Ghosts, phantoms and other ghosts, experts say, appear on the border of the worlds. But which of them is real and which is parallel is still to be understood
Every year more and more tourists travel specially to those countries where they are promised to show ghosts. Locals protect haunted castles, mills and swamps and are always eager to capitalize on travelers' interest in the wanderings of restless souls. Such routes are very popular in Ireland, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany …
Ghosts, ghosts, phantoms, mirages - what is behind these phenomena? What is their nature? It is said that ghosts often come to impressionable persons. At the same time, there are stories about the observation of paranormal beings and objects by whole groups of people. Moreover, neither the doctors, nor the acquaintances and relatives of involuntary witnesses of these strange phenomena had any doubts about their mental health. The tendency to deception or fabrication behind them, too, was not previously noticed. So what is it? Modern science offers its own explanation, and it may be worth, discarding thoughts about the other world, to listen to scientists.
Light and shade
Vladimir Vitvitsky, head of the information technology department of the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow, has long and seriously been studying optical illusions and deceptions and believes that the nature of most strange visions is explained using simple physical laws. The whole thing, he believes, is in the light. “The human eye perceives not the objects themselves as such, but only the light reflected from them,” says Vladimir Vitvitsky. - Then, with the help of the retina, light or dark spots with halftones are converted into a digital code, or simply electrical impulses, and they enter the brain. The brain decodes them and, based on the information received, creates an image of the object in the mind. This is a standard construction scheme for what people consider to be an image of the real world. But it can be violated by forcing the light to reflect on the wrong principlesto which the human eye and brain are accustomed. “On this,” the scientist notes, “all the magic tricks of the illusionists in circuses are based on”. The easiest way to do them is using a system of mirrors that redirect the streams of light reflected from real objects to another point, where it is projected and appears before our eyes.
But nature is capable of creating the same tricks. The most famous of these are mirages. When in the desert wanderers see a lake or even a whole city, they go to it, and that turns out to be just an optical illusion. “In fact,” the physicist explains, “the city exists in reality, but it is somewhere very far, beyond the horizon, maybe even a thousand kilometers away. It is clear that you will not be able to see him from such a distance. However, at different altitudes, the air has different densities depending on the distribution of temperature and humidity. Scientists have found that light is reflected from a denser air layer like a mirror. And at a certain moment, a lot of such mirrors can appear in the atmosphere, and they will take the image of the city far from its real location, and then focus it elsewhere.
Mind games
However, not everything can be explained solely by physical properties. Professor of the Moscow Medical Academy. IM Sechenov, Doctor of Medical Sciences Yuri Sivolap told Itogi that some illusions arise directly in the mind of a person. At the same time, from the point of view of psychiatry, otherworldly phenomena arise from two components: lack of external information and imagination. An important role is played by a person's readiness to perceive an object. “He is waiting for a miracle, and the one who is waiting will almost always see what he wants,” Yuri Sivolap believes. This is often the case with creative people or those who are passionate about the study of the paranormal.
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“But it also happens that a person does not want to see something, is afraid. In a state of fright in the dark, he will walk through the cemetery, and instead of a cross, he will see a figure, which will also begin to approach, - continues Professor Sivolap. “However, a normal person will not see a ghost in detail. This requires either a very strong suggestion or illness. Moreover, the main difference between illusions and hallucinations is that the former do not arise from scratch, but as a result of a changed vision of another object. Hallucinations are the fruit of a sick consciousness.
But not only special impressionability can make a person see in a real object something that actually does not exist. According to Yuri Sivolap, such states are noted in a person when dreams literally burst into his seemingly waking consciousness: “For example, when traveling long distances, a tired human brain may enter a kind of borderline state between sleep and reality. You see some objects with open eyes, information is transmitted to the brain, and there the sleep mechanism starts in parallel, and images from the kingdom of Morpheus are superimposed on the real world."
Modern psychiatry is also able to explain those cases when entire groups of people see ghosts or, say, flying saucers. “The induction mechanism is triggered, that is, the influence of people on each other,” Yuri Sivolap believes. - Let's say there are several people in one place. They either expect to see something or have a great deal of suggestibility. Suddenly someone saw something and begins to transmit the image to others. Medicine knows real mental epidemics, massive hysterical reactions that affect large groups of people.
Suggestion also affects the behavior of people in so-called haunted houses. “People believe that a ghost lives in the house, they develop a stereotype. Moreover, it is known at what exact time you can see it, - continues Yuri Sivolap. "People set themselves up to meet a ghost, and it comes to the curious in the image already described by someone."
However, stereotypes and the expectation of a miracle are not all that can cause a vision. Places frequented by ghosts and unidentified flying objects often coincide with anomalous zones. It is believed that geomagnetic deviations attract otherworldly beings like a magnet. But medicine has its own point of view. Yuri Sivolap is confident that various geomagnetic anomalies can certainly play a role in the appearance of illusions. The brain, according to the physician, obeys physical laws, reacts to electric charges, magnetic fields, it has its own bioelectric activity. When electromagnetic interference interferes with the perception of reality and the processing of information going from the eye to the brain, a person can have completely unexpected images that are taken for reality.
Fifth Dimension
It turns out that physicists and physicians can explain almost all paranormal visions? It seems to be yes, but they still make reservations that leave room for doubt.
So, Yuri Sivolap, talking about the mechanisms of the appearance of illusions in the mind of a person, does not deny that "in fact, something may be," and an expert in optical deception Vladimir Vitvitsky believes that "it is impossible to deny a priori the presence of ghosts and UFOs just because that we don't believe in them. " It is worth remembering that scientists know only a small part of both the human brain and the world around us. How many other dimensions besides the three spatial and one temporal ones described today can exist in the world?
Physicists, for example, are almost close to the discovery of the fifth, and the American researcher Anthony Garrett Lisi put forward the "Theory of Everything", in which 248 linear and 57 more dimensions in space coexist peacefully. It is difficult to imagine what creatures and worlds can inhabit each of them. Maybe they literally swarm next to us, but the brain, enslaved by the modern scientific picture of the world, simply refuses to give us their images. Some scientists even put forward a version that gray matter does not do this on purpose, so that people simply do not go crazy with fear - a kind of protective mechanism is triggered. It is possible that the time has not yet come for humanity to be ready to see the real world, and not the one that we ourselves invented and called real.
OPINIONS
The presumption of nonexistence
Valery Kuvakin, member of the RAS Commission for Combating Pseudoscience, Doctor of Philosophy:
- People can claim otherworldly phenomena for many reasons. These are mainly psychological, associated with a violation of perception or the general mental state of a person. There may be deliberately false messages or related to falsification of some processes. Not a single independent examination of those cases that lend itself to analysis has so far confirmed any phenomena associated with the concept of UFOs or ghosts. It is impossible to deny paranormal phenomena a priori, because science cannot deny what it has not studied. In the meantime, we need to take the position of scientific skepticism.
Sergey Stafeev, Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the St. Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor:
- Mirages are not something from the category of the paranormal, they are scientifically proven. They can be seen with an ordinary eye, they were filmed. It is said that something similar to ghosts was also photographed, and this something was printed on paper. I had to conduct several examinations of such photographs. It turned out to be either photomontage or hardware effects associated with poor photographic material or camera. There are no objective facts proving the presence of ghosts or that they are not optical illusions. Although it is also impossible to unambiguously deny their existence.