The Science of Ghosts

We all know that Halloween is just around the corner. Maybe some of us will go out and trick or treat. Maybe some will watch a scary movie or go to a haunted house. No matter what, that one question always eludes us on this particular holiday: do ghosts really exist? When someone tells a ghost story and their encounters, should you believe them? The answer is, simply put, no.

There are several scientific explanations to why we believe in the paranormal. First: sleep paralysis. This is essentially dreaming with your eyes open. As neuroscientist Baland Jalal explains, when you sleep, your body enters a stage called rapid eye movement, or REM. In this phase, you dream, and your eyes dart rapidly under their closed eyelids. While your eyes move, the rest of your body is paralyzed. Normally, before you wake up, your body shuts this paralyzed state off. But for people with sleep paralysis, they open their eyes and wake up while their body is still in REM, so they see images and figures from their dream while their body is still paralyzed.

The second explanation is pareidolia. Every second, your brain receives signals from the world around you; your eyes take in color, your ears take in sound, and your skin senses pressure. Your brain must order these signals to make sense of them. This is known as bottom-up processing. The brain is so good at it that it adds meaning to meaningless things. For example, when gazing at the moon or at a dark shadow, you might see a face.

Next, your brain also does top-down processing, where it identifies important aspects of the signals that it takes in, and it fills in the rest. However, sometimes the brain adds things that aren’t there. One example is when you mishear song lyrics. Your brain thinks that it has figured out the meaning to the lyrics, but in reality you misheard the lyrics. In other words, you added a meaning to the song that wasn’t there. Another prime example would be on ghost-hunting TV shows. When they display a signal that their devices picked up, at first you may hear a jumble of sounds. But, when they show what the ghost is supposedly saying, you then can easily decipher the words. In this case, your brain added something that wasn’t there previously.

Finally, inattentional blindness could explain why something abnormal occurred. This happens when you get so absorbed in something that you don’t realize what’s going on around you. For instance, when you’re watching that scary Halloween movie, you may get so caught up in it that you didn’t realize that someone moved the remote from the couch to the desk in your living room. So, you may have thought a ghost did it.

In conclusion, these are scientific explanations that provide valid possibilities to why something occurred and how it happened. So, when Halloween comes around, enjoy the paranormal stories, but still consider what could have really taken place.