“Demons” paralyze about 15 percent of people in their sleep.
A cry for help appeared on the Krasnoyarsk Internet forum for parents. A young mother wrote that the devil had infiltrated her two-year-old child: he beats against the walls of the crib in a dream, howls strangely, cries and does not wake up, and sometimes he still looks into the corner with an unseeing gaze. At the forum, my mother was advised to go to church, to the witch grandmother, remove the damage and search the threshold, most likely there will be a doll or a needle with which the enemies are trying to destroy the family.
Mom appeared on the forum a week later with a report that she had invited a priest to the house, who consecrated her apartment, then went to a nearby village, and the hereditary witch removed the terrible curse from the child. The family also rented a new apartment and put up their own for sale. All this helped - the child began to sleep peacefully. The agitated forum fell silent. A month later, a message appeared from my mother that everything was repeated in the new apartment, and the question is - who knows a specialist in any city in the world who can remove such a strong damage from her child.
Soccer head wife
“As a rule, people who are far from science try to explain incomprehensible phenomena with paranormal reasons: witchcraft, demons, aliens,” explains Alexander Panchin, candidate of biological sciences and popularizer of science, at a lecture for Krasnoyarsk residents “The sleep of reason gives rise to monsters”. “However, neuroscientists know that there are specific physiological causes behind many of the similar symptoms in humans. For example, there is a video in which a sleeping person sits on a bed, and his arms and legs dangle convulsively in different directions. It happens with animals: a sleeping dog in a dream rises from the floor, accelerates and crashes into the wall with all its might, and only after that wakes up. All this is a violation of the phase of short sleep. There is even a case when a person dreamed that he was playing American football and throwing a ball,while he was sleeping, he grabbed his wife by the head and tried to throw her under the bed.
The case with the Krasnoyarsk obsessed child, according to Panchin, can be explained by the dysfunction of a certain area in the brain - the lining of the pontine tegmentum, in Latin. If my mother went to the doctors, and not to the witches, she could stay in her apartment and not be afraid of any damage.
Promotional video:
Mara or Kanashibari?
“This boy was lucky,” the biologist continues. - But in Spain a young mother was tried, she tried to kill her daughter, howling and running in her sleep. She, according to her mother, was possessed by the devil. But such disorders are often observed in children with their immature brains, and there is nothing terrible or paranormal about it. As a rule, everything has its own rational explanation. There is also the opposite situation, in which about 15 percent of people find themselves. They also try to explain it by the presence of demons: a person is sleeping, and then it starts to seem to him that a dark creature is sitting on his chest and strangling him. It is very difficult to wake up from such a dream, and a person experiences rather painful feelings.
The lecturer himself had a similar dream twice, and it was, in his words, the worst dream in his life. The researcher turned to literature and found that this plot is repeated in different cultures: in Scandinavian myths it is Mara, in Japanese stories - kanashibari, in Muslim stories - jinn. Scientists eventually found a simple explanation for this: people who experience similar sensations develop a physiological condition called sleep paralysis. When a person sleeps, their brain goes through REM sleep and NREM sleep. During the first phase, the brain is active as if it were awake. If you wake him up, he will say that he had dreams and will remember them. The body, to protect a person during REM sleep, disrupts the transmission of signals from the brain to the muscles. So that the person who dreams that he is jumping does not really start jumping. But sometimes the mechanism "glitches": the person has already woken up, but the signal to the muscles is not yet coming, and he feels paralyzed. At the same time, he cannot breathe in deeply, and slight suffocation occurs. Some shadows and rustles can be perceived as the presence of something nightmarish. But as soon as the brain triggers a signal to the muscles, everything goes away.
Ghostbusters don't believe in them
“Now there are more and more rational explanations for strange phenomena, because there is more knowledge and instruments for measurements,” Panchin continues. “Even, for example, poltergeists are always explainable. There are ghost hunters in America, but not the ones from the movie with ectoplasm and traps, but skeptics who are trying to figure it out. Once a well-known American journalist said that one day it began to seem to her that voices were heard in the house, some kind of implicit visions appeared. She called the ghostbusters. The experts who came discovered that there was a small carbon monoxide leak in her gas system in the house, and all her visions were explained by this. And every time people declared that they saw ghosts, and then went to doctors or scientists, completely prosaic reasons were found out:MRI showed incipient Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, oxygen deprivation, damage to brain areas. All this caused glitches.
Scientists have found an explanation for other popular plots that people are trying to explain using either magic or esotericism: going out of their body and flying through a tunnel with light at the end. The body exit mechanism was discovered by accident. During an operation on the open brain of a patient with epilepsy, doctors looked for damaged areas (in order to remove them) as follows: electrodes were shocked into various areas of the brain, and the patient responded with what he felt. And suddenly he said: "Oh, I just left the body and look at you from above." It became clear that a certain area in the temporal region is responsible for this sensation. Scientists then carried out experiments on other patients, and everyone who was stimulated to a certain point in the brain declared that he left the body and was hanging from above.
“As for the light at the end of the tunnel, it is seen, for example, by pilots who experience overloads on airplanes or in simulators, in centrifuges,” explains Alexander Panchin. - This happens when blood leaves the brain and hypoxia begins. Our vision is designed in such a way that there are many light-sensitive cells in the center, and much less of them along the periphery. Therefore, when vision begins to turn off, for example, during an operation, the peripheral is first turned off, and the central remains. A bright spot appears, there is darkness around - this is the light at the end of the tunnel.
Gooddini vs. the magicians
And even scientists have dispelled black magic. Anthropologists-skeptics have described many cases when shamans point a bone at a person, he stops eating, drinking and dies. Sometimes a person casts a curse and the other dies of a heart attack. There are hundreds of similar cases in the medical literature. It would seem that this is proof of the existence of paranormal forces. But psychiatrists and psychotherapists confidently declare - the only one who can harm himself during someone else's curse is the “damned” one himself. The human brain does not see the difference between dreams and real events, for him everything is real. And if a person believes that it will get worse, the brain will not resist. So the best salvation from black magic is healthy skepticism and humor towards the damned.
“At the Harry Gooddini Prize, we are offering a million rubles to anyone who proves that they have paranormal abilities in a controlled scientific experiment,” the biologist sums up. “We invited people who claimed to see auras. They showed them four girls, they claimed to see the aura of each. Then they put them behind the screens, confused places, put a young man between them. None of them could say exactly who was standing where, by the color of the aura, which they supposedly could see behind the screen. And so far, none of those who claim to be a magician have passed our test. Moreover, they do not risk coming to us now, so as not to be exposed.
Nina Fateeva
