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Ghost Lusters
- If You Want to See a Specter Badly Enough, Will You - 20081103
Researchers set up "haunted"
room to prove an electromagnetic theory of ghost sightings
By Adam Marcus
Most scientists dismiss the vast majority
of ghost sightings as hoaxes. But researchers in Canada, England
and elsewhere are exploring what happens in the brain to create
the illusion that something is "haunted." So far,
they have found evidence that some apparitions may be brain
benders caused by spiking EMFs (electromagnetic fields), and
possibly even extremely low-–frequency sound waves (known
as infrasound) so subtle that the ear does not register them
as noise.
EMFs emitted by power lines and towers, clock
radios and other electrical sources may help debunk myths
that people or things are haunted, says Michael Persinger,
a neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario,
Canada, who has conducted research on the topic. One such
study, published in 2001 in Perceptual And Motor Skills chronicles
the experiences of a teenager who in 1996 claimed to be receiving
nocturnal visits—one sexual—from the Holy Spirit.
The 17-year-old girl, who had sustained mild brain damage
at birth, said she also felt the presence of an invisible
baby perched on her left shoulder.
When Persinger and his colleagues investigated
(at the behest of the girl's mother), they found an electric
clock next to the bed that was about 10 inches (25.4 centimeters)
from where she placed her head when she slept. Tests showed
that the clock generated electromagnetic pulses with waveforms
similar to those found to trigger epileptic seizures in rats
and humans. When the clock was removed, the visions stopped.
Persinger determined that the clock, in combination with the
girl's brain injury, were highly likely to have been contributing
factors to the perceived nocturnal visits.
Although Persinger believes this case and
others to offer compelling evidence that EMFs contribute to
a person's perception that something is haunted, experiments
intended to prove this theory leave room for doubt.
Christopher French, a psychologist at Goldsmiths,
University of London College in London who studies the paranormal,
is one researcher who has conducted experiments to test the
EMF theory but has been unable to prove its validity. He and
colleagues four years ago built a "haunted" room
in a London apartment rigged with electromagnetic sources
and infrasound generators. They invited 79 volunteers, recruited
via the Internet, to spend some time inside the cool, dimly
lit space.
Researchers disclosed to the subjects that
they might experience some weirdness— feel a presence,
tingling or other strange sensation—while in the room
and were given psychological evaluations to assess their susceptibility
to the suggestion of the paranormal. This included the Australian
Sheep–Goat Scale, which tries to separate likely believers
(sheep) from skeptics (goats). Examples of items on the scale
include questions about belief in life after death and whether
a subject has ever experienced an episode of precognition.
The researchers used a computer to drive twin
coils, hidden behind the walls of the room, that generated
EMF pulses up to 50 microteslas (a unit for measuring the
strength of a magnetic field) of electromagnetic pulses, many
times greater than the one1- to -four4 microteslas generated
by Persinger's clock. They also used a computer to pump in
extremely low-–frequency infrasound waves that were well
below what humans could possibly hear. Such sounds have been
linked, albeit tenuously, to some alleged hauntings. In a
1998 Journal of the Society for Psychical Research article
entitled, "The Ghost in the Machine," Coventry University
(U.K.in England) researchers Vic Tandy and Tony Lawrence describe
an experiment during which they detected an infrasound wave
with a frequency of 18.9 hertz in a factory where workers
had reported strange experiences they believed to be paranormal
(French and his team used waveforms of 18.9 and 22.3 hertz.).
French's volunteers were exposed to electromagnetic
pulses, infrasound, both or neither. "Most people reported
at least some slightly odd sensation, such as a presence or
feeling dizzy, and some reported terror, which we hadn'’t
expected," French says. "Terror is obviously quite
an extreme reaction, and we only anticipated getting reports
of mildly anomalous sensations in the context of this particular
experiment." Still, French and his colleagues could not
conclude that EMFs played a role in conjuring these feelings.
Like any dutiful researcher, French—who
became interested in paranormal psychology after reading the
1981 book Parapsychology: Science or Magic?, by the renowned
doubter and British psychologist James E. Alcock—has
gone into the field, visiting purportedly haunted houses,
which are in ample supply in England. He says believers "psych
each other up. Sitting in pitch darkness you hear noises,
which are common in these old houses, but believers see and
hear things that just aren't there, according to our recording
devices."
French's findings were published in the in
the journal Cortex this month, and he and his colleagues have
been trying to garner funding for a follow-up study. It will
not be easy—poking holes in ghost stories might appear
on its face to be of little scientific value. Still, French
insists such research can reveal important truths about the
human mind, including questions of memory and delusions. "Within
psychology, people talk about reality monitoring, trying to
understand how we make distinctions between mental events
and events that take place out there in the real world,"
he says. "It's something we take for granted: Did you
really lock the door before you went to bed, or did you just
think about it?" On the extreme is schizophrenia, in
which the brain makes no distinction between the real and
the imagined.
"There's a continuum, and this kind of
framework is useful when you're talking about hallucinatory
experiences," French says. "People are mistaking
their attribution, feeling a product of their own mental processes
as something that's taking place in the real world. Anything
that can lead to making your mental events more similar to
events that take place—a vivid imagination, for example—will
make it more difficult to distinguish between the two."
Of course, believers say French cannot see
or hear ghosts because he is a "horrible skeptic,"
which he readily admits. "I wish it was a bit more spooky,"
he says of his time waiting for apparitions to appear in dank,
musty castles. "I'm sitting in the dark, in the cold.
I wish something more would happen."
Persinger commends French's team on its "splendid
experiment," even if it didn't validate his ideas. Still,
he contends, EMFs do affect the body in many ways—from
the brain to individual cells, to enzymes, and even DNA. The
key to testing their effects on brain activity, he says, is
to make sure that the fields are neither too strong nor too
weak, and that they come in the right pattern. So he is not
willing to give up on finding a way to prove scientifically
that EMFs are behind at least some ghost sightings. "I'm
a scientist," Persinger says. "I don't believe in
anything."
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