Do you sometimes feel like you’re not alone? Maybe you are at home alone or walking down an empty street. You don’t see anyone, you don’t hear and you don’t feel, but suddenly the hairs on the back of your head stand on end – you just feel that someone is there. If something like this happened to you, you experienced a “sense of presence”. aptly named PresentA new book by psychologist Ben Alderson-Day aims to demystify this deeply mysterious phenomenon.
First, this is not a ghost book. Although Alderson-Day speaks to psychics and others who believe that the presence they experience (or claim to experience) comes from spirits, demons, and phantoms, he himself has no interest in questioning “reality.” this presence. That’s good too, especially since one of the people he talks to says he can talk to the “spirit” of the tree.
Instead, the book attempts to explain why, despite all the evidence, people so often say that they feel that someone or something is “with them” in such a variety of situations.
Most people know that people with schizophrenia report hearing voices – this is by far the most common “positive symptom” of the disorder (it’s not “positive” in a “good” sense, it only distinguishes hallucinations and delusions from “negative” “). symptoms of schizophrenia). schizophrenia, such as superficial emotions and withdrawal from the world). Some also report visual hallucinations, although this is less common. But Alderson-Day notes that many people with schizophrenia also report hallucinations that are not associated with any of the five senses: they describe the feeling that a person (and sometimes even an animal) is near them, even when they are not speaking or talking. . talk. make yourself visible.
What is much less known is that Parkinson’s disease is also associated with these strange symptoms. In fact, one amazing statistic I learned from the book was that 25 percent of people with Parkinson’s disease sometimes felt a strange presence in the room with them. It is part of a specific form of dementia associated with the physical symptoms – tremors, slow movements – of Parkinson’s disease, and this is often extremely distressing for patients who realize that they are affecting both their mental and physical health, as well as losing their abilities. physical abilities. .
This follows from a poignant article by his wife Susan Schneider Williams in the magazine neurologyComedian Robin Williams, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease before committing suicide but actually had disease-related dementia with Lewy bodies, began to experience hallucinations in the last months of his life, but hid them even from her.
Even without an obvious or diagnosable disorder, many people still report an eerie presence. Extremely stressful situations for some – Alderson-Day tells the story of Ernest Shackleton’s 1916 expedition to the cold, remote island of South Georgia, where he and two of his explorers had the strange feeling that a fourth person was traveling with them.
Sometimes it’s fear or anxiety: we all came home at night after a horror movie and watched the shadows in our hallway with added suspicion. And sometimes it’s grief: many people who have recently died report that they somehow “feel” the continued presence of a deceased loved one in their home.
But some people are definitely more receptive to this experience than others. Alderson-Day describes research using signal detection. For example, in a 2017 study, adults were played a recording of white noise that also contained a clearly audible word, a barely audible word, or no word at all. They asked each participant if they had an imaginary friend as a child. The Christopher Robins, who had imaginary friends in their youth, were better at recognizing when a word was present in sound, but also had a higher rate of “false alarms,” meaning they often “heard” a word even if it wasn’t real. over there.
Other experiments, such as experiments in which a spoken sentence is played with white noise replacing the last word (“I’m going to [FZZZ]’) point in the same direction: those who reported hearing voices in everyday life were more likely to report hearing a word in the noise, even if there wasn’t one.
So could it be that voices and imaginary friends—and perhaps the tendency to sense presence with them—arise from an overactive ability to recognize actions? That is, it is more likely to decide that changes in the world occur due to the action of a deliberate, deliberate being, and not by chance? It is understandable why this ability would arise: it is safer to interpret movement in the grass as a saber-toothed tiger and run away than to write it off to the wind and be eaten. Some even suggested that this ability, which is inherent in almost all people, is the basis of religion.
But, as with all psychological abilities, people vary in their degree of susceptibility to detecting this agent: perhaps those with brain detection sensitivity set slightly higher for some reason are more likely to report voices and presence. .
This is far from the only possible explanation discussed in the book. For example, a group of researchers has developed a machine to create a sense of presence. You stand at the machine and press the button at regular intervals. Each time you do this, the hand of the machine gives you a little push. Over time, you will develop a strong connection between the press and the simultaneous sensation in the back.
And then scientists mess with you: you start to slow down the “feedback” of the machine, which teases you a little after you press the button. This kind of intervention in the motor and perceptual systems of the brain seems quite reliable in creating this strange, amazing feeling of being in space with you – even if it’s just you and the machine.
Interestingly, the presence machine seems to work most effectively in people with Parkinson’s disease, whose motor systems are already impaired by the disease. All of this has led some researchers to build expectancy theory: our brains are always making predictions about what will happen next, and when that prediction turns out to be drastically wrong—expectations are violated—our brains start filling in unexpected gaps with an idea to fill them. that someone else should be held responsible for the action. Perhaps, according to the theory, people who are hallucinating and reporting a strange presence have some kind of distortion in how their brain constructs these expectations.
There is strong evidence in favor of this theory from the Presence Machine and other sources. But it can’t fully explain people’s experience with presence, says Alderson-Day: “The presence that people talk about is often specific and meaningful; often it is not just “presence”, but the presence of a specific person or object. It is not clear how to move from the general to the specific presence.
Thus, scientists need to do more to weave together psychological theories about agent recognition, the predictive brain, and people’s personal circumstances — not to mention the neuroscience data that the book also discusses, such as those of people with epilepsy who used to feel present. . they are having a seizure, or those whose brain tumor or other lesion has caused them to feel the presence of another person accompanying them while they are alone. Alderson-Day’s book is an excellent starting point for this kind of research.
The last question came to my mind while reading Alderson-Day’s account of his conversation with a psychic who claimed to be able to talk to a tree. How do you know they’re telling the truth? Of course, there are many liars and hypocrites – for example, there are many social media accounts where people with obscure truth content claim to suffer from a range of strange and wonderful diseases and conditions. Can’t some people who claim to experience presence regularly just make it up to get attention?
Alderson-Day’s response is that the people he interviewed were not at all eager to draw attention to themselves, and in many cases very reluctant to speak of their felt presence. Yes, some presences are comforting, like the thought that a loved one who has died is still around. But many of them are disturbing and humiliating, inspiring fear rather than curiosity.
But I still have doubts about the psychic. And this brings us back to the question of the “reality” of these experiences. Finding out whether people actually experience the supernatural is the pinnacle of parapsychology, where researchers have been experimenting with mediumship, telepathy, clairvoyance, and other paranormal abilities for over a century, including a number of experiments very much related to “presence.” There’s an idea if people can psychically “tell” when someone else looks at the back of their head (interestingly, one such study showed that when skeptics do an experiment, they don’t find that the participants have psychic powers, but when believers do them They are experimenting.
This is one of the strangest areas of psychological research. But Alderson-Day’s book reminds us that by seriously examining people’s most inexplicable claims, we can often learn a lot about how our brains work and about some deeply human experiences.
Presence: Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen OtherBen Alderson-Day, available now, published by Manchester University Press (£19.99)
Source: I News
With a background in journalism and a passion for technology, I am an experienced writer and editor. As an author at 24 News Reporter, I specialize in writing about the latest news and developments within the tech industry. My work has been featured on various publications including Wired Magazine and Engadget.