According to sociologists from the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), about 46 percent of Russian residents believe in the existence of various evil spirits, while 14 percent of respondents say that they have personally encountered something otherworldly.
The poll showed that women are more superstitious than men: exactly half of the fairer sex believes in all kinds of otherworldly things (as for the strong half of Russians, only 42 percent of the respondents gave an affirmative answer). Most of these people believe in ghosts and ghosts.
The numbers are certainly amazing, but the next time one of you hears strange and scary sounds in your apartment, do not rush to call "Ghostbusters", it is better to turn to science.
Before you get scared, remember: every shadow, every "manifestation of poltergeist" and no one knows where the sounding voice can be rationally explained from the point of view of science. It is with such explanations that we propose to get acquainted today.
10. Electrical brain stimulation
Many people around the world note that they once saw disembodied forms and a haze that looked like a person. Almost all of these people say that they saw these outlines only out of the corner of their eyes, but when they looked directly, the ghost disappeared.
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Many of these people believe that they have seen a demon, some believe that they have seen their own astral bodies, and some assume that all these subtle forms are time travelers who appeared and disappeared in a second. However, some scientists have a more shocking theory on this score.
When Swiss scientists performed a method of electrical brain stimulation on a patient with epilepsy, very interesting things began to happen. She noted that someone was sitting behind her and repeating each of her movements after her. When the girl stood up, the disembodied figure also stood up.
When the patient leaned forward and touched her knees, the mystical essence approached her and allegedly helped to maintain balance. When the doctors told the patient to take and read what was written on the card in front of her, the girl noted that the shadow was trying to snatch the card out of her hands.
However, scientists explain this phenomenon very simply. The fact is that doctors performed electrical stimulation of the temporo-parietal zone, where the part of the brain that is responsible for a person's self-awareness is located.
By manipulating an area of the brain that helps us distinguish ourselves from others, doctors have disrupted the brain's ability to understand its own body, leading to the creation of a human mental counterpart. Scientists hope this phenomenon is key to understanding why so many people, both schizophrenic and otherwise healthy, are beginning to see different shadows or even believe that they have seen aliens.
9. Ideomotor effect
The popularity of Spiritualism was particularly high in the 1840s and 1850s. After all, spiritualism "allowed" people to communicate with deceased relatives and friends. One of the most popular ways to communicate with the world of the dead was the Ouija Ouija board. Interestingly, a board covered with alphabet, numbers and simple words like "yes" or "no" is still popular today.
A seance with the use of a Ouija board usually takes place as follows: a group of people gathered at the same table puts their hands on a special tablet-pointer, and then each asks a question of interest to him or her. If there is a ghost in a room next to people, then he begins to move the index board from letter to letter and thereby answer the question posed.
Another very creepy method of "interacting with spirits" was a completely ordinary table. During the session, people would also sit around a table (usually a round table was used) and put their hands on the tabletop. To everyone's surprise, the table began to move independently, leaning on one or the other leg, rising above the floor and "even flying around the room."
Probably, one should not say that ordinary fraudsters very often hunted in the seances, trying to "steal" more coins from the amazed public, but were all the features of the seances described above a common deception of people? It was decided not by anyone, but by the well-known physicist Michael Faraday. Through a series of experiments, Faraday found that tables most often moved due to an ideomotor effect.
This effect occurs when the power of our imagination makes our muscles move unconsciously. People were so convinced that they expected the table to move around the room that they unconsciously moved it themselves.
A similar scenario occurred, for example, in 1853, when four doctors decided to conduct an experimental seance to summon spirits. Third parties were invited to participate. Half of the people in the group were secretly told that the table could only physically move to the right, while the other group was told by scientists that the table could only move to the left.
As a result, the table did not budge at all during the session! However, when the researchers announced to everyone that the table could move in one direction, the ideomotor effect came into play. The Ouija board works on the same principle. The only thing that moves all these things during a seance is our own muscles, and not someone else's great-grandmother who has gone into the world, who hid a stash for a rainy day.
8. Infrasound
After Vic Tandy saw a gray ghost near the classroom board, he thought that ghosts had settled in his laboratory. However, the next day, Tandy made an amazing discovery. Preparing for an amateur fencing competition, Tandy placed his blade on a stand and after a while found that the blade was vibrating for some reason. Almost immediately, the scientist understood everything. He realized that the force that made the blade vibrate was the same force that had settled in his laboratory. Vic Tandy was dealing with infrasound.
The human ear is able to hear sounds up to 20,000 Hz and is unable to hear sounds below 20 Hz. Everything that is outside these indicators is called infrasound and, despite the fact that we do not hear these sounds, we can feel and see them in the form of vibration. Dr. Richard Wiseman of the University of Hardforshire (UK) says that we are able to feel these waves, especially in our stomach.
And these feelings can be either "positive" (a person suddenly feels anxious) or "negative" (real fear appears). And with the appropriate environment (imagine a dark and gloomy room), a person may experience real panic when exposed to infrasound.
Infrasound can be created by thunderstorms, wind, other weather factors, and even the things that are common in our everyday life. But back to Vic Tandy, who witnessed the vibration of his blade. Thinking about what could become the source of infrasound, Tandy remembered the hood recently installed in his laboratory and decided to make sure that the sound created inside it creates vibrations with a frequency of about 19 Hz.
Since the resonant frequency of our eyes is about 20 Hz, the infrasound, acting on Tandy's eyes, created images that are actually not there. When Vic turned off the hood … all the ghosts disappeared, as they never had.
We also note that according to Dr. Wiseman, these vibrations can be a source of paranormal activity in haunted houses. When examining two underground rooms, he found evidence of the presence of infrasonic waves, which were created by the city roads located above them.
According to Wiseman, this fact can explain all the ghostly figures that are often seen in these underground rooms, and the eerie sounds of footsteps that are heard. All this is the result of vibration.
7. Unconsciousness
What do shamans and Valeria Lukyanova have in common (for those who do not know, we advise you to look on the Internet. A healthy charge of cheerfulness and laughter is guaranteed!)? They all love channeling! In general, channeling is one of the most ancient ways to talk to the spirit worlds. If you do not know what channeling is, then everything is simple: it is the process of receiving information from intelligent Beings who are in a more subtle reality of existence, as well as the age-old spirits of this mortal world.
The shamans of ancient times believed that there was a special channel between the world of the living and the world of the dead. In the West, for example, there is such a character as the famous medium John Edward, who believes that he can communicate with people who have gone to another world, as well as a madam named Jay Z Knight, who assures everyone that she was able to set up a channel with a spirit named Ramta, who lived 35,000 years ago in Atlantis. There is no doubt that channeling is very attractive to various degrees of scammers, but there are people who really believe in what these charlatans are doing!
The answer to everything is unconsciousness, or "altered state of consciousness", when people say and do things that they did not even know about. When a medium “clears his mind,” he tries to find a friendly spirit guide. This spirit-mentor supposedly enters the body of the medium and reveals to him secret knowledge about this world and the Universe as a whole. When a medium clears his mind, different ideas and pictures begin to appear in his head, and the medium believes that all these thoughts come from another entity, from the spirit.
But in fact, these thoughts are formed exclusively by his mind. You will be surprised, but our brain is able to come up with various crazy things even without our conscious participation in it. You've probably come across unexpected inspiration, right? You probably had some completely incomprehensible nightmares, or were you daydreaming? All this is not a consequence of the establishment of a channel with the Higher beings, it is a consequence of the constant and non-stop work of your brain.
6. Temperature
Imagine that you are exploring a gloomy abandoned mansion in the middle of the night when the air around you suddenly becomes colder. However, if you take a few steps to the left or right, the temperature returns to its previous state. This phenomenon is called cold spots by parapsychologists.
Cold spots can be signs of paranormal activity, according to ghostbusters. When a ghost decides to prove himself and scare the people around him to death, he needs energy. Therefore, it sucks heat out of the surrounding objects (including people), and so the so-called cold spots appear.
However, scientists have another, simpler (albeit more boring) explanation on this score. When skeptics investigate "haunted houses", it is often clear that cold air enters the room through a window or chimney. However, even if the room does not have a chimney or windows, the presence of cold spots has a completely rational explanation. The point is that each object has its own temperature. Some objects may be warmer or colder than others.
In order to stabilize the temperature in a room, objects begin to lose their temperature in a process called convection. So the air temperature can either go down or rise. Likewise, when dry air enters a room with moist air, the dry air sinks to the floor, while the moist air rises to the ceiling.
This air movement will be felt by our skin as coolness (the human body is warmer), and it is this process that is a consequence of the so-called manifestations of cold spots. The next time you feel the presence of a ghost and its chilling essence, we advise you to turn on the heater.
5. Problems with the camera
Ghostbusters often report encounters with ghosts in the form of a ball hovering above the ground. Some believe that these clots of light are the spirits of the dead, but not completely departed to another world. Invisible to the eye, balls may appear in photographs. And this is exactly the catch.
Brian Dunning, a person who does not believe in any kind of mysticism, says that a particle of dust or an ordinary insect located very close and caught in the camera lens will appear in photographs in this way, blurred, incomprehensible and mystical. In turn, thanks to the camera flash, this spot on the photograph will glow, which is why most people will be ready to take it for a manifestation of a ghost. Quite a logical and rational explanation, isn't it?
Interestingly, even the majority of those who believe in various kinds of ghosts are very skeptical about photographs in which glowing balls appear here and there. Parapsychologist Pamela Heath, for example, although she believes in the existence of real images of this phenomenon, notes that several of the cases she investigated about glowing balls ultimately turned out to be the subject of various grains of sand, hair, dirty lenses, reflections in the lens or the very movement of the photographer at the time of shooting.
Many of the sites where supporters of the paranormal gather have stopped accepting such photographs, because so many of them turned out to be either fake or a common delusion about what they depicted.
4. Carbon monoxide poisoning
In 1921, ophthalmologist William Wilmer published a rather ghastly note in the American Journal of Ophthalmology. It told the story of the H family and their haunted house. The article reported that all sorts of frightening creaks, doors slamming, footsteps in an empty room, and moving furniture flooded people's homes.
One of the children felt that someone was sitting on it, the second child of the family was attacked by some mystical figure. At night, a woman and a man came to the hostess of the house, who simply stood by her bed. Later, the hostess said that unwanted visits were repeated.
Over time, paranormal activity in the house increased so much that all family members were already desperate and fell into a deep depression. After that, it was noticed that all the plants in the house began to die for no reason at all. And it was this that made it possible to find out the true history of the haunted house. The fact is that the smoke from the fireplace located in the house did not go into the chimney, as expected, but spread throughout the house. It turned out that the whole family suffers from carbon monoxide poisoning.
The bottom line is that carbon monoxide is colorless and odorless, making it very difficult to detect. The gas is very dangerous to humans because our red blood cells absorb CO (the formula for carbon monoxide) much more easily than they absorb oxygen. And a lack of oxygen in the body leads to symptoms such as weakness, nausea, confusion and ultimately death. But before you leave for another world due to carbon monoxide poisoning, you may experience all sorts of hallucinations, which all members of the "H" family suffered.
Another interesting case occurred in 2005, when a woman “frightened by the spirit” called the law enforcement service. The police who arrived at the scene found out that the cause of the paranormal activity was a broken water heater, which was filling the house with carbon monoxide. The moral of this fable is this: stay away from carbon monoxide, otherwise you may see not only ghosts, but also the light at the end of the tunnel (or maybe not).
3. Mass hysteria
In June 2013, more than 3,000 factory workers in Gazipur, Bangladesh went on strike. They were not on strike against long shifts or too little wages. They all wanted someone to get rid of the ghost in the toilet. Interestingly, the evil spirit terrorized exclusively the visitors of the women's toilet and made everyone run away from there in panic.
The unrest among the workers intensified, and the city police had to take this matter. Here, we note that a similar incident occurred at a school in Patong on Phuket Island, where 22 students were hospitalized after they saw the ghost of an old woman. By that time, an exorcist had already been summoned at the factory in Bangladesh to perform a rite of cleansing the factory from all kinds of evil spirits. And it would be better to immediately call a lawyer!
The bottom line in both cases is that both the plant workers and the students of the school experienced a psychological phenomenon called "mass hysteria." This collective disorder occurs when people are really in a very serious stressful state, which, in turn, is most often the culprit of the oppressive environment around (strict school rules or very hard work, for example).
Such a strong psychological stress develops into physical disorders. A person often begins to have a headache, nausea appears and even attacks of aggression appear. And if you also take into account that a person is in an almost isolated society of very religious people, where every rumor can be taken seriously, then you will get a similar collective disorder. Anxiety, like a virus, will pass from one person to another, spreading panic around.
It is interesting to note that among these 3,000 plant workers, only a few people personally "saw" the ghost. Among the people on strike was one woman who campaigned the loudest, but even she herself did not personally see the ghost. She simply fell ill and believed that the cause of her illness was an evil spirit that settled in the factory. This assumption turned out to be so powerful and so suitable for the situation that everyone around began to riot. Fortunately, this strike did not come with any casualties.
2. Jonah
It's a shame that real ghostbusters don't use proton blasters. The sight would be unforgettable! Nevertheless, they use equally interesting tools. For example, an ion counter. The ion counter, as you might have guessed, counts the number of ions. An ion, in turn, is an atom with an unequal number of protons and electrons. If an atom gets an extra electron, then it becomes a negative ion; if an atom loses an electron, then it becomes a positive ion.
Ghostbusters are literally obsessed with all of these ions, because they believe the number of these particles indicates the presence of a paranormal entity nearby. Some say that the presence of the spirit interferes with the concentration of the usual number of ions in the atmosphere, while others believe that ghosts feed on ionic energy so that they have the opportunity to manifest themselves and scare a person to white slippers.
However, ion meters are not at all suitable for detecting ghosts. Ions are formed as a result of all kinds of natural phenomena such as weather, solar radiation, and radon gas leaks, for example. So it usually comes down to who interprets what he sees. Scientists, seeing the concentration of ions, think: "The usual thing." Ghostbusters shout: "Paranormal activity!"
Interestingly, positively charged and negatively charged ions can affect our mood. Negative ions make us feel calm and relaxed, while high concentrations of positive ions can lead to headaches and feelings of emptiness. All of this may explain the way in which people living in a "haunted house" often experience fatigue and excitement, not to mention headaches.
1. Quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics is a scientific field that studies the smallest types of matter. If everything works out, then in the future, thanks to quantum mechanics, we will be able to create really cool things like super-powerful quantum computers. But it is very funny to hear when someone puts the phrase "quantum mechanics" with words like "soul" and "ghosts" in one sentence.
Take, for example, Dr. Stuart Hameroff and his friend, medium Roger Penrose. Hameroff and Penrose put forward the theory that human consciousness is formed inside the microtubes found in our brain cells. And these pipes, according to these two gentlemen, are responsible for quantum computing (the soul in the main).
Hameroff and Penrose believe that when a person is on the verge of death, all the quantum information accumulated by his brain leaves him, but continues to exist outside the body. As an example, these people cite cases in which people who experienced clinical death returned back to this mortal earth and talked about the flights of their souls outside the body and about the light at the end of the tunnel.
As you might have guessed, a huge number of scientists have questioned the theory put forward by Hameroff and Penrose. However, Dr. Henry Stapp is not one of them. As a respected scientist in the scientific community for the study of quantum physics and once worked even with the famous Heisenberg, Stapp suggested that if all these people really returned from the afterlife, then why should we deny concepts such as channeling and a window to another world?
Do you yourself think people like Stapp, Hameroff and Penrose are ordinary dreamers or are they modern Galilees?