November has somehow managed to sneak up on me, like an evil creature in some horror movie, moving with great stealth to claim its next victim. In October of 2018, I wrote a blog entry on ghosts, luck, and curses.[1] I explained how such phenomena might be interpretations of consequences, caused by us unaware and/or by obscure environmental factors. Whereas the phenomena in that earlier entry were potentially observable by anyone, this current entry touches on phenomena experienced only by certain individuals. In particular this entry is about individuals thinking they actually see ghosts or monsters, that are not visible to others. While it’s easy to dismiss such people as hallucinating or maybe just imagining things, there may be some truth to this type of phenomena.
Having been around dogs most of my life, I have noticed that a dog will sometimes growl or bark at something that doesn’t seem to be present. When it happens, I typically can’t see or hear the threat, and I doubt the dog can either. My current theory is that the dog simply smells the scent of some distant animal, carried by the wind. But if a person claims to see someone or something nearby that other people can’t see? That raises a whole bunch of generally unpleasant questions. Is that person insane? Delusional? In need of new/more/less/legal medication? Hypnotized? Ill? Mentally disturbed? We generally don’t worry so much about dogs. Instead we just accept that we don’t understand their reasoning. (“I don’t see anything, silly dog!”)
What if there’s also nothing wrong with a person seeing something unseen by others? Assume for the moment that there is in fact nothing wrong with the person, that their mind and body are working properly, with no unusual foreign influences. How might they detect something that others can’t? In a way, the situation can be considered as just a disagreement. Sane healthy people disagree with each other quite often about what they see. This situation isn’t helped by the fact that our senses can give us ambiguous information, like with optical illusions. There are even flat images composed of random dots (called random-dot stereograms) that present a three-dimensional image when looked at in the right way.[2] So we can even disagree with ourselves in terms of what we just saw seconds earlier.
While optical illusions are interesting and often entertaining, they are still relatively close to the sensory level. The same general image is perceived by different people but can be interpreted as indicating different physical attributes, like false depth. Is an optical illusion alone likely to cause such a difference in perception, where someone says there is a ghost or monster present and someone else says there is nothing there? I doubt it. Sensory-level interpretations might not be able to explain ghosts that only some people can see.
I suspect the isolated perception of ghosts or monsters is more at the symbolic level, a matter of how sensory information is translated into relevant concepts. There are of course many examples of disagreeing with others on the symbolic level. Besides misreading letters or words, there are also different interpretations of contracts, local laws, supreme court decisions, and the U.S. Constitution, to name a few legal examples. Complex religious texts like the Christian Bible have no shortage of different interpretations. Literary works like those from William Shakespeare have countless scholarly interpretations as well.
Literature is of particular interest for intentionally “painting mental pictures” with its sensory details. Well-written prose can help us imagine a setting or situation in great detail. Poetry is especially known for its tendency to evoke the emotions and senses. Advertisers like to appeal to our emotions and senses as well, though in a generally less aesthetic way. They presumably hope to encourage us to purchase their products or services. Political advertisements similarly like to portray candidates as better or worse than they might be perceived without such advertisements, with hopes of swaying our votes.
Though all these different examples of symbolic interpretations are from human culture, who’s to say nature isn’t capable of affecting us in the same way? After all, symbols are tied to concepts. Primitive concepts like danger or food are more deeply embedded in us than others. Strong fear might have us see something that isn’t there. Maybe love causes us to see things better than they are. Psychologists even tell us that people can unintentially provide false details during a legal trial, thinking they are telling the truth.
At this point in the discussion, it might seem perfectly normal and acceptable for someone to think they see a ghost or monster that isn’t there. But is there really nothing there? Previously I wrote about the proverbial monster under the bed as a way of instilling a healthy fear of the unknown in children, to help keep them safe from harm.[3] Maybe the perception by adults of ghosts or monsters is another example of nature trying to keep us safe. But might there be something there? Maybe a potential source of danger from germs or fungus could affect someone subconsciously in a way that leads to the perception of a monster. At a basic level, it is very important for the person to avoid that danger, and the human body might choose to use whatever works in such an emergency.
On the flip side, though we might blame people for seeing what they expect to see, maybe the majority of us see nothing there because we expect to see nothing. Now who’s right and who’s wrong? Ghosts and monsters may have been reported more frequently in previous centuries because it was more acceptable to think and talk about such things. Maybe that helped people of the past to avoid dangers that we now might avoid by (e.g.) washing our hands. Like the dog barking at nothing, these people might detect danger that others don’t.
Yet I can’t help but think there might be more to the story, at least in some situations. So-called psychics of the past (if not intentionally fraudulent) may have detected “psychic vibrations” in objects they touched, by perceiving something most of us are not aware of. Maybe we simply never learned to interpret our senses in such ways. Maybe fortune tellers had a similar knack for detecting and interpreting patterns we are normally not aware of. These kinds of uncommon perception might be present in more places than we expect and more helpful than we think. “Spirit of the season” could take on new meaning.
References
[1] https://oddstem.com/2018/10/13/ghosts-luck-and-curses/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_dot_stereogram
[3] https://oddstem.com/2020/04/28/monster-under-bed-coronavirus-conspiracies/
(c) Copyright 2020 by Mike Ferrell
Odd STEM 