How do rituals of communion with the dead affect the spirit? And conversely, how does the way your brain is wired affect the perception that these experiences are real?
A team of researchers decided to find out in a sophisticated way: by isolating the research subjects in a dark room where they had to sit in front of a mirror for almost an hour. Strange things, they reported in a study carried out in Journal of Abnormal Experience and Cognitionthen followed.
The facility may seem familiar to paranormal enthusiasts: it’s what’s called a psychomanteum, a place believed to allow you to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Trapped in the darkness of space, your only company is a mirror tilted toward the ceiling so that it reflects only empty space, providing the canvas upon which ghostly forms appear.
For the experiments, the researchers recruited 30 people, half of whom had reported a previous experience with a ghost, and the other half suffered from a condition called synesthesia, in which the brain’s sensory pathways are mixed up, usually manifesting as tasting or hearing colors.
Before entering, participants had to think for fifteen minutes about a deceased loved one. Then they sat in the psychomanteum, looking at the upturned mirror, for another 45 minutes. The researchers monitored their heart rates, while also monitoring environmental cues typical of ghost hunters, such as electromagnetic readings and temperature variations.
Participants could also press a button when they thought they detected a presence in the room or experienced strong visual images. After their stay in the psychomanteum, participants rated the intensity of their frightening encounters on a scale and asked themselves whether they felt the encounters were real.
Some indeed felt very captivated by their experiences.
“One participant saw her hair being stroked by her loved one, which was meaningful and very impactful,” said lead author Christine Simmonds-Moore, a psychologist at the University of West Georgia. Scientific alert.
To the researchers’ surprise, people with synesthesia did not report feeling a presence more often or having more intense experiences than those without the condition. But what they found was that participants rated as more creative, based on a survey they had them take beforehand, also tended to report more intense experiences and visual images in the mirror.
Strangely, the data showed a correlation between geomagnetic fluctuations and the physical perception of a ghostly experience – but only for synesthetes. (As Scientific alert As the researcher notes, the study relied heavily on statistical comparisons, which increases the risk of finding trends that could be due to simple coincidence.)
The results suggest what you probably suspected: that people’s backgrounds, subjective differences in how they perceive the senses, and physical factors in the environment all affect people’s supposed encounters with the supernatural.
Read more about scary science: Scientists say they have discovered the cause of ‘ghosts’
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