Name: Things That Go Bump in Your Brain: 4 Scientific Explanations for Ghosts
Uploaded: 2020-04-04T04:56:03.000Z
Duration: 9 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It was a dark and stormy night, and the SciShow team was working late into the night on the newest episode.

As they toiled late into the evening, they started to notice… peculiar things.

And the shadows flitting just out of view.

It was then they finally came face to face with the legendary Ghost of SciShow!

If you talk to the caretakers of old buildings, or hop onto any number of subreddits,

you're sure to find countless stories of personal run-ins with a spook.

And encountering a ghost, whether it's in an old building, your bedroom, or in the SciShow office,

So, perhaps you can take comfort in the fact that these encounters can be explained by natural phenomena:

And a lot of it actually has to do with our brains and how they interpret the world around us.

If we want to talk about explanations for seeing ghosts,

we should start by talking about our eyes.

Pretty much every ghost story happens at night or in a dark place,

Many ghost sightings are brief glimpses of something just at the edge of a person's field of vision.

Then, they look to see what it was, but it's gone!

And that kind of sighting can probably be chalked up to the way human peripheral vision works.

You see, your ability to detect color and resolve detail drops off considerably at the edge of your visual field.

But, your ability to detect motion actually increases.

That's because the periphery of your retina has fewer cones,

the light-sensing cells  that excel at detecting color and shape,

and more rods,  which are better at detecting motion.

So, especially in low-light and/or high-spook conditions,

it's easy to notice motion out of the corner of your eye without clearly making out what's actually moving.

Plus, all of your senses can be heightened when you're on alert,

which increases the likelihood you'll be frightened by otherwise mundane visible stimuli.

So if you just catch something moving out of the corner of your eye,

only to find nothing unusual there when you look,

It's much more likely that the mechanics of your eyeballs made something ordinary seem extraordinary

than it is that a ghost crept past and then vanished.

One of the most common devices in a paranormal investigator's toolkit is the humble audio recorder.

They use it to pick up EVPs, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon...s…

it doesn't pluralize quite right when you spell it out.

Anyhow, the idea is that you can hit record, ask questions to a room,

and then hear vocal responses in the audio when you play it back.

It's just that those vocal responses aren't generated by ghosts, they're generated by your brain.

Another way our brains can trick us is pareidolia:

our tendency to find familiar patterns even  where none exist.

We've talked about this before in the context of seeing faces in rocks or toast.

That happens because our primate brains evolved to quickly recognize one another,

and that ability comes with the side effect of also recognizing familiar forms

Turns out this isn't just a visual thing.

We're so keen on recognizing other humans that we often hear human voices that aren't really there.

This is what's known as audio pareidolia,

and it explains why you might hear a cryptic voice in radio static,

or someone whispering your name in the wind.

Basically, when your brain attempts to make sense from nonsense,

static and amplified background noise are shaped into vague words.

Add a little sprinkling of wishful thinking because you're trying to hear words from the other side,

and you end up with a full-blown ghost voicemail.

And the power of suggestion can even alter what message you hear.

As we explained when we talked about auditory illusions,

there are a lot of factors that can affect how your brain interprets ambiguous sounds.

Experiments from both white noise and human speech have demonstrated that

if subjects are given context beforehand,

their interpretation of a recording tends to match their preconceived expectations,

even if the provided context is deliberately incorrect.

So if we were to play you something we recorded in the Old Sawmill across town at 3 AM the other night,

your impression would be very different if we told you that it said “GET OUT”

than if we told you the message was “EIGHT COWS”.

Still, in either case, the recording in question wasn't actually speech or words at all,

“Nice try Scishow, but you're not going to convince me

that ghosts are just when people get confused about motion off to the side or mis-hear static.”

Another device no serious paranormal investigator would be caught dead without is an EMF detector.

EMF, of course, stands for electromagnetic field:

the area of radiation that surrounds flowing electrical currents.

These fields can be naturally occurring or can come from electronics,

Now, paranormal investigators will tell you that EMF detectors track ghosts

because their incorporeal forms generate EMFs.

But some scientists think what's really going on is the opposite:

EMFs may actually cause the feeling of being haunted.

We mentioned a while back that some ghost stories can be explained by the phenomenon of infrasound.

Those are sound waves with frequencies below the normal human range of hearing.

they still make things in your body wiggle around a bit like other sound waves do,

leading to everything from the feeling of being watched to outright seeing apparitions.

But instead of vibrating our bodies, they mess with our neurons.

Laboratory studies have demonstrated that low-frequency EMFs can darken our mood

or cause other negative psychological effects when applied to regions of the brain.

And the effects can be much stronger, including visual hallucinations.

The catch is that not everyone may be affected the same way, if at all.

For example, the relatively minute EMF of an alarm clock

was enough to make one patient hallucinate nighttime visitors in her bedroom.

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Things That Go Bump in Your Brain: 4 Scientific Explanations for Ghosts

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