Ghosts all in the Mind(?)

6th

I have posted this article in the Ghosts in the News thread but though it could be a very good thread in itself. Its a area which has been discussed a few times before but usually as a though from someone on another subject.

MADISON, Wisconsin: When scientists wrote in a recent issue of the journal Nature that they could induce phantom effects — the sensation of being haunted by a shadowy figure — by stimulating the brain with electricity, it made perfect neurological sense.

One could even argue that the existence of such sensations explains away the so-called supernatural. In fact, as The New York Times reported, the researchers promptly concluded that ghosts are mere "bodily delusions" — electrical misfirings and nothing more.

The report does look like a kind of proof — albeit very small proof, as this was a study of two people — if one happens already to believe that ghosts are no more than biological quirks. But to those inclined to believe as much, it can also look like proof that ghosts are real entities.

Scientific study of the supernatural began in the late 19th century, in synchrony with the age of energy. As traditional science began to reveal the hidden potential of nature's powers — magnetic fields, radiation, radio waves, electrical currents — paranormal researchers began to suggest that the occult operated in similar ways.

A fair number of these occult explorers were scientists who studied nature's highly charged circuits. Marie Curie, who did some of the first research into radioactive elements like uranium, attended séances to assess the powers of mediums. So did John Strutt, Lord Rayleigh, who won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with atmospheric gases.

Rayleigh would later become president of the British Society for Psychical Research. He would be joined in that organization by other physicists, including the wireless radio pioneer Oliver Lodge, who proposed that both telepathy and ghostly appearances were achieved through energy transmissions connecting living minds to one another and perhaps even to the dead.

Lodge argued that the human brain could function as a kind of receiver, picking up signals at a subconscious level. Along the same lines, he thought it possible that a spirit's appearance was really just its specific energy signal stimulating a response from the receiver's brain.

The theories developed by Lodge and his colleagues dovetail rather neatly with the electricity-produced hauntings that Olaf Blanke, a Swiss neuroscientist, reports in Nature. For example, he used an implanted electrode to send a current into a region of the brain called the angular gyrus.

The test was focused on language processing, but as a side effect one of the test subjects nervously reported sensing another person in bed with her, silent and shadowy. Her creepy companion came and went with the ebb and flow of current.

Blanke believes that even this one subject's experience serves as an example of how we may mistake errant signals in the brain for something more. Humans tend to seek explanation, he points out; to impose meaning on events that may have none.

The pure rationalists among us suggest that our need to add meaning to a basic, biological existence easily accounts for the way we organize religions and find evidence of otherworldly powers in the stuff of everyday life.

The nonpurists suggest a different conclusion: willful scientific blindness. There's no reason Blanke's study can't support their theories of the paranormal. Perhaps his experimental electric current simply mimics the work of an equally powerful spirit.

Much of the psychical research done today applies similar principles: brain- imaging machines highlight parts of the brain that respond to psychic phenomena.

The American psychologist and philosopher William James, also a leader in the Victorian paranormal research movement, remarked even then on the culture clash: "How often has 'Science' killed off all spook philosophy, and laid ghosts and raps and 'telepathy' underground as so much popular delusion?" he wrote in 1909. And how often, James wondered rhetorically, had such efforts stopped people from seeing ghosts and believing in supernatural powers? Because in the end, of course, the conclusion has nothing to do with science at all and everything to do with how one sees the world.

I suspect that we'll dwell forever in the haunted landscape of our beliefs. To many people it's a world more interesting — bigger, stranger, more mysterious — than the one offered by science. Why choose instead to be creatures of chemical impulse and electrical twitch? We would rather gamble on even a tiny, electrical spark of a chance that we are something more.

Deborah Blum, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin, is the author of "Ghost Hunters: William James and the Scientific Search for Life After Death."

Stevenmu made mention that in Sleep Paralysis that the conscious mind (may) wakes up before the body due to being aware on an entity or energy. We know what SP is but what is the trigger?

Similarily just because controled electric charges can give 'ghostly' feelings does that mean that the same affect cant not be caused by another factor or as above:

Perhaps his experimental electric current simply mimics the work of an equally powerful spirit.

Aisling&M

I find it very interesting and confusing at the same time that this could be true. that indeed we can be fooled into feeling/sensing a presence from the afterlife through electrical stimulation. Then I started thinking that yes, I do accept that this is correct. We can be stimulated biologically to see/hear these phenomenon. When other areas of the brain are similarly stimulated then I believe senses other than the 6th are activated, smell, touch, sight, sound and taste. So, if the brain can be manipulated into thinking it tastes an apple does it mean that when the person later goes to the market, buys an apple and eats it that the secondary experience of taste is not real?

It is enough to say that in my opinion the brain and body can be manipulated to believe something that is impossible in a controlled experiment but it does not mean the the true experience later or earlier witnessed is not possible.

If you place your hand on a hot object and it whisks itself away to avoid harm
do you consider it the same as lifting the arm to touch the cheek of someone you love?
The same muscles are involved but the trigger is abundantly different.

CodeMonkey

Aisling&M wrote:

It is enough to say that in my opinion the brain and body can be manipulated to believe something that is impossible in a controlled experiment but it does not mean the the true experience later or earlier witnessed is not possible.

If you place your hand on a hot object and it whisks itself away to avoid harm do you consider it the same as lifting the arm to touch the cheek of someone you love? The same muscles are involved but the trigger is abundantly different.

Yeah but does the paranormal explaination for the experience later or earlier witnessed still more plausible to a believer with this report? How do you know the trigger for the experience outside of the lab wasn't just natural occurances of errant brain signals and not of a paranormal nature?

Aisling&M

I believe the brain is more complex that just to allow one set of triggers to cause a reaction such as mentioned. You can cough because a) you have a cold, b) something got caught in your windpipe, c) you are allergic to flowers d) you went running in the cold air......etc. etc.
I don't think it's an either/or experience. I do believe there is both a spiritual and a biological side to sensing a presence as there is in each of us. We are biological beings with an 'energetic' body aswell.

If you receive stimulus of a supernatural kind, I would reasonably expect the physical body to react as much as the 'mind'.

POLO9N

i was watching Most Haunted last night and the end they never mentioned whats actually behind the wall, they did discover some bones..anyone know what really was there? or is this just a mystries forever

littlebug

POLO9N wrote:

i was watching Most Haunted last night and the end they never mentioned whats actually behind the wall, they did discover some bones..anyone know what really was there? or is this just a mystries forever

POLO9N you could try posting this in the "paranormal TV shows - megamerge" thread futher up the page as the title of this thread is somewhat different to your question and it could get lost in here! I didn't watch last night myself so I can't comment... sorry.

You could also have a look at living tvs own forums www.livingtv.co.uk as there's a dedicated MH forum where you might get more focussed discussion about the specifics of the various episodes than you would find here. I could be wrong but I don't think there are many regular MH viewers on here!

madhitchhiker

It must have truth to it, otherwise these things being discussed won't exist.

POLO9N

POLO9N wrote:

i was watching Most Haunted last night and the end they never mentioned whats actually behind the wall, they did discover some bones..anyone know what really was there? or is this just a mystries forever

THANKS FOR THE INFO MATE, SORRY JUST NEW TO THIS PLACE.BUT GOT TO SAY PEOPLE ARE MUCH NICER THAN aam.