A person is often faced with unexplained phenomena. But if all alone can be attributed to a game of imagination, how to explain the cases when several people together see a ghost or monster from Loch Ness? Maybe it's a miracle, or maybe a massive hallucination.
The phenomenon of mass hallucinations
1846, two French military ships - the frigate Belle-Poule and the corvette Berceau were caught by a terrible hurricane off the coast of Africa. The first managed to survive the natural disaster without any special losses, but he lost sight of his fellow traveler. Searches in the open ocean are usually useless, so the frigate set off for a pre-determined rendezvous off the east coast of Madagascar, on St. Mary's Island. However, the corvette was not there either.
For the Belle-Poule team, a painful waiting period began. Every day brought more and more concern for the fate of the unfortunate corvette, whose crew consisted of 300 people. So a month passed. Finally, on the horizon, the signalman saw a battered ship without masts, which was drifting near the coast. The entire crew turned their gaze to the West, and to everyone's jubilation they recognized the missing Berceau in the ship.
The excitement became even greater when everyone saw in front of them not a wrecked ship, but a raft filled with people and towed by sea boats, from which they gave signals of death. This vision lasted for several hours, and every minute more and more terrifying details of this scene became clear. On the order of the commander, the cruiser Archimede was sent to the aid of the perished. The day was already coming to an end when he swam to the cries of the drowning. All the time on the way, the team saw these people, heard their calls. But having sailed closer and lowered the boats from the cruiser, they found that the raft with the people turned out to be just silent bodies torn from the shore of huge trees. There was no trace of Berceau or his crew.
In 1897, the explorer Edmund Perisch, in his book Hallucinations and Illusions, spoke of sailors who saw the ghost of a cook who had died a few days ago. The entire crew watched as he dragged along, limping behind the ship. This went on all night. In the morning it turned out that they were pieces of wood caught on the ship.
The milk miracle in India in 1995 is also attributed to mass hallucinations, when thousands of local residents watched the local deities drink milk in temples. At least it mysteriously disappeared from the glasses presented to the statues.
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The fakir's secret
How can you explain the hallucination that several people see at the same time, and is it even possible? Modern science does not give an unambiguous answer to this question. According to some scientists, mass hallucinations are impossible, according to others, we simply do not know anything about them.
Psychologists of the 20th century explained this phenomenon by the theory of telepathic contact. According to its original version, the viewer who perceives the vision can, by establishing contact with other members of the group, make others notice the vision.
Take, for example, the fakirs, or rather their famous rope trick. Psychologist Andri Puharichi in his book "On the Other Side of Telepathy" described it as follows: a boy climbs up the rope, a magician climbs behind him with a knife in his hand, and both of them disappear somewhere above. Screams are heard, and then body parts cut into pieces fall to the ground in a hail. The magician comes down with a bloody knife, puts the pieces in a box, and then a smiling boy jumps out of it. Creepy … But if you watch this performance on film, then, according to the researcher, the boy and the fakir all the time stand indifferently beside the rope, coiled on the ground. From this, Puharich concluded that "the hallucination arose in the fakir … she was telepathically excited and transmitted to several hundred spectators."
In 1934 this trick was repeated twice in London, and the organizers filmed the second session with hidden cameras. The developed film showed a rope lying on the ground and a boy running away towards the bushes. The spectators present witnessed an event that did not happen in reality.
Majority opinion
Commenting on the aforementioned foci of fakirs, researcher Faivishevsky reported that "visual hallucinations are so well reproduced under hypnosis that the possibility of their occurrence is beyond doubt." But the main thing, he said, is the readiness or the psychological attitude.
Attitudes strongly influence our behavior. They can also make us see what is not in reality. This was proved in 1951 by a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Solomon Ash. He conducted an experiment in which the participants had to compare the lengths of the segments of different lengths depicted on the cards. In this case, the subjects, in fact, were only one of eight, the other seven were bogus, deliberately giving the wrong answer. As a result: three quarters of the subjects believed more than those around them than their own eyes, they gave the wrong answer at least once if the whole group chose it. Later the experimental data were refined and supplemented. So, for example, it turned out that three people are enough for the subject to have an internal conflict, forcing him to accept the point of view of the majority.
This behavior is called suggestibility, and we are all susceptible to it. Therefore, when people are imbued with general moods and feelings, according to psychologists, “one spark” is enough to “ignite” a collective hallucination. According to the famous researcher V. M. Ankylosing spondylitis, hallucinations that first appear in one driven to insanity, are then transmitted to others. Mutual suggestion, associated with constant conversations about the same subject, leads to the fact that the hallucination becomes common for the masses. In the case of the frigate Belle-Poule, such a "spark" was the jubilation of the signalman, who, after a long wait, simply saw what he wanted to see.
Mirror neurons
And yet it is interesting in what way people instantly copy the emotional state of another, which is expressed by facial expressions, eye expressions, breath length and other visual things. It is impossible to explain everything by “secrets of the subconscious”. Scientists believe that perhaps the whole thing here is in mirror neutrons, which are present in speech, motor, visual, associative and other areas of the body. They are excited when performing a certain action or, attention, when performing this action by another creature. They are responsible for imitation. Perhaps mirror neurons are the cause of massive hallucinations. In other words, when one imagines and voices a picture, our brain automatically begins to generate it. By the way, this is exactly what happens in the case of compassionate pain or empathy, when we get unpleasant sensations, seeing,that someone has pinched a finger or cut themselves.
Mirror neurons are still poorly understood features of our brain. It is only known that they are often the cause of mass psychoses, for example, phobias.