Scientists 'see' ghosts

[Loredoctor]

Scientists "see" ghosts
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor


The reason that apparitions, bogeymen and phantoms like to lurk in the shadows may have been revealed by scientists.


A 'ghost' in the Haunted Gallery at Hampton Court Palace
A team from University College London finds that when we gaze around in a poorly-lit context, it can fool our brains into seeing things that are not really there.

Although no one has done a systematic study of ghosts, neuroscientists are convinced they are "all in the mind" and, in the light of the new work, it does not seem so surprising that they seem most often glimpsed in "spooky" dimly-lit circumstances

In the journal PLoS Computational Biology, Prof Li Zhaoping and her colleagues say that the context surrounding what we see is all important - sometimes overriding the evidence gathered by our eyes and even causing us to imagine things.

They were surprised to find that a vague background context has more influence on what we see than one that is bright and well defined, and speculate that this might explain the power of some abstract art and why we can see vivid details in the vague brush strokes of impressionist paintings.

"The paintings are vague in details, but I speculate that, perhaps because of this vagueness viewers are free to use their vivid imaginations to fill-in the details," says Prof Zhaoping, who adopts her first name as her scientific pen name - Li is such a common name it can cause an identity crisis for Chinese scientists.

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"Everything we see is an hallucination generated by the virtual reality machine inside our head," comments Prof Mike Morgan of The City University, London.

"Normally these hallucinations are vetoed by the information coming through our senses, so we can call perception 'controlled hallucination.'

"But when the input is ambiguous we can see all sorts of things, like the faces de Quincy saw in clouds and carpets. There are hundreds of faces hidden in the textured floors of the platforms at Euston Underground Station, if you look for them."

To reveal the haunting power of context, 18 observers were asked by the UCL team to concentrate on the centre of a black computer screen. Every time a buzzer sounded they pressed one of two buttons to record whether or not they had just seen a small, dim, grey 'target' rectangle in the middle of the screen. It did not appear every time, but when it did appear it was displayed for just 80 milliseconds (80 one thousandths of a second).

"People saw the target much more often if it appeared in the middle of a vertical line of similar looking, grey rectangles, compared to when it appeared in the middle of a pattern of bright, white rectangles. They even registered 'seeing' the target when it wasn't actually there," says Prof Zhaoping.

"This is because people are mentally better prepared to see something vague when the surrounding context is also vague. It made sense for them to see it - so that's what happened. When the target didn't match the expectations set by the surrounding context, they saw it much less often.

"Illusionists have been alive to this phenomenon for years,"continues Prof Zhaoping. "When you see them throw a ball into the air, followed by a second ball, and then a third ball which 'magically' disappears, you wonder how they did it.

"In truth, there's often no third ball - it's just our brain being deceived by the context, telling us that we really did see three balls launched into the air, one after the other."

"Contrary to what one might expect, it is a vague rather than a bright and clearly visible context that most strongly permits our beliefs to override the evidence and fill in the blanks."

This could also be why monsters tend to lurk in shadows. "In shadows many things are seen vaguely (rather than clearly), thus tending to trigger the filling-in," says Prof Zhaoping.

[matrixman]

Great article, Lore! Their reasoning makes sense to me.

[Zarathustra]

While this "filling in the blanks" tendency is strong, it is especially strong for faces. Our brain is equipped to recognize faces and to intuit feelings and meanings in facial expressions. Consequently, we often see face-like images in things when there is none at all. Think how easily we see a smile in a colon and parenthesis, for instance.

A similar phenomenon is to hear voices in random white noise like wind (and for similar reasons). Our brains are fine-tuned to extract meaning along these lines: facial expression and vocal articulation. It's also why we are so good at reading handwriting and hundreds of different fonts while computers struggle with this. Voice recognition, face recognition, handwriting recognition . . . these are tasks even children can accomplish, yet computers have historically struggled with. The ease with which we do it--even to the point of seeing and hearing meaning where there is none--compared to the difficulty of the digitalized equivalent, makes our tendency to intuit meaning even more profound and powerful. It is little wonder that people see ghosts. They are seeing their own meaning-imbuing tendency.

[Queeaqueg]

I really don't know if ghosts exist or not. What was written above is really interesting but it hasn't convinced that ghost do not exist. There are lots of evidence(if you can call it that) to suggest there are ghosts... especially from parapsychology... and those hunter people.

For a minute I thought this thread was about Scientists actually proving that ghosts exist.

[Zarathustra]

If ghosts exist, and people can actually see them, then given the fact that we've all been curious about life after death, you'd think at least one ghost in history would have tried a little to make their existence a demonstrable fact. Where are all the ghosts of scientists? Why isn't Einstein's ghost bothering Stephen Hawkins about all the stuff he's figured out since he died?

Either there are no ghosts, or they can't contact us in any way. To think that all the billions of people who have died haven't been able to prove their existence after death is just too incredible to believe.

[Queeaqueg]

I have been meaning to reply to this. Bare with me on this.

The idea of ghosts is that they are damned souls which are too attached to life and are unable to let go of something(bad death, Injustice, etc). Here are reason why possibly not everyone can see, hear, etc ghosts;
1. Human's lack sensory technology. Maybe ghosts are alwasy in contact but are normal senses can't pick them up but certain technology(white noise things, etc) can just pick them up.
2. The reason why Einstein doesn't bother Hawkins because Einstein is not damned or atached to life and has moved on to the next or Hawkins is not listening
3. Not everyone becomes a ghost. Most move on to an afterlife or get reincarnated.
4. They are supernatural, maybe they go beyond what we can measure.

I know those are not the most sound reasons in any way but they are few reasons people have come up wih to why ghosts are not always around.