Spooky Science: Why Do People Claim to See Ghosts? | Alison Gopnik| Big Think

There is a fascinating line of research recently trying to explain why people see ghosts. And it's a phenomenon that people have talked about for a long time that someone will suddenly feel as if there's this presence of another person that's nearby.

And it turns out that you can actually artificially induce that sense of another presence that's nearby. You can do it by using the sense that we have of our own presence. So, as I'm sitting here now, I have a fairly strong sense that I am sitting here now; that there's this person who's me who's sitting here.

Part of that is because of my kinesthetic appreciation of the way that my own body works. The fact that when I try to do something, my body follows. So, what they did in this experiment was to set up a situation where I'm, say, moving a stick; I feel a stick behind me touching my back.

So, even though I couldn't actually be bringing about that movement, it's highly correlated with my own movements, the way that my hand waving is correlated with my intending to wave my hand. So, here it is; I'm intentionally moving this stick, and I'm feeling the stick moving in exactly the same way on my back.

It turns out that when you do that, people report, even though they know it's not true, they report that there's this other person that somewhere out there. There's a presence that's there that's responsible for what's happening to them.

When you look at people who report this feeling of presence, it's a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage which affect this kind of kinesthetic sense we have of our own bodies. So, the sense that I had that I'm here inside of me, not over there, that's generated by particular brain areas, and with damage to those brain areas, that system gets so messed up.

One of the results is that you think that there's another person there. Now, I think part of what makes that whole story—you know, you might think this is a kind of encouraging Scooby Doo sort of story—so it looked like there was a ghost, but no, we really found out that the ghost was just this illusion of our own kinesthetic body.

But even though that seems kind of comforting, I think there's actually something even spookier that's the result of that. The thing that's even spookier is, what about that feeling I have about me? What about that feeling that I have that I'm here existing in my body?

What these experiments suggest is that's just as much of an illusion as the ghost. So, the ghost in the machine, the ghost that's me, that's just as much an illusion that my brain is generating as the ghost that's out there that's causing that feeling on my back, or the ghost that's out there that's the result of the little glitch in my kinesthetic processing.

So, even though I think this is kind of an encouraging thought for Halloween that all those ghosts are really just illusions of your mind, there's a bit of a catch.

Like in all good ghost stories, it's kind of a turn of the screw that says, yeah, well, that might be true about those ghosts, but that might be true about that ghost that's my own sense of self too...