Instant Genius - The psychology of why we feel ghostly presences, with Ben Alderson-Day

Episode Date: June 11, 2023

At our core, humans are deeply curious about the unknown – and ghostly spirits are no exception. From Hamlet to The Sixth Sense to Ghostbusters, the excitement or horror of encountering ghosts or spirits is ingrained in the human imagination. But for many people it’s very real: for people who feel someone’s presence who isn’t there, or see someone or something, or hear voices. In this episode of Instant Genius, we spoke to psychologist Ben Alderson-Day ahead of the Cheltenham Science Festival about why some of us believe in ghosts, science mediums and psychological disorders, and what makes someone more likely to feel presences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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At our core, humans are deeply curious about the unknown, and otherly spirits are no exception. From Hamlet to the sixth sense to ghostbusters, the excitement or horror of encountering ghosts or spirits is ingrained in the human imagination. But for many people, it's very real. for people who feel someone's presence who isn't there, or see someone or something, or hear voices, and there are many situations where these sensations might occur.

In this episode of Instant Genius, I speak to psychologist Ben Alderson Day about why some of us believe in ghosts, the science of mediums and psychological disorders, and what makes someone more likely to feel presences. So to start with Ben, your area of expertise is felt presences. Could you start by experience? explaining to us what a felt presence actually is.

Of course. So a felt presence is the feeling that someone is close by without any clear sensory evidence really, you know, no sight, no sound to tell you that that person is there. So people when they describe felt presence, they just say, I just know or I just feel that a person is with me. Often people find it hard to put it into more words than that. It's a really hard experience to describe. But what's interesting about this experience is it happens across many, many different contexts and conditions. So it happens in clinical disorders like Parkinson's and schizophrenia. It happens in survival situations.

It happens in things like grief and bereavement. And it can happen around the boundaries of sleep as well. Is it at all possible that ghosts exist? Well, that's a pretty big question. I think that this line of research that I'm interested in suggests that many people's experiences of ghosts might have a scientific basis and will feel very real to them. Now, whether people will take that to mean that ghosts are real or not, I think will depend on an individual's perspective.

But hopefully this kind of work definitely shines some new light on it. So why do some people believe in ghosts? I think that there's a long tradition, really, of needing to believe in something that goes beyond us, goes beyond the everyday world. And obviously, if you look at history of religious and spiritual belief, then elements of the afterlife or spirits continuing are prevalent in so many beliefs. systems around the world. As to why people in the present day might have some kind of vivid experiences that they choose to describe as ghostly or indicate ghosts, that could be happening

for a number of reasons. Now, parapsychologists quite often will be interested in particular scenarios or particular places that might put somebody in an unusual state, might make them maybe more suggestible or give them kind of really unusual inputs to their senses so that they think they see something when nothing happened or that they feel like they're just having a particularly eerie feeling that day in a particular room or particular house. But the other side of it is us, what happens to us. So less the spaces around us and more how our minds are working and how we feel in terms of ourselves and the distinction between self and other. And those sorts of questions are often tackled by researchers who work on things like mental health, but also

aspects of creativity and imagination research and really looking at the kind of boundaries of the mind for creating vivid experiences. And that's kind of where my research comes in. I'm not a parapsychologist. I don't tend to study ghosts per se. But I started exploring this topic of felt presence through working on psychosis. People describing just sometimes a really eerie feeling that somebody was in the room with them, even when this person wasn't speaking, couldn't be seen, as if there was just an invisible figure there. In order to understand those experiences, what you have to delve into is really the science of the mind for how we track a sense of self and how that can change in lots of different situations. So there's different elements there. Why do people believe in things like ghosts? Well,

sometimes they're in the right place and the right setting, but sometimes it's more to do with how their own mind is working. So that feeling that someone or something is there, could you explain how this works a bit more and how common is this feeling? So it can be a really hard thing to pin down and put a number on. To give a bit of context, I've done research before on things like hearing voices that other people can't hear. And we quite often say in the general population that roughly 5 to 15% of adults will have an experience of hearing a voice that somebody else can't hear at some point in their lives. Feelings of presence aren't often asked about in standard kind of surveys or questionnaires on unusual experiences. And they can be really

hard for people to describe. But they crop up in lots of different situations. So, In grief and bereavement, a feeling of a continued presence can be quite common, more so than, say, a voice or a vision. In sleep paralysis, where people wake up in the morning and they can't move their body, you're actually very prone to hallucinations in that context. The most common form of hallucination is this just distinct feeling of a presence in the room. And some clinical disorders like Parkinson's, for example, there are estimates that between a quarter and a fifth of people with Parkinson's will have this feeling of presence from time

to time. So when you add all those estimates up, it might be a sizable, minority of the population have had these experiences before. It might not be 5 to 15%, but it could be something like 2 to 4%. In reality, we need to do more research asking very specifically about this experience to understand exactly how many people it affects, but just the variety of context in which it occurs suggests that it could be quite a common phenomenon. Now, the bigger question there is, you know, how does it happen? Why does it happen? And this is something where the science is constantly evolving. And there are a few different candidates theories really for why it might

occur. But one current theory that people have is that presences can arise when essentially we disrupt our own map of where our bodies should be in space. So we all have a sense of where our bodies are and we have senses like pro preception, which tells us where our muscles are in space. But what we know from cases in say neurology and neuropsychology is if you disrupt the body's own sense of where it should be in space, then we can start getting really unusual feelings like shadow figures or a feeling of a presence nearby mirroring our own body position. Sometimes that might be the product of, say, a tumour or kind of epilepsy, something like that. Sometimes you can induce it through electrical stimulation of bits of the brain as well, but essentially disrupt that sense of where

the body thinks it should be, and you seem to be able to create these projected body maps. So at least some presences might have their basis in that in kind of changing the body's own sense of where it should be. So ghost stories are usually about malevolent spirits, with obvious exceptions like Casper, the friendly ghost, of course. But in real lived experiences, how do these negative sensations balance out with more positive ones, like sensing a lost loved one, for example? There's a whole variety out there, really. So perhaps some of the most consistently malevolent are one of the examples I've already mentioned. The sleep paralysis presences tend to be really, really scary. So when people have this sense of a presence in the room, it feels incredibly malevolent,

almost like it's a being of pure malevolence that's just kind of watching you in the room. So that's not always the case in the sleep paralysis presences, but a lot of them feel really, really evil. And some of the theories about why that occurs have gone back to almost kind of evolutionary ideas about the danger of being paralyzed and prone. You know, probably the worst thing that could possibly happen is that you can't move if you think of kind of like the, in the sense of evolution. So people or have suggested that maybe that sense of a presence is almost like your brain making sense of how under threat you are, that you'd have a feeling that you're at most risk when you can't move. Now, in some clinical disorders as well, where presence gets described, sometimes these

presences are really unwanted. So I first started studying the topic by talking to people with psychosis who regularly heard voices. And some of them would say, you know, the voices don't even have to speak. Sometimes I just know they're there. I can feel they're there. And that might be a presence just on your shoulder that kind of feels very overbearing, very critical, something that's really kind of following you around in a way that is very intrusive, that invades your personal space. So those sorts of presences can be really problematic and distressing for some people. But then the presences say that are described in Parkinson's disease are very neutral, often don't have any sense of kind of emotion or identity as if it's just a kind of wireframe or a mannequin,

the sense of somebody just behind you. Presences induced experimentally, by disrupting those body maps I mentioned. They're often very kind of, very neutral, very kind of, they don't have any sense of who that presence is or anything like that. And then for some people, in particularly in bereavement, presences can be comforting. You know, it might have a real sense of a particular person that you've lost, and it might help somebody to have a sense of presence there.

So there's a whole gamut of emotions associated with these experiences. I think people might assume that they're always unsettling because I think people think presence and think you mean ghost. But that's not always the case. there really is a variety out there. Could you explain a bit more about why you're more likely to sense presences while you are in that period of mourning? I think a lot of people's initial assumption would be that a sense of longing and loss is

somehow kind of creating that presence on its own, in a way just out of the kind of the strength of feeling and the wishes of that person. And if that was the case, that it perhaps wouldn't be surprising that people would sometimes describe a feeling of presence, but the picture can be quite complicated. So there's a theory that's very popular in the moment in understandings of the brain that's sometimes called a kind of predictive coding

or predictive processing theory or sometimes the Bayesian brain. And this is the idea that a lot of what our brain does is try to predict the environment around us. Rather than kind of just taking in information and making sense of it, we actively try and make these models of the world or models of perception

that often will save time and allow us to not have to take in, new information each time, but just know that, okay, broadly, this is what's happening in the world outside, and we'll only correct that prediction or that model when we absolutely need to. What that idea does is it places a big weight on expectation. It says that our expectations are a big driver or experience of the world. So in bereavement, we might think, well, look, if, you know, if you lose somebody who is your lifelong partner, who always used to sit in that armchair, who was part of your life and your world for so long, then just that sense of expectation and emotion

could create the perception that that person is still there. But where it gets complicated is that some people have these continued presences, even for people they've lost, but they don't necessarily miss, or maybe that they had quite complicated relationships with that were very ambivalent and sometimes quite damaging. And yet people might have continued presence. And there are researchers who've done work on this, like Jacqueline Hayes is at York St. John University,

or Editha, Stephan, who's at Plymouth, who've done some really care. work exploring this idea of the continuation of certain relationships. So in one sense, those presences might actually say something more about our brain's capacity to build quite complex relationships with others, to imagine what they're thinking, what they're doing at any particular moment, to represent their thoughts and feelings. You know, often we might need to do that even for people who are around us, you know, and still living. You've mentioned some of these certain conditions that include sleep paralysis and psychosis. What does science currently think is happening

in the minds of people during something like psychosis? Oh, well, that's a really big question. And you'd have to say lots of different things. But in terms of why people might have really unusual perceptual or sensory experiences or kind of hallucinatory experiences, I think the current most popular models are that it's something about how the brain models its own expectations. And things like voices are the most common in psychosis, followed by visions and then followed by the other senses, we're still getting a sense of how common presences might be in psychosis. I've done some research where for some people in their first wave of psychosis, actually as many as half might experience presence at some point.

But yeah, I think the current series that are popular for understanding that are that our brain is constantly having to draw upon expectations to make sense of uncertainty in the world around it. You might have come across illusions before where in order to understand a piece of text or a kind of particular sound, you need to understand what you're listening out for. As soon as somebody tells you the word, everything clicks and you can pick it out from the kind of the noise and the ambiguity. That's an example of how our brains use expectation and top down knowledge to find the signal from the noise. Now, for some people, their brains might be doing that more than others. They might be constantly trying to find the exegyxyl piece or trying to put a template onto something,

even when maybe a template isn't even needed. I did a study back in 2017 with people who regularly heard voices that other people couldn't hear, but they weren't in distress. There were people who just had kind of heard voices all their lives and just worked out, had managed them in their own way. And we got them in a scanner and we said, we want you to listen out for a particular sound that's different from the others. It's basically an attention task and just try and stay vigilant, stay alert.

What we didn't tell them is that in the sounds that we were playing them, sometimes there was actually some hidden words, some hidden language. we're using a special type of stimulus called sine wave speech. And usually most people can't understand this, think it sounds a bit like the clangers or something, until you say it's speech, and this is what's being said, and then suddenly something clicks and they can understand it.

What we found was that the people who went in the scanner who heard voices, even if we didn't tell them to listen out for anything, they could start to understand the speech. They weren't hallucinating. They could understand the speech that was hidden in those sounds, as if their brain was already drawing upon kind of the expectation, of there being meaning and pattern underlying what was there. So that supports that general idea of this kind of predictive brain.

And that might be a large part of what's going on in psychosis. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. You're great of protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe.

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Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. When we get an uncanny feeling or some kind of instant telling us that something is wrong, that? Should we trust those feelings? Well, I think that if you have those sorts of feelings, that something is wrong, it does suggest a change that might need to be paid attention to, but it doesn't necessarily tell you what is wrong, what's happening. And the reason I say that is that our body is quite good at, in a way, playing tricks on us or kind of signaling something that then is hard for us to recognize and interpret ourselves. People who study, say, the psychology of emotions, people like neuroscientist Lisa Feldman-Barratt,

the US who's very interested in how we recognize and process emotion. She argues that really a lot of the time what we have is bodily signals, say kind of agitation or change in heart rate or something like that, a kind of queasy feeling in our stomach. And then what we do based on our cultural experiences and our understanding or our language for emotions is we come to categorize those in particular ways. But that's a kind of almost like a two-step process where we're creating this model for what's happening to us, as opposed to. to a recognition that you're having a particular emotion and your body is changing at the same time. And that's important, right, because it could be, you know, a feeling of agitation could be

surprise, it could be excitement, it could be anxiety, it could be threat. And sometimes you need to kind of do a bit more digging of, you know, why you're feeling the way you're feeling to understand what is the thing you need to pay attention to. So coming back to your question, you know, should we trust what's there? We should trust that there's something significant is happening if we notice those changes in ourselves, but what is happening might need to be interpreted a bit more. And I think the other thing to say as well is that there are various ways in which psychologists now can disrupt our own sense of self. And for a number of years, we've been trying to devise experiments that essentially allow us to model perhaps states of psychosis or unusual

experiences. And often the most successful are ones that create a misbatch between what we expect to happen in terms of our senses and what's actually happening and how we stitch those together. To give an example, you might have come across something like the rubber hand illusion before. This is an illusion where you ask people to put their hands in front of them on a table and you hide their vision of one hand and instead you put a rubber hand next to it in the same orientation. And what you can do, if you stroke, take a paintbrush and you stroke the rubber hand and the hidden hand at the same time, gradually you can essentially give somebody the feeling that the rubber hand belongs to them rather than their actual hand. The reason is,

behind that is that essentially when our brain is presented with multiple different sensory cues that are happening at the same time, it does its best to kind of stick those together in a way that makes sense. It goes, well, look, the hand that I can see that's getting struck at exactly the same time as I can feel it is this rubber hand in front of me. It doesn't quite look like my hand, but it's in the right place. It's getting touched at the same time. It's my hand. It takes a bit of time, but a lot of people are susceptible to this, even to the point that if you then kind of go at the rubber hand with a hammer, suddenly they jump and they're super scared. what that's an example of is essentially the plasticity of our brain in terms of how it makes sense

of multiple cues, relies on timing, and then stitches those things together to suddenly integrate something into our body and ourself, which isn't part of us. It's a rubber hand. Now, you can do these, basically, these experiments and you change the timings, you change, say, feedback to sound, to vision, change feedback to movement, to the touches that we're expecting. And if people have got used to these things being in sync, and suddenly they come out of sync, then people suddenly can have very uncanny feelings. The uncanny can come about by changing our brains kind of essentially the principles by which we build the sense of what belongs to us. And sometimes it's as simple as kind of just slightly changing our expectations of our sensory cues.

So where do mediums, the people who claim to communicate with the dead, where do they come into your research? Oh, well, I've involved mediums in quite a bit of my research in the past. perhaps, and most people find that surprising, but I sometimes find people who work as mediums or psychics some of the most interesting people to talk to, particularly if you talk to them in a biographical way, trying to understand what their experiences were like when they were growing up and this sort of thing.

Because whether or not you believe in the kind of objective claim of what they're doing, quite often you find that people who end up being mediums or psychics have had lots of unusual experiences in the past often experiences that they couldn't explain. You know, they might always be the kid in the class who happens to see the ghost or, you know, hear something that other people can't hear

or something like that. And then they end up in, say, a spiritualist church or wikis a medium because that provides a framework that seems to make sense for them. But it might take a number of years before they kind of feel like they have an answer for what's there.

And it might be that the experiences that are having are very hard to control or hard to understand. There is a tradition within research on, say, psychosis and schizophrenia, where we try to do work with people who often have unusual experiences but don't end up using mental health services. They sometimes call things like healthy voice hearers or non-clinical voice hearers, if they're people who say hear voices every day but don't seem to acquire a diagnosis or anything in distress. And there's been

a number of different studies around the world with these sorts of populations over the past decade. But interestingly, when you go and, you know, talk to the people who took part in those studies, a lot of them will have spiritual beliefs or may have either worked as mediums themselves or have worked with or sought advice from mediums. So there's a big kind of overlap, really, between people who are generally having unusual experiences and people who end up working in that tradition. You know, some people will be skeptical and say, well, you can't just rely on what they say and what they might be, you know, spinning you a yarn in some way. But then there has been research done where, you know, you can get them in a brain scanner or get and doing particular

psychology tasks on a computer and often the kinds of things that they're susceptible to in terms of how their perceptions work, how they spot patterns and meaning. There is an element of continuity with people who then also have distressing experiences too. I don't mean to say that in the sense of like, I don't particularly want to pathologize people's experiences if they're healthy, but it's more that there's a continuum of experience of how people's brains differ. And what's interesting about psychics and mediums is that they might always have been, you know, seeing and hearing the world in a different way to the rest of us, and that might tell us something about how distressing an unusual experiences work too.

And I know some of your recent researchers looked into cultures and communities who believe that they can speak to gods or spirits or ghosts. So could you tell us a bit more about these wider cultural or societal influences on someone or a group of people's tendencies to believe in or to hear voices? Absolutely. So I think that culture plays a huge factor in how we, experience, interpret and share these sorts of phenomena. It matters hugely if somebody has a really unusual experience, say, you know, you wake up in the morning, you can't move and you have this feeling

of an evil presence in the room. If you don't have a framework for understanding what's happening there, then it's going to be all the more unsettling. It's going to feel like something you have to keep to yourself. It might even feel like something quite shameful that you can't kind of, you can't put into words and you thought wasn't a real thing. It might really challenge your beliefs about how the world works. And a friend of mine, for example, when sleep paralysis presence this first happened to her, you know, she went down the next morning and said, Dad, I need you to tell me about ghosts.

You know, this was something that she didn't believe in and then suddenly felt like, okay, maybe I do need to think about this again. But there are other cultures around the world who have a really different relationship to the unusual and the uncanny. bereavement practices very hugely across different communities. It's not uncommon in Latin American communities to almost encourage a sense of continued presence in context of grief and bereavement via grieving rituals. The way in which people respond to disembodied voices and the idea of kind of voices in your head, there's some research that suggests that can vary hugely across

cultures and that can have a big impact on how people manage that. So a collaborative mind, Tanya Lerman, who's a cultural anthropologist. at Stanford. She ran a study in 2015 where she compared people with schizophrenia hearing voices in California, in Ghana, and in India, and she was interested in how the content of the voices might vary according to local beliefs about, you know, the way the mind works. And the interesting thing she found was that the content of the voices in California was much, much more derogatory, abusive, very violent towards the person. And in India and Ghana, it refers to, it refers to, more kind of local concerns around social difficulties, I think, particularly in the Indian case,

and then the potential of, you know, bewitchment and spirits and things in the Garnayan case. What that seemed to track as well was in these different communities, there was a different sense of what the boundaries of the mind were. In India and Ghana, there was a sense of which the mind and the self could be a bit more porous. It was possible that spirits could be in some way passing through what other people's thoughts or ideas could get into your mind and vice versa. So while these experiences are distressing, and I don't want to minimize them,

that actually there was a sense in which they could be interpreted in a different way, they could be something that's more transient, they weren't necessarily something that would be as persecutory for the person. In America, you know, the idea of somebody else's thoughts or ideas of which is getting into your head was not allowed,

which did not fit a local model of the mind because your mind is your castle, you know, So in that sense, it was that much more of a violation that people were hearing voices that that other people couldn't hear, that they could have voices in their head. And so the way that team made sense of it was that, look, the local, almost like the local philosophy of mind, the model of mind, understanding of how the mine works, that sets at the boundaries of then how the experience is interpreted within that. And that will then impact upon the content of the experience, then how people manage it

afterwards too. So culture, I think, is a huge factor here in how. we interpret the unusual and the uncanny. So a lot of experiences of presences are often tied to a specific place, a geological location, where there's often feelings of presences around places where bad, but also sometimes good things have happened in the past. Could you tell us a bit about what research has been done into so-called haunted places? So parapsychologists in particular are always very interested in, you know, where the particular places could have kind of could change people's perceptions and

character feeling of something being haunted. And, you know, very often if you look at, you know, some of those examples, it's situations where there's a lot of sensory uncertainty, you know, it's poor lighting, it's kind of strange sounds, it's something where our brain is trying to resolve the uncertainty there and kind of makes its best guess, which might involve, oh, there's a person here too. I think some ways in which presences might differ is often they're kind of, they feel tethered to us in some way. They're connected to us. People often feel like they have a connection to the presence that's with them. But that's not to say that space and place isn't important when it comes to presence. I mean, I would say actually what we know more about

is how extreme environments can induce these phenomena. So whether it's oceans, deserts, Antarctic or Arctic environments, polar environments, mountain, you know, kind of the Himalayas, this mountain ranges, anywhere where you have kind of extreme sensory conditions. So like a whiteout within snow or, you know, continuous sand dunes, as far as you can see or just, you know, an ocean for miles around. Our brains can really struggle with how we deal with almost like that kind of both sensory overload and sensory monotony. And when people are left alone, often they'll start to have kind of some very unusual and hallucinatory experiences. It's not uncommon, you know, sailors, solo voyages will have some

of these experiences, polar explorers too. But it's often people when they're right at the brink, when they're on the edge of safety or even, you know, kind of there's a real threat to life that sometimes people describe these presence experiences too. And that seems to be more about the interaction of our brain's capacity to create others and our brain's capacity to kind of create defense mechanisms, you know, ways to help us get through adversity. And there's something about how our brain responds to that creates some very, very vivid presence experiences. It's not just people's imagination. People have really distinct feelings that somebody is there with them.

And often it's the presence that leads them out of adversity. There's a whole area of research on something called the third man factor, which is all about presences in extreme environments, you know, coming in, often saving the day. What excites you about new and upcoming research in this area? So I think one thing that people are interested in, as I mentioned before, always a potential role for, say, trauma and adversity in presence and kind of understanding how that might people, some people more susceptible to presence experiences. I think that also has

implications for how, for people who are in distress, how we might support them clinically. And, you know, it might be that you end up drawing on tools from, say, work on PTSD and things like that that would support people with distressing presences. I'm quite interested in almost like the kind of the role of the imagination and that some people, via kind of creative and imaginative processes might be able to create presences. There's a phenomenon called Tulpomancy where people create what they describe as almost like sentient imaginary friends

that they can converse with. And the interesting thing is, if you look at the research on topomancy, is that it seems to overlap a bit with how fiction writers describe creating their own characters that somehow end up almost like speaking of their own accord. So in future, we're going to be doing some really exciting

work with the Edinburgh Book Festival, trying to explore more about the dynamics of the imagination and how, for some people, that might tip over, into things that feel a bit uncontrollable or don't belong to them and, you know, it's more to do with the other than to do with the self. So I think, you know, we're only just beginning to understand really the boundaries of the imagination. I think that will be maybe one of the next frontiers for understanding presence research.

That was Ben Alderson Day on Felt Presences. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine. The current issue of BBC Science Focus is out now. Get your copy in your local supermarket, newsagents or wherever you buy your favourite magazines. You can also download a digital version of our app and visit us 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 vocal, name creates high-end

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