Instant Genius - The psychology of paranormal experiences

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Be it a cold, drafty room in a creaky old country house or a still, quiet forest on a dark night, chances are that at one point or another we’ll all have entered an environment that for some reason made us feel uneasy. But what exactly makes a certain place or situation feel so creepy, and why do we get these feelings in the first place? In this episode, we’re joined by psychologist and magician Prof Richard Wiseman to talk about his work as a scientist who investigates the psychology behind paranormal phenomena. He tells us how ghostly experiences may actually have evolved to help keep us away from dangerous environments, how our brains are primed to see faces that aren’t really there, and how the state of consciousness that exists between waking and sleeping can lead us to feel the presence of threatening entities lurking in our bedrooms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear worldly and scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor and BBC Science Focus. Be at a cold, drafty room in a creaky old country house, or a still quiet forest on a dark night. chances are that at one point or another we'll all have vented an environment that for some reason made us feel uneasy. But what exactly makes a certain place or situation feel so creepy? And why do we get these feelings in the first place?

In this episode, we're joined by psychologist and magician Professor Richard Wiseman to talk about his work as a scientist who investigates the psychology behind paranormal phenomena. He tells us how ghostly experiences may actually have evolved to help us keep away from dangerous environments, how our brains are primed to see faces that aren't really there, and how the state of consciousness that exists between waking and sleeping can lead us to feel the presence of threatening entities lurking in our bedrooms. So Richard, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, pleasure.

So today we're talking about all things spooky. So the first thing, to me, I think which is quite surprising anyway, quite a lot of people claim to have seen a ghost. So what are some of the common characteristics of a ghostly experience? Well, actually seeing a ghost is reasonably rare. So people experience a ghost. So they'll say, oh, there's that sense of presence or a sudden drop in temperature. I heard a creaky floorboard, something like that. You are right.

I mean, some people do see a ghost. Often they'll wake up in the middle of the night and they'll see a little of the night and they'll see a a strange entity, strange ghostly figure at the end of the bed. So all of those things wrap around to a ghostly experience. If somebody says, I think this place is haunted, I experienced a ghost, that's what we're talking about, but it isn't just a visual experience. Are some places more kind of ghosty than others, some environments? Yeah, I mean, certainly some places have a reputation for being haunted.

And what they mean by that is over time, people have gone into those places, often not not knowing the reputation, the building, and experienced a ghost, often in the same place. Now, because what you don't know is when they say, well, I didn't know anything about the reputation, is whether that's true or not. Maybe somebody did say to them, oh, you're in the ghostly room, and then that sort of kicks off an experience. So some of the research we did, and we did at Hampton Court Palace and the Edinburgh vaults up in Edinburgh, surprisingly, was to take the idea and try and test it scientifically. So at Hampton Court, we had the haunted corny. which is where Catherine Howard was allegedly dragged down kicking and screaming in the 16th century.

And in this corridor, over time, people had reported some very strange experiences. And we could look back on those historical records and pinpoint the areas where people had said, there's something weird going on here. Then we took groups of people who allegedly didn't know very much about where those experiences have been. We took those groups through the area and said, put an X. on a floor plan if you experienced something rather odd. And we could see that those experiences tended to clump in the places where historically a ghost had been reported.

So you're absolutely right. There's certain parts of an environment that kick off this rather strange reaction for saying this place is haunted. And if you're a believer, you'll say that's because that's where the ghosts are. And if you're a skeptic, and I tend to be a bit more skeptical, you say maybe there's something about that environment. And in Hampton Court Palace, we could see that sometimes it was due to drafts. There are hidden doors in the place, which caused these rather odd air movements.

In the Edinburgh vault, we could see that sometimes it was a very dark environment that you're going into. That means that people would say there's, I think, there's a ghost here. So I think those environmental factors shouldn't be underestimated. They can drive paranormal experiences. Is there anything to do sort of some places just seem to be innate, creepy. So speaking from personal experience, a few years ago, my partner and I went on holiday. We were going around Devon and Cornwall. And we went to Hope Cove in Devon. And we booked ourselves into an Airbnb, arrived there and came up to this play, very isolated. There's nobody around.

And we sort of unpacked our luggage. Went to bed. And after about five, ten minutes, My partner said to me, just don't like it here. I don't think I can sleep here. And I'm so glad you said that because I feel exactly the same. And then we packed our stuff and almost ran to the car to get back. That's the kind of rational behavior we're looking for. Yes, very good. Yeah, but of course I don't believe in anything like that.

I didn't feel under, well, I did feel under threat. But, you know, where did that come from? Because I know it was completely irrational. So I think part of it is that we watch movies and you mentioned one there and that drives what spooky places are like. And if you're in a place which matches something you've read about in a book or seen a movie or whatever, it's not surprising. It doesn't feel very uneasy because you've just seen the spirits emerge in the movie or whatever it is. I also have my kind of Scooby-Doo sort of theory about ghosts, which is that these experiences may have evolved over time to keep us out of. of places that are actively dangerous to us.

Now, your hotel doesn't sound like that. But if you go into a cave and it's very dark and there's a predator in there, well, probably it's a good idea to get out. And so it could be that people who think, oh, that place feels like it's haunted, I'll leave, are the ones that have survived and passed on that idea to future generations. So it could be that they've got some kind of evolutionary power. or, I mean, more likely in a sense, I'm a social psychologist, not an evolutionary psychologist, that you're watching films, you're reading books, you're seeing photographs, and those places

depict in the West, haunted places in a certain way. Suddenly you find yourself in one of those environments. It's not surprising. You're scared. And what can happen is as soon as you become afraid, you start to become hypervigilant. You start to go, oh my goodness, where's the threat? And a creaky door or the wind blowing across an open window, suddenly that might be a moment. makes a noise, oh my goodness, that's a ghost. You become more afraid. You become more hypervigilant. So it feeds on itself. So all those things might explain while you ended up rushing, terrified, screaming like a child from the hotel. So let's have a look at sort of seeing things. So this phenomenon of parodolia. So could you explain that for us? What's going

on there? Parodalia is about faces. So we are social animals. And so faces are really important to us. And it's incredible what our brains do in that we can recognize and identify faces really easily. You look at a photograph of 100 people, you instantly see the faces. You can zoom in on anyone and know how that person feels from their facial expression. We like faces, big parts of the brain put over to facial processing. And so we'd rather see a few faces that aren't there than miss one that actually is there. Missing a face that is there is disastrous. us. And so when you present people with anything that looks like a face, you know, two eyes

and a mouth, they'll see a face there. And you get it all over the place. You get it on bags, on sinks, on the side of houses. You know, you get these incredible images where people go, oh my goodness, it looks like a face. And that's that part of the brain kicking in. When it comes to ghosts, well, now you might see a photograph of a haunted place. There might be a bit of a blur there or an odd reflection, and you see the face. Maybe you see it in smoke. Maybe you see it in fire. And you think, my goodness, this was taken in a haunted place. That's evidence of a ghost. And it can happen in real life as well.

It can be light reflecting on some rocks or something like that. And you suddenly see a face there. So that can drive some of those visual experiences. Do we see a similar thing with sound? Because often you see a lot on these television shows, they'll go around trying to record sort of ghostly sounds or something. So is that a similar phenomenon? Yeah, you can get that EVP.

where again we're very attuned to the human voice and to words, and so you give people static and they'll hear fractions of words in there and go, oh my goodness, that's somebody saying, you know, help me or something like that. But you need to have the suggestion almost with those things they can sound random until somebody says, no, no, listen, and then you can hear the words help me. And suddenly you can. So often they're driven by that suggestion. There's been quite a few studies that show when you take away those suggestions,

People can't identify reliably the noise that's in there or the sounds that are allegedly in there. And the other thing you bring up there is that now a lot of scientific investigations do involve gizmos, involve people going around with bits of equipment, recording magnetic fields or humidity or whatever. And so it's this weird thing of people using quite legitimate scientific instruments that aren't designed to be used in ghost hunting,

but using them in a sciencey way to appear scientific. despite doing something, which is often deeply irrational, which is using an instrument to look for a ghost. So you mentioned their suggestion. Are some people kind of more susceptible to these experiences than others? Yeah, totally. Well, you have a whole lot of factors that clump together. So good imagination, believing, obviously, in the paranormal, being a good hypnotic subject. So if you ask people to, you know, hold their hands out, close their eyes, and imagine one hand becoming

heavy, the other hand becoming light, if you're a good hypnotic subject, when you open your eyes, you'll get difference in hand level. It's a very quick and easy way of checking that. If you get a big difference there, because you've been suggestible and you've made one hand go up and the other hand go down, you'll tend to be the sort of person that sees and reports ghosts because you're very suggestible. And it's a haunted place. Oh my goodness. Now I feel the ghosts of the energy and so on. So they're definitely a correlates of belief in the paranormal and with paranormal experiences as well. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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Hilton, for the stay. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, name and focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in hi-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it

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So, you know, what is this? What's going on there? Well, sleep paralysis, and you're not alone experiencing it, so around about a quarter of the population, I experience it at some point, is that when you are dreaming, you are very close to waking state. So there's the sort of sleep cycle

as you start off in light sleep, you go down into deep sleep, and then you come up into dreaming, and you're very close to consciousness. So you're having this dream, you don't want to act out the dream, and so you're paralysed. So during a dream we're paralysed.

with paralysed, it doesn't take much to push you up into waking state. And there's a very odd state of consciousness in between those two where you're kind of awake and aware of your environment, but you're also paralyzed. So you bring in some of the bizarre dream imagery, but you also are paralyzed and your brain tries to make sense of that. It tells you a story. And the story is, for some reason, I can't move. And I'm seeing these odd images. Maybe I'm being held down. And it might be a witch that's holding you down. It might be the aliens. It might be a ghost depending on your belief system. But the phenomena, the experience is absolutely real and terrifying, as you say, for people. And a lot of people say that's evidence of a ghost. So it's one instance where,

yes, you get these experiences associated with sleep. The other one that I used to experience a lot, and thank goodness I don't know anymore, is a night terror, which happens in deep sleep. So that's the exact opposite. You're in paralysis, again, for the most part. But you, I wouldn't use the word wake up. You sit up, your eyes are open, and you are totally convinced there is some kind of evil entity at the foot of the bed. It can be a giant spyser, it can be a hooded figure or whatever. And you'll scream out.

and if you're sleeping next to somebody else, they'll wake up properly whilst you just go straight back into deep sleep. So the reason is the night terror is more terrifying for them than it is for you. And again, people often think that's because there's a ghost there if you believe in those sorts of things.

And it's often associated with anxiety and so on. So many of these experiences are reported around sleep and dreaming and now we're starting to get a bit more of a handle on why that's the case. Yeah, so I have a twin and growing up, he used to get these. Okay. It's a horrible thing to see. Yes.

They're absolutely terrified, look awake. Yes. Staying at something. So I'll never forget seeing that. It was horrific. But yeah, he wouldn't remember. No, that's right. I mean, sometimes the screen can wake you up, but then you're in a very odd state because you've been

woken up from deep sleep and it's very unsettling. And there's not much you can do. The thing not to do is approach the person, because if you touch them or even come close to them, they see you as the entity, and that can get quite violent quite quickly. So the thing you can do is say their name very gently from a distance. And sometimes that would do.

Sleeping in a cold room actually reduces them and reducing anxiety and minimizes them as well. But they're in the same sort of category as sleepwalking. So often sleep walking, sleep talking, night terrors, all deep sleep associated phenomena, unlike a bad dream, which is dreaming state, basically. And so a nightmare in that sense is very different to a night terror. We were talking there about being visited by ghosts.

But let's change gears and have a look at actually trying to speak to spirits. Yes. Like the idea of a seance. Yes. So I know this is one of your things. So what exactly is a seance? Well, seance is an attempt to commune with the dead, and it can take various forms. So the simplest form is table tipping, which used to be done in Victorian times.

And I've had many a happy evening doing table tipping. You need a light table that tips reasonably easily. There's no point in doing it with a big mahogany table. So a small table, a group you sit around, you just touch your fingertips to the table, and you sit there for a while and hope that the spirit is. will come and tip the table. And they normally do. And then the table will start to move around the room and so on.

And what's happening there is what's called idiomotor action, which is that without realizing it, you're gently pushing the table. When all of you push in the same direction, often by chance, then it will start to move. At that point, you'll unconsciously know which direction to push in and that can start to move. It will never levitate, but it will move across the table, across the floor. So that could be lots of fun, and that was a sort of Victorian parlour entertainment, and it's good. It's not very far away from the Ouija board, where you'll then put an upturned glass on the table and put letters of the alphabet around, and you put your fingers on the glass, and it spells out a word.

If you're lucky, otherwise it just spells out nonsense. It's exactly the same thing that everyone's pushing, and at some point they all push together. if they can all unconsciously double-guess what the word is, they'll start to spell it out. Hello or something. Hello, that's right, yes. Or some little nonsense if it's a bad day. So there's that.

Less fun because people take it a bit more seriously. But both of those things are different to what I've done a great deal of, which is the Victorian dark room seance. So this is where it's a full-on seance. It's luminous objects, objects with luminous dots on like a ball or a candlestick, you extinguish all of the lights so you're in complete darkness, which is still an alien environment to most people.

Nowadays we're just not used to that. Can't see anything at all. And you essentially use trickery, use magic tricks, my background as a magician, to fake these phenomena. And we always say to people, when we do it, it's a reconstruction of a Victorian seance. We were absolutely honest with people. But people are still doing them nowadays, still faking that stuff and still convincing people, there are ghosts in the room.

And it is a very, very creepy experience to see those objects move around. You can see why that convinces people of spirit forms. So all of those things were count as a seance. And then most recently, because infrared lighting and recording has made darkroom saunces are a tad problematic and challenging, there's the move towards mediumship, which we have a medium, give you a message from the dead, which some people would count as a seance as well,

because it's any attempt to communicate with the dead. So with a haunting, you experience it, with a seance, it's a two-way interaction. So you mentioned there, mediumship. So you hear people talking about cold reading. Yes. When it comes to it. So what does that mean?

Well, cold reading means that you're using, various psychological strategies to give the impression that you know about a person if you're a psychic or that the spirits are telling you about that person

if you're a medium. Different to hot reading where you'd go in knowing that information. So if I was doing a hot reading on you, I'd look you up on the web and find out as much as I can and I come into the room knowing that.

Most mediums aren't doing that at all. Most of my think are sincere in their beliefs. They're walking in and they're doing a cold reading, which is they don't know anything about the person, but you, if you're a believer, would say, oh, they're in communication with the spirits. If you're a skeptic, you go hold on a second. You know, and it's a very strange interaction because you're trying, if I was the

medium, to help me out. You know, you're not trying to be skeptical. So if I say, I get an impression, you're your great-grandmother's in spirit and I'm getting a J or a, is J or a K, I can't hear it properly. That's two letters the alphabet down. And I'm looking at your reaction. If you nod, I might follow up on that. If you look blank, then I'll move on to something else. You know, she's telling me there's a pain on this side of your body. Is there something over here? So it happened recently. And again, it's a two-way interaction. So often they start out with quite vague statements, which are then sharpened on the basis of how you're responding. That's one of the strategies. Another one is to predict things which are true are most people. So, you know, you've got a

scar on your left knee. That's true of about a third of men, apparently, for various reasons. And there's just this vagueness so that, you know, you could say, I see a ship. Is there something to do with sailing or a thing? There's a ship coming in. There's a ship you're standing there and there's a boat or a ship coming in. So that makes sense. And the person will tell you, if they go, not at all, you know, the ship's a metaphor. There's a big change. There's a change coming into your life. And people are only there to talk about X number of topics. It's either going to be travel or relationships or career or money or health. And so they'll bop around these topics until they find the one. So all these things would count as cold reading. And they

can be done consciously. There are books and downloads and DVDs on how to do it. Or it can be done unconsciously or a medium over time that's just learned these text. links. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Richard Wiseman. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, Paranormality, Why We See What Isn't There. If you'd like to what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Incident Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then please do also check out our YouTube channel at ScienceFocus.

The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital. precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal,

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