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Paranormal
- Why We Believe - 20081103
By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK
Belief in the paranormal reflects normal brain activity carried
to an extreme.
(HealthNewsDigest.com) - It wasn't immediately
obvious to Walter Semkiw that he was the reincarnation of
John Adams. Adams was a lawyer and rabble-rouser who helped
overthrow a government; Semkiw is a doctor who has never so
much as challenged a parking ticket. The second president
was balding and wore a powdered wig; Semkiw has a full head
of hair. But in 1984, a psychic told the then medical resident
and psychiatrist-in-training that he is the reincarnation
of a major figure of the Revolution, possibly Adams. Once
Semkiw got over his skepticism—as a student of the human
mind, he was of course familiar with "how people get
misled and believe something that might not be true,"
he recalls—he wasn't going to let superficial dissimilarities
dissuade him so easily. As he researched Adams's life, Semkiw
began finding many tantalizing details. For instance, Adams
described his handwriting as "tight-fisted and concise"—"just
like mine," Semkiw realized. He also saw an echo of himself
in Adams's dedication to the cause of independence from England.
"I can be very passionate," Semkiw says. The details
accumulated and, after much deliberation, Semkiw went with
his scientific side, dismissing the reincarnation idea.
But one day in 1995, when Semkiw was the medical
director for Unocal 76, the oil company, he heard a voice
in his head intoning, "Study the life of Adams!"
Now he found details much more telling than those silly coincidences
he had learned a dozen years earlier. He looked quite a bit
like the second president, Semkiw realized. Adams's description
of parishioners in church pews as resembling rows of cabbages
was "something I would have said," Semkiw realized.
"We are both very visual." And surely it was telling
that Unocal's slogan was "the spirit of '76." It
was all so persuasive, thought Semkiw, who is now a doctor
at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group in California, that
as a man of science and reason whose work requires him to
critically evaluate empirical evidence, he had to accept that
he was Adams reincarnated.
Perhaps you don't believe that Semkiw is the
reincarnation of John Adams. Or that playwright August Wilson
is the reincarnation of Shakespeare, or George W. Bush the
reincarnation of Daniel Morgan, a colonel in the American
Revolution who was known for his "awkward speech"
and "coarse manners," as Semkiw chronicles on his
Web site johnadams.net. But if you don't believe in reincarnation,
then the odds are that you have at least felt a ghostly presence
behind you in an "empty" house. Or that you have
heard loved ones speak to you after they passed away. Or that
you have a lucky shirt. Or that you can tell when a certain
person is about to text you, or when someone unseen is looking
at you. For if you have never had a paranormal experience
such as these, and believe in none of the things that science
says do not exist except as tricks played on the gullible
or—as neuroscientists are now beginning to see—by
the normal workings of the mind carried to an extreme, well,
then you are in a lonely minority. According to periodic surveys
by Gallup and other pollsters, fully 90 percent of Americans
say they have experienced such things or believe they exist.
If you take the word "normal" as
characteristic of the norm or majority, then it is the superstitious
and those who believe in ESP, ghosts and psychic phenomena
who are normal. Most scientists and skeptics roll their eyes
at such sleight of word, asserting that belief in anything
for which there is no empirical evidence is a sign of mental
pathology and not normalcy. But a growing number of researchers,
in fields such as evolutionary psychology and neurobiology,
are taking such beliefs seriously in one important sense:
as a window into the workings of the human mind. The studies
are an outgrowth of research on religious faith, a (nearly)
human universal, and are turning out to be useful for explaining
fringe beliefs, too. The emerging consensus is that belief
in the supernatural seems to arise from the same mental processes
that underlie everyday reasoning and perception. But while
the belief in ghosts, past lives, the ability of the mind
to move matter and the like originate in normal mental processes,
those processes become hijacked and exaggerated, so that the
result is, well, Walter Semkiw.
Raised as a Roman Catholic, Semkiw is driven
by a what-if optimism. If only people could accept reincarnation,
he believes, Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites might stop fighting
(since they might be killing someone who was once one of them).
He is dismissive of the idea that reincarnation has not been
empirically proved. That was the status of everything science
has since proved, be it the ability of atoms to vibrate in
synchrony (the basis of the laser) or of mold to cure once-lethal
infections (penicillin). Dedicated to the empirical method,
Semkiw believes the world is on the brink of "a science
of spirituality," he says. "I don't know how you
can't believe in reincarnation. All it takes is an open mind."
On that, he is in agreement with researchers
who study the processes of mind and brain that underlie belief.
As scientists began studying belief in the paranormal, it
quickly became clear that belief requires an open mind—one
not bound by the evidence of the senses, but in which emotions
such as hope and despair can trump that evidence. Consider
the Tichborne affair. In 1854, Sir Roger Tichborne, age 25,
was reported lost at sea off the coast of Brazil. His inconsolable
mother refused to accept that her son was dead. Twelve years
later a man from Wagga Wagga, in New South Wales, Australia,
got in touch with her. He claimed to be Sir Roger, so Lady
Tichborne immediately sent him money to sail to England. When
the claimant arrived, he turned out to be grossly obese, E.J.
Wagner recounts in her 2006 book "The Science of Sherlock
Holmes." Sir Roger had been very thin. Sir Roger had
had tattoos on his arm. The claimant had none. He did, however,
have a birthmark on his torso; Sir Roger had not. Although
Sir Roger's eyes had been blue, the claimant's were brown.
Lady Tichborne nevertheless joyfully proclaimed the claimant
her son and granted him £1,000 per annum. Lawsuits eventually
established that the claimant was an impostor.
Letting hope run roughshod over the evidence
of your eyes, as Lady Tichborne did, is surprisingly easy
to do: the idea that the brain constructs reality from the
bottom up, starting with perceptions, is woefully wrong, new
research shows. The reason the grieving mother did not "see"
the claimant as others did is that the brain's sensory regions,
including vision, are at the mercy of higher-order systems,
such as those that run attention and emotions. If attention
is not engaged, images that land on the retina and zip back
to the visual cortex never make it to the next stop in the
brain, where they would be processed and identified and examined
critically. If Lady Tichborne chose not to focus too much
on the claimant's appearance, she effectively blinded herself.
Also, there is a constant back-and-forth between cognitive
and emotion regions of the brain, neuroimaging studies have
shown. That can heighten perception, as when fear sharpens
hearing. But it can also override the senses. No wonder the
poor woman didn't notice those missing tattoos on the man
from Wagga Wagga.
The pervasiveness of belief in the supernatural
and paranormal may seem odd in an age of science. But ours
is also an age of anxiety, a time of economic distress and
social anomie, as denizens of a mobile society are repeatedly
uprooted from family and friends. Historically, such times
have been marked by a surge in belief in astrology, ESP and
other paranormal phenomena, spurred in part by a desperate
yearning to feel a sense of control in a world spinning out
of control. A study reported a few weeks ago in the journal
Science found that people asked to recall a time when they
felt a loss of control saw more patterns in random noise,
perceived more conspiracies in stories they read and imagined
illusory correlations in financial markets than people who
were not reminded that events are sometimes beyond their control.
"In the absence of perceived control, people become susceptible
to detecting patterns in an effort to regain some sense of
organization," says psychology researcher Bruce Hood
of the University of Bristol, whose upcoming book "Supersense:
Why We Believe in the Unbelievable" explores the mental
processes behind belief in the paranormal. "No wonder
those stock market traders are clutching their rabbit's feet"—or
that psychics and the paranormal seem to be rivaling reality
stars for TV hegemony ("Medium," "Psychic Kids,"
"Lost" and the new "Fringe" and "Eleventh
Hour"). Just as great religious awakenings have coincided
with tumultuous eras, so belief in the paranormal also becomes
much more prevalent during social and political turmoil. Such
events "lead the mind to look for explanations,"
says Michael Shermer, president of the Skeptics Society and
author of the 1997 book "Why People Believe Weird Things."
"The mind often takes a turn toward the supernatural
and paranormal," which offer the comfort that benign
beings are watching over you (angels), or that you will always
be connected to a larger reality beyond the woes of this world
(ghosts).
As science replaces the supernatural with
the natural, explaining everything from thunder and lightning
to the formation of planets, many people seek another source
of mystery and wonder in the world. People can get that from
belief in several paranormal phenomena, but none more so than
thinking they were abducted by aliens. When Susan Clancy was
a graduate student in psychology at Harvard University, she
was struck by how ordinary the "abductees" she was
studying seemed. They were respectable, job-holding, functioning
members of society, normal except for their belief that short
beings with big eyes once scooped them up and took them to
a spaceship. They are men like Will, a massage therapist,
who was abducted repeatedly by aliens, he told Clancy, and
became so close to one that their union produced twin boys
whom, sadly, he never sees. Numerous studies have found that
abductees are not suffering from any known mental illness.
They are unusually prone to false memories, and tend to be
creative, fantasy-prone and imaginative. But so are lots of
people who have never met a little green man.
Some 40 percent of Americans believe it's
possible that aliens have grabbed some of us, polls show,
compared with 25 percent in the 1980s. What makes abductees
stand out is something so common, it's a wonder there aren't
more of them: an inability to think scientifically. Clancy
asked abductees if they understand that sleep paralysis, in
which waking up during a dream causes the dream to leak into
consciousness even while you remain immobilized, can produce
the weird visions and helplessness that abductees describe.
Of course, they say, but that doesn't apply to them. And do
they understand that the most likely explanation of bad dreams,
impotence, nosebleeds, loneliness, bruises or just waking
up to find their pajamas on the floor does not involve aliens?
Yes, they told her, but abduction feels like the best explanation.
Larry, for instance, woke from a dream, saw shadowy figures
around his bed and felt a stabbing pain in his groin. He ran
through the possibilities—a biotech firm's stealing his
sperm, angels, repressed memory of childhood sexual abuse—and
only then settled on alien abduction as the most plausible.
The scientific principle that the simplest explanation is
most likely to be right is, well, alien to abductees. But
again, an inability to think scientifically is exceedingly
common. We are more irrational than we are rational; emotions
drive voting behavior more strongly than analysis of candidates'
records and positions does. The universal human need to find
meaning and purpose in life is stronger and more basic than
any attachment to empiricism, logic or objective reality.
Something as common as loneliness can draw
us to the paranormal. In a study published in February, scientists
induced feelings of loneliness in people by telling them that
a personality questionnaire they filled out revealed that,
by middle age, they would have few friends and be socially
isolated. After this ruse, participants were more likely to
say they believed in ghosts, angels, the Devil, miracles,
curses and God than were participants who were told their
future held many friendships, found Nicholas Epley, of the
University of Chicago, and colleagues.
That we are suckers for weird beliefs reflects
the fact that the brain systems that allow and even encourage
them "evolved for other things," says James Griffith,
a psychiatrist and neurologist at George Washington University.
A bundle of neurons in the superior parietal lobe, a region
toward the top and rear of the brain, for instance, distinguishes
where your body ends and the material world begins. Without
it, you couldn't navigate through a door frame. But other
areas of the brain, including the thinking regions in the
frontal lobes, sometimes send "turn off!" signals
to this structure, such as when we are falling asleep or when
we feel physical communion with another person (that's a euphemism
for sex). During intense prayer or meditation, brain-imaging
studies show, the structure is also especially quiet. Unable
to find the dividing line between self and world, the brain
adapts by experiencing a sense of holism and connectedness.
You feel a part of something larger than yourself. This ability
to shut off the sense of where you end and the world begins,
then, may promote other beliefs that bring a sense of connection,
even if they involve alien kidnappers.
Other normal brain functions can be hijacked
for spooky purposes, too. Neither the eyes nor the ears can
take in every aspect of an object. The brain, therefore, fills
in the blanks. Consider the optical illusion known as the
Kanizsa triangle, in which three black Pac-Man shapes sit
at what could be the corners of a triangle, their open mouths
pointed inward. Almost everyone "sees" three white
lines forming that triangle, but there are in fact no lines.
What does the "seeing" is not the eyes but the brain,
which habitually takes messy, incomplete input and turns it
into a meaningful, complete picture. This drive to see even
what is not objectively there is easily hijacked. "Perceptually,
the world is chronically ambiguous and requires an interpretation,"
says Stewart Guthrie, professor emeritus of anthropology at
Fordham University and author of "Faces in the Clouds."
And suddenly you see Satan in the smoke from the World Trade
Center. "We see the Virgin Mary in a potato chip or Jesus
on an underpass wall because we're using our existing cognitive
structures to make sense of an ambiguous or amorphous stimuli,"
says psychologist Mark Reinecke, professor of psychiatry and
behavioral sciences at Northwestern University.
Scientists mean "see" literally.
Brain imaging shows that the regions that become active when
people imagine seeing or hearing something are identical to
those that become active when they really do see or hear something
in the outside world. This holds true for schizophrenics (their
visual cortex becomes active when they hallucinate people,
and their auditory cortex when they hear voices, in ways that
are indistinguishable from when they perceive real people
and voices) and for healthy people engaging in mental imagery
(think of a pink elephant). It is not too far a step for mentally
healthy people to see or hear what they are thinking intensely
about. Christina Puchalski, director of the George Washington
Institute for Spirituality and Health, felt her dead mother's
presence "with me in a very deep and profound way, emanating
from a certain direction," she says. "Maybe if you're
thinking very strongly about that person, your mind is creating
the sense that he is there."
A more common experience is to see patterns
in coincidences, something that also represents a hijacking
of normal and useful brain function. You think about the girl
at the party last Saturday and—bam!—she calls you.
You think about the girl who chatted you up in class—and
never hear from her. Guess which experience you remember?
Thanks to the psychological glitch called confirmatory bias,
the mind better recalls events and experiences that validate
what we believe than those that refute those beliefs.
But why? Why do we remember the times we thought
of someone just before she texted us and forget all the times
we had no such premonition? When the mind was evolving, failing
to make an association (snakes with rattles are to be avoided)
could get you killed, while making a false association (dancing
will make it rain) mostly just wasted time, Michael Shermer
points out. "We are left with a legacy of false positives,"
he says. "Hallucinations become ghosts or aliens; knocking
noises in an empty house indicate spirits and poltergeists;
shadows and lights in a tree become the Virgin Mary."
The brain also evolved to recoil from danger,
and the most frequent sources of danger back in the Stone
Age were not guns and cars but saber-toothed tigers and other
living things. As a result, we are programmed to impute vitality
to even inanimate threats, as Bristol's Hood has demonstrated.
When he gives a speech about irrational beliefs, he holds
up an old cardigan and asks who would be willing to wear it
in exchange for about $40. Usually, every hand in the audience
shoots up. But when Hood adds that the sweater was once worn
by a notorious murderer, almost every hand disappears. "People
view evil as something physical, even tangible, and able to
infect the sweater" as easily as lice, Hood says. "The
idea of spirits and souls appearing in this world becomes
more plausible if we believe in general that the nonphysical
can transfer over to the physical world. From there it's only
a small step to believing that a thunk in an empty house is
a footstep."
There is a clear survival advantage to imputing
aliveness and asking questions later. That's why, during human
evolution, our ancestors developed what is called a hypersensitive
agency-detection device, says Benson Saler, professor emeritus
of anthropology at Brandeis University. This is an acute sensitivity
to the presence of living beings, something we default to
when what we perceive could be alive or inanimate. "Whether
it's a rock formation or a hungry bear, it's better to assume
it's a hungry bear," says Saler. "If you suppose
it's a rock formation, and it turns out to be a hungry bear,
you're not in business much longer." Defaulting to the
"it's alive!" assumption was "of such considerable
value that evolution provided us with greater sensitivity
to the presence of living agents than we needed," says
Saler. "We respond to the slightest hint or indication
of agency by assuming there are living things present. Developing
ideas about ghosts and spirits is simply a derivative of this
hypersensitivity to the possibility" that a living being
is present, and too bad if it also produces the occasional
(or even frequent) false positives.
The belief that minds are not bound to bodies,
and therefore that ghosts and other spirits exist here in
the physical world, reflects a deep dualism in the human psyche.
No matter how many times neuroscientists assert that the mind
has no existence independent of the brain, "we still
think of our essence as mental, and of our mind as being independent
of body," says Fordham's Guthrie. "Once you've signed
on to that, existence after death is really quite natural."
This dualism shows up in children as young as 2, says psychologist
Paul Bloom of Yale University: kids readily believe that people
can exchange bodies, for instance, and since ghosts lack material
bodies but have minds and memories, belief in dualism makes
them perfectly plausible. At the even more basic level of
perception, the brain is wired for faces, says Northwestern's
Reinecke. "Even in the first weeks of life, infants tend
to perceive angles, contours and shapes that are consistent
with faces," he says. There's Mary on the potato chip
again.
All of which raises a question. If the brain
is wired so as to make belief in the paranormal seemingly
inevitable, why are there any skeptics? And not just "any,"
but more assertive, activist ones. Groups such as the Committee
for Skeptical Inquiry, the Skeptics Society and the James
Randi Educational Foundation all work to debunk claims of
the paranormal. A growing number of scientists and others
now proudly wear the badge of "skeptic," just as
more scholars are coming out as atheists, like Richard Dawkins
did in his 2006 book "The God Delusion" and as Christopher
Hitchens did in his 2007 tome "God Is Not Great."
The growing numbers and assertiveness of skeptics (and public
atheists) reflects the fact that they "have long felt
like we belong to a beleaguered minority," says Shermer,
who was once a born-again Christian. Their more aggressive
attitude provides a sense of mission and community that skeptics,
no less than believers, crave. It takes effort to resist the
allure of belief, with its promise of fellowship, community
and comfort in the face of mortality and a pointless, uncaring
universe. There must be compensating rewards.
One such compensation, it is fair to say,
is a feeling of intellectual superiority. It is rewarding
to look at the vast hordes of believers, conclude that they
are idiots and delight in the fact that you aren't. Another
is that skeptics believe, or at least hope, that they can
achieve at least one thing that believers seek, but without
abandoning their principles. Skeptics, no less than believers,
think it would be wonderful if we could speak to dead loved
ones, or if we ourselves never died. But skeptics instead
"seek immortality through our … lasting achievements,"
Shermer explains. "We, too, hope that our wishes for
eternity might be fulfilled." Too bad that as they fight
the good fight for rationality, their most powerful opponent
is nothing less than the human brain.
With Karen Springen in Chicago and Kurt Soller
in New York
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