If you believe that the dead can return and haunt the living, you are not alone. According to one poll, 45% of Americans believe in ghosts, and 28% say they actually saw them. They appear in movies ("I see dead people …"), books and music videos of the group Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. Historical evidence suggests that virtually every culture has expressed a curiosity about the afterlife. Many people believe in ghosts, but is there any real proof of their existence?
I traveled to Buffalo, New York, to meet with Joe Nickell, a paranormal researcher who has been trying to find an answer to this question for 50 years. “I am the world's only full-fledged, paid, professional paranormal researcher. My goal is to explain, not to debunk or popularize. Just explain. Nickell is a Renaissance man motivated by a variety of fields of science.
“In my business I resort to linguistic analysis, analysis of blood counts, psychological issues. Anything that can shed light on each case. " Did he find anything that would make him believe in ghosts for the hundreds of cases he worked on during his half-century of practice? "Neither me, nor science have any clear evidence or confirmation of the existence of ghosts."
In part, this kind of research is complicated by differences in the definition of the concept of "ghost" by different people. Are books flying off the shelves? Ghost. Are the balls in the pictures? Ghost. Mysterious steps in the attic? Ghost. Is Patrick Swayze seductively helping you mold a vase? A ghost, definitely. All potential evidence for the existence of ghosts lies in questionable photographs, videos (“The next day, his TV began to sway wildly by itself”) and eyewitness reports (“Even if it happens during the day, you will not leave the eerie feeling that someone is there.) is fun and creepy, but not scientific evidence. Ghost hunters often use device-like devices to measure the electromagnetic fields that ghosts are supposed to be exposed to. However, no one could explainwhat is the connection here, and therefore most scientists are skeptical about this.
So, there may not be any empirical, scientific evidence for the existence of ghosts, but if it seems to you that you saw one of them, this does not necessarily mean that you are crazy. There are many logical explanations for the paranormal. One of them is infrasound - sound waves with a frequency below 20 Hz perceived by humans. It can be produced by extreme weather conditions, humpback whales and certain mechanisms such as motors and fans.
Scientists have suggested that exposure to infrasound can cause depression, chills and a sense of someone's presence, as well as visual hallucinations. “At 18 Hz, it resonates with the structure of the human eyeball. And a sound that resonates with something material will vibrate materially at this frequency. When this happens to you, your eye begins to see what is not really there."
Swiss scientists have managed to simulate a "ghost" in the laboratory. They created a robot that mimics the subject's hand movements with a mechanical hand that touches his back, but with a slight delay. When the movement is delayed, an unambiguous sense of the presence of a ghost in the room is created. “This time I felt that I was playing with someone or something. It was not me who poked myself in the back, but as if some animal, for example, a monkey, with which I played.
While most ghost sightings cannot be attributed to a robot poking you in the back, this experiment demonstrates how manipulating certain areas of your brain can create an effect that scientist Olaf Blanke dubbed "misperception" and which can easily be confused with paranormal presence.
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Sometimes, to feel or see such a person's presence makes a state of his own consciousness. "When people see ghosts, they are a kind of waking dreams that occur at dusk between falling asleep and waking." This kind of waking dreams can also be called "sleep paralysis", which about 8% of people experienced at least once in their life. You seem to be awake, but you cannot move, and this is often accompanied by creepy images of shadows, people and even monsters. And if you are not familiar with the scientific explanation of this phenomenon, then you may well confuse it with the appearance of a ghost.
Grief is another possible explanation for encounters with ghosts. According to one study, up to 60% of widowed people say they see or hear their deceased loved ones. Neurologist Oliver Sachs, in his book on hallucinations, says seeing a loved one’s face can help cope with grief. “These kinds of hallucinations are not frightening and even soothing. It is part of the grief process and helps heal the wound that remains in a person's life."
“There is no reason to doubt that the majority of paranormal phenomena contribute to something very positive. There are, of course, exceptions, and they are all related to our hopes and fears. We hope that ghosts exist, because in this case we understand that we will not die in the end, and our loved ones do not leave us - they are real and seem to be alive. I remember that when my grandmother died, I didn't want that, but the very idea that we leave the body and continue to live is very strong. After all, each of us at least once said something like “I’m sorry that I was not able to tell my mother one thing” or “I wish my father knew that I was not angry with him.”
Ghosts may not really exist, but this does not mean that you will never be able to see them.