This is another response to a recent article by CJ, a very long-time psychical researcher and member of the paranormal research group ASSAP. Over the past few days he has written a two-part article discussing the Psycho-Social Hypothesis of the UFO experience and its possible flaws, which I have also responded to. Now he has put up a similar thought-provoking essay on the possible neurological origins of the ghost experience.
CJ states that we don’t just see with our eyes, but with our brains. There are particular sections of the brain devoted to turning the electro-chemical impulses from our peepers in to vision, and our conscious visual perception of the world around us. Among other parts of brain mentioned by him is the visual cortex located at the rear of the skull. People who have received an injury to this section of the brain may become cortically blind. There’s nothing wrong with their eyes or optic nerves, but the blow to the visual cortex means that they cannot translate the impulses from the eyes into images in their brains. There also a related phenomenon in which the cortically blind nevertheless seem to have some kind of vision subconsciously. When these people are asked to point to a person or object, they are perfectly able to do so with accuracy, even though they aren’t consciously seeing anything. To them, it’s all guesswork, even though something more than this is operating.
This leads to the thorny question of what is actually going on when people see ghosts. Scholars, theologians and spiritualists have been discussing the nature of spooks since the days of the Greek philosophers. And many people, who believe that scepticism only arose in the 18th century Enlightenment, would probably be astonished how much scepticism towards ghosts, demons and magic there was in the Middle Ages and before. Theologians had to wrestle with the problem of how ghosts could be seen, if the soul was immaterial. They concluded that there was a third form of material between the soul and ordinary matter. This was spirit. It was extremely tenuous, but nevertheless could be seen, and so could souls when they were embedded or cloaked in it. In the 19th century some Spiritualists suggested that the deceased were made of matter as we are, but this was at a higher vibration and so usually invisible to us. This followed 19th century theories about the ether and how atoms were some kind of whirlpool within this attenuated stuff that pervaded the entire cosmos.
A similar explanation has been used by Contactees and members of UFO-based New Religions to explain their contacts with the space brothers. These religions arose before humans had sent probes to the neighbouring planets and discovered how hostile they were to organic life like ours. George Adamski, dubbed by UFO Magazine ‘the great pretender’ because of his notorious hoaxes, claimed that he had met and interacted with men and women from Venus and Mars. Mars, unfortunately, is not the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs full of beautiful alien princesses, feudal warlords and alien creatures. Nor is the world of canals of Schiaparelli. It is an almost-completely airless world more like the Moon, and any life existing there is probably microbial. Venus is not C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra either, or the various primordial swamps suggested by previous scientists. It’s a hell world of sulphuric acid rain, a mean temperature of 400 degrees and an atmospheric pressure 40 times that of Earth. Any life departed from its rocky surface many millions of years ago. But several decades ago, a gentleman from the Aetherius Society tried to explain away this divergence from his religion’s teaching on Wogan. Debating the issue with astronomy presenter and broadcaster Patrick Moore, the presenter of the Sky at Night, this said that the aliens on Venus with which his religion claimed to be in contact, had not been detected because they were at a higher vibration.
Back to ghosts, CJ appears to be following the view of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research that ghosts are hallucinations, though of a different nature from that experienced by schizophrenics and others with mental health problems. They suggested that ghosts were hallucinations caused by other minds, living or dead. Crisis apparitions are one example. These are when a person suddenly sees an image of a friend or loved one on the verge of death. The SPR believed that they are caused by the dying individual telepathically sending out an image of themselves to the percipient. The theory that ghosts were telepathic impressions from other minds is the central premise behind L. Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic ghost story, The House and the Brain.
There is clearly something to this. There are ghost encounters that do indeed suggest that the experience is in some sense hallucinatory, but nevertheless also objective, generated by something or someone. In one of the cases investigated by Tony Cornell, an academic and veteran paranormal investigator, he and a colleague were called out to a haunting in a woman’s house. Their car broke down along the way, and so one of them stayed to get this sorted out while the other went on to talk to the woman. When he arrived, she explained to him that there was a red-headed woman by the fireplace. His fellow turned up a few minutes later, having heard nothing of the previous conversation. When he came in, he asked who the woman by the fireplace was. This suggests that there was an objective element to the experience, in that there was something or someone there generating the image of the woman seen by the house’s occupant and one, but not both, of the ghosthunters. This has given rise to the Stone Tape theory, based on the ideas of T.C. Lethbridge, in which there is something in the environment that records mental impressions, and which replays them to certain sensitive individuals. These people then experience them as ghosts.
If this is correct, then it raises the question of what changes or features in the visual cortex or other structures of the brain involved in vision, that allow genuine mediums and clairvoyants and ordinary people to perceive ghosts. The brain, it has been said, is the most complicated organised structure in the cosmos. At the moment there are controversies over the possible existence of neurological differences between certain sections of humanity. There has been a long-time debate over whether there is a difference between the brains of men and women, and whether this is the cause of different mental abilities between the sexes. Obviously this is intensely controversial. A few decades ago one neuroscientist discovered that the corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemisphere’s of the brain, was thicker in women. This discovery was received with fury by some, and there have been demonstrations against the neurologist, including physical assault, one of which left him with a fractured skull. See the relevant article in the volume The Human Brain Evolving. Differences in brain structure have also been claimed as the origin of homosexuality. A Californian doctor, LaVey, claimed after extensive dissection of the brains of gay men, that one section of their brains was more similar to heterosexual women than to hetero men. And it has also been claimed that gay women’s brains are similarly more like that of heterosexual men than heterosexual women. This appears to be the accepted view. But some neurologists have questioned whether men’s and women’s brains are all that different. These doctors and surgeons point out that you can’t immediately tell the sex of a brain from its appearance. There may be immense problems examining the question of a neurological origin of the ghost experience.
And it is questionable whether the theory that ghosts are some form of hallucination actually explains all the varieties of the ghost experience. Looking through Hillary Evans’ excellent Seeing Ghosts, it is clear that people’s experiences of seeing and encountering ghosts is extremely varied, and often doesn’t simply consist of seeing or hearing them. Some of the encounters in the book are about instances where the percipient had eaten with a supposed ghost in a café or restaurant, only to find out later that this person had been dead for days before. Yet when they met them, they behaved like a fully embodied, corporeal being. And what about poltergeists, the noisy ghosts that throw objects about? These appear to have a physical reality, at least in their effect on the homes and property of the people haunted by them. They aren’t hallucinations, although the entity responsible for the hurled plates or whatever may also be invisible and immaterial in itself, just as the ghost causing the hallucinatory experience in that model is also objectively invisible and immaterial. It is possible that there is no single ghost experience, but a variety of related or apparently similar phenomena, and so no single explanation is possible. Or it may be there is a single ghost phenomenon, but that it involves a number of factors and processes, including hallucinations, but that these may vary according to types of experience. CJ has stated that this is the first part of his discussion of ghosts and hallucinations, and promised that in his next piece he’ll return to the subject of UFOs. I await both with interest.
For further information, see: https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/09/ghosts-working-notes-part-one/
Tags: 'Perelandra/ Voyage to Venus', Aetherius Society, ASSAP, Assault, C.S. Lewis, CJ, Contactees, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Gays, George Adamski, Ghosts, Hallucinations, Hillary Evans, L. Sheridan Le Fanu, Magic, Mars, Men, Middle Ages, Neurology, New Religions, Paranormal, Patrick Moore, Psychical Research, scepticism, Seeing Ghosts, Sky at Night, Spiritualism, T.C. Lethbridge, telepathy, The House and the Brain, The Human Brain Evolving, Tony Cornell, UFO Magazine, UFOs, Venus, Wogan, Women
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