echoes of a bygone era. If you haven’t had this disturbing experience yet, you probably know someone who has.

* Ben Alderson-Day is Professor of Psychology at the University of Durham, UK.

This article was originally published on the academic news site The Conversation and republished under a Creative Commons license. The original text was published here. Read here the original version in English.