Have you ever seen a ghost or accomplished something paranormal?
Yeah, yeah
in the cold harsh light of science, it's sometimes easy to think there's nothing out
to get you in the darkness, but even the most hard-boiled skeptic can feel a chill
in a cemetery, at dusk, or in an a left house.
So, what does science say about ghosts?
I'm going to have a go at explaining the soul,
nighttime demons and that feeling that you might sometimes get that
there's someone or something there in the room with you.
People often say that ghosts are the
souls of the Dead that haven't fully crossed over to the afterlife, and
although no one has yet produced evidence of a ghost under control conditions,
there have been attempts to quantify the soul.
In 1901 DR.
Duncan MacDougall had TB sufferers placed on scales in their dying hours and
seem to pinpoint a 21-gram change in their weight at the moment of death.
By repeating the experiment with dogs and showing no weight change, he
attempted to prove that the mass he saw lost by his human subjects was the mass
of the soul escaping the body.
Psychologist
Richard Wiseman has
defined the counter-arguments to MacDougall's claims though.
Human bodies hate rapidly at the point of
death and the change could come from sweating out moisture, plus it's worth
pointing out that dogs don't have sweat glands all over like us. That's why they
pant to cool down and that and support why they didn't lose any mass at the
point of death.
What about experiencing
ghosts firsthand? Though well, a universal demon found in cultures all
over the globe is a monster that sits on your chest and attacks you while you
sleep. In Mexico there's even a phenomenon named for it if you
translate it, "a dead body climbed on top of me". Is there a scientific
statement? Yes, and it's sleep paralysis. You've probably heard of REM
sleep (the rapid eye movement period of sleep) way you dream. Well,
it's thought that sleep paralysis exists to stop you from thrashing
about and reacting to all of those images. When you are suddenly jarred awake
from your dreams you can get stuck, your body is paralyzed but
your brain is conscious. The confusion of coming out of a dream state,
plus that strained sensation of having no control over your body, could explain the
ghostly sightings.
Another ghostly
feeling often quoted is the feeling that somebody is in the room with you when
there definitely isn't. A team of Swiss scientists was investigating this
exact thing in patients suffering from neurological conditions that produced
this "feeling of presence". The interesting bit of the
research is that the scientists actually managed to recreate those very
sensations in healthy subjects. Two of them begged for the experiment to stop because they were so spooked. Using basic robotically controlled prosthetics,
the volunteers had to essentially poke themselves in the back. Even though the volunteers were entirely in control of the device as soon as a half-second the delay was introduced between the control and the prosthetic arm moving,
most materials reported that it felt like another human or presence within the room.
You can get your head around this if you felt about how complex it is to
actually tickle yourself. That's because there's a surprisingly fast connection
between your brain and your body telling you that the tickling sensation is
coming from you, not another source. Your body is naturally expecting the
tickle, and it dampens the effect. Otherwise, you'd be sniggering all time
you went to crush your legs.
One school of thought even suggests that the reason schizophrenic people sometimes sense other presences could be
down to a similar disconnect between what the mind and body are hoping to feel.
Oh, and interestingly, some schizophrenic people can actually
tickle themselves.
Okay, so scientists
doing pretty well right now 3-0, I think you could say. But what if a ghost they reported to haunt and a burnt tree and the research scientists
themselves promise they saw it, yeah that'd be pretty convincing? Well, at Coventry
University in the 1990s many worker cleaners researchers and
engineers reported feeling distressed, depress, and even terrified
in the laboratory. The room seemed to give everyone who worked there was spooked-out feeling. 1(One) of the lab team even reported seeing a shadowy figure
at the edge of their vision. So what was this ghost? Was it a long-dead Ph.D. student? a haunted test tuber? large air conditioning fan? what, wait,; yeah. The key to figuring out this ghostly presence
is that sound is a wave when you yell or even speak, you vibrate the air
around you and that moving vibration. Those waves of pressure are close together to a high-frequency sound or Besides that low-frequency sound. That mosquito ringtone that was
used a few years ago was a high-pitched whine, with the frequency of
around 16 kilohertz that's 16,000 vibrations per second. It was
used by teenagers because young people could hear that frequency sound, whereas
adults couldn't because they'd undergone a natural hearing loss.
Well, just
like there can be high-frequency sounds out of our hearing range, like the dog
whistles or ultrasound.
There's also
infrasound, inaudible noises, and some around 20 (twenty) Hertz are
too low for you to hear. But our ears did not only perceive these changes in air pressure. Think about ultrasound. We can't hear it,
but it can be used to break down kidney stones by vibrating them.
Infrasound can also vibrate your body. It's been reported to
cause smearing of vision in certain environments and unsettling feelings.
In fact,
there have been a fair few reports of hauntings in factories, where there were
huge fans generating infrasound about 18 (eighty) Hertz. When the
fans were turned off, reports of odd experiences vanished, including the fan at
Coventry University
So, there
it is, that's what science has to say about those reports of ghostly goings-on.
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