Ghosts Exist (depending on your definition of ‘exists’)

Image by Claire Stotts

Eastern and Western Perspectives: A Precursor

From the fables of Bloody Mary and Sleepy Hollow in England and the United States to the legends of Shinigami (gods of death) and Wangliang (demon) in Japan and China, tales of ghosts and spirits are seen in contemporary folklore throughout nearly every culture. Despite sharing some similarities in the general nature of these specters, however, there exists a vast difference between the public perception and the fluidity with which this topic is treated and approached.

The notion of spirits in the West is heavily influenced from an entertainment perspective, as tales of apparitions are typically heard of and seen in horror settings and popular culture. We dress up for Halloween, watch Hollywood’s latest horror films, tell ghost stories around the campfire, and will occasionally spiral down the Youtube rabbit hole of scary videos — all for the sake of chasing those big scares and that eerie, slightly disturbing feeling that keeps us at the edge of our seats. Ghost culture in the West has become inextricably reduced to a fun distraction and a source of pleasure.

In Eastern cultures, ghosts and spirits are deeply linked to heritage, tradition, and religion. The presence of ghosts is much more openly embraced and even has massive influences on daily life. First used around 3500 years ago, Chinese masks were used to drive away ghosts and evil spirits from people, their houses, and during funerals to ensure that the soul will rest in peace. Even today, these masks are prevalent in cultural practices like Nuo Opera, China’s most popular folk opera that aims to drive away devils, disease and evil influences, and also to petition for blessings from the gods. This overwhelming belief in specters even has influences on the current demand of real estate and Asian architecture with the prevalence of curved roofs to help ward off evil spirits, which were believed to assume the form of straight lines.

The best defense against such ghosts was to live an exemplary life, and this was why ghost stories were (and are) so often told to children: they express cultural values and encourage people to be kind and courteous to each other. Proper respect should be given to one’s elders, superiors, and ancestors in life so that they would not feel wronged after death and one should always keep one’s word to others. Most importantly, proper burial practices should always be observed, no matter how much cost or trouble they require.

Hollywood ghost stories are therefore both more horrifying (initially) and more reassuring (ultimately) than their Eastern counterparts. The unnerving distinction of Asian stories is that they’re willing to admit the possibility that spirits are simply with us, day in and day out, and there’s not much we can do to make them go away. In classic Japanese ghost stories like those collected by Lafcadio Hearn in ‘’Kwaidan’’ (1904), the ghosts frequently win their battles with us mortals; if they abandon the field, it’s usually by choice or whim.

As such, Eastern Spirits are not mere home invaders, crashing into our lives as Western ghosts do; they’re just unannounced visitors — people we forgot we’d given keys to. Ghosts are, after all, primarily metaphors for the unshakable presence of the past, and it makes sense that a culture such as Japan’s, in which ancestral tradition is so densely woven into the fabric of daily existence, would consider the appearance of a ghost a somewhat less alarming event than we Westerners would. For us, it’s shock; for the East, it’s, more often, awe — there’s an element of remembrance and reverence for fables they’ve only heard about.

So do Ghosts exist?

Let’s start with an assumption based on lack of evidence to the contrary: Ghosts do not exist. There’s no evidence the blurry visages people claim to see are actually manifestations of people who have died, but that lack of evidence still doesn’t account for the fact that 66 million people in the US claim to see ghosts — with the vast majority of them not attempting to monetize this claim — that all can’t possibly be mistaken or fraudulent assertions. People do see things. But why?

In 1902, the “Father of American psychology” William James published The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature, where he linked singular “religious experiences” to psychological disorders in the brain. To him, they were the result of “delusional insanity.” This laid the general groundwork that scientists should focus on the brain in order to locate a cause for spiritual occurrences. And so began the long dance with schizophrenia as a possible cause.

The links are obvious. Schizophrenia affects nearly one percent of the global population, around 20 million people, which makes it large enough to account for some of the breadth of ghostly claims. While the symptoms that lead to diagnosis are varying, there are a few checkpoints that align perfectly with the feeling of ghostly presences, particularly audio/visual hallucinations and delusional thinking. In 1994, the University of Adelaide in South Australia confirmed that there was a correlation between instances of schizophrenia and belief in the paranormal, although the correlation was only significant for male subjects.

But, still, a correlation between feeling ghosts and schizophrenia is too broad of a correlation to really accomplish anything. What’s actually going on in the brain to account — at least partially — for claims of ghost sightings?

In 2014, researchers in Switzerland brought 12 people who reported having “secondary representations of their body” into the laboratory. In the scientific world, this sensation is known as Feel of Presence (FoP), a murky sense that other people are in the room with you, similar to the experience of those claiming to have encounters with the spirit world. But there’s something unique about FoP that points toward a more specific cause. “Feeling of Presence has specific characteristics,” says Giulio Rognini, one of the study’s co-authors. “If the patient was standing, the presence was felt standing. If the patient was lying down, the patient felt as if the presence was lying down.” In other words, there’s a shared movement between the person claiming to feel the invisible presence and the presence itself. This implies a sort of doubling in the patient’s brain, which further implies signals somehow getting crossed. Rather than attributing their own movements and activities to their own bodies, subjects attribute them to ghostly presences that are near them. With FoP as a focal point, scientists devised an experiment to re-create this feeling and more closely examine what’s happening in the brain during those moments of FoP.

Researchers blindfolded their test subjects and placed them between two robots. Participants were then instructed to reach forward and make a motion on the robot sensor in front of them. When they did, the robot behind them mimicked the same motion on the participant’s back at the exact same time, in a loop of sorts. This was a little strange — imagine how it feels to rub your hand, but then feel the rubbing on your knee — but it only got spooky once they slightly delayed the reaction between the robots. “That replicated the effect of a lesion in those areas of the brain that integrate your own body signals,” Rognini says. When the researchers tweaked the timing, respondents claimed it felt as if some other presence was touching them. Others claimed it felt as though the room was now full of people, rather than the few researchers who were actually present. (Again, respondents were blindfolded during the act.) A few were so freaked out by the “ghostly presence” that they asked to end the test.

When they crunched the data to see what parts of the patients’ brains were firing during these lab-created FoP episodes, researchers saw activity in three areas of the central cortex that deal with visual input, memories, and perception: the insular cortex, frontoparietal cortex, and the temporoparietal cortex. “These areas give you representation of your body,” Rognini says. “They give you the [feeling] that you are a specific body.” When that sensory process is fudged, your brain makes the assumption that there’s someone else in the room with you. Now, these findings can potentially go a long way toward finding a cure for alleviating certain symptoms of schizophrenia. Knowing where the brain is malfunctioning is the first step toward fixing it.

But not all ghost sightings can simply be placed in the boxes of schizophrenia and psychosis. In fact, this is precisely the issue present in our Western view on the topic of spirits. We are so quick to invalidate stories of apparitions, dismissing them as mental illnesses and unreal. Rather, we should adopt some perspective from our Eastern neighbors and open our minds to be more receptive to spirits. In doing so, we can disentangle the — for lack of a better term — linguistic issue with “ghosts.” If you see a tree, you don’t know it’s a “tree” until someone teaches you to associate that four-letter word with the leafy wooden thing sticking out of the ground. In the same vein, if someone feels an invisible presence around them, they don’t automatically associate it with a spirit until they’re taught to do so.

We argue that as it currently stands, although it is natural to view spirits and apparitions from the lens of what we can physically observe, the current Western view of ghosts is rooted too much in the external stimuli and not enough in its internal repercussions.

In astral projections, for example, or the typical out-of-body experience through which consciousness can function separately from the physical body, subjects don’t acknowledge or believe it occurs in their mind — they view it as out of their control. Ghosts and demons typically manifest in these settings and are seen as dark, scary creatures — and nothing else. But the implication of this mode of thought fails to attribute these demons to the real reason why they manifest in the first place: out of internal anxieties, negative emotions, energies, and states of mind as a result of real actions and consequences. As such, the notion of ghosts should be viewed more as a tool to understand our underlying states of mind and the actions we consciously take. Similar to how in Eastern culture, tales of ghosts and spirits are used to encourage integrity, compassion, and respect for others, we should view ghosts as vehicles for assessing our internal states of being and making the right decisions to uplift ourselves and others.

There is no way to prove or disprove any theories about ghost experiences that are so mysterious, that happen so quickly and without warning. The fleeting and subjective nature of these experiences renders it virtually impossible to catalog or study in any true methodical way with our current knowledge. But just because we do not currently have the means to fully understand these phenomena does not mean that we should completely disregard the topic. Until we uncover more about the truth behind ghosts, what we can do is reframe the notion of ghosts in a way that allows us to introspect candidly and live our lives better. At least for the time being, it’s not ghosts that should be feared and examined, but ourselves.

References:

1. Gao, Deyong, and Yuan Zeng. “Ghost Culture, Face Culture and Illusion of Demand-a Cultural Perspective of Pension Real Estate.” American Journal of Industrial and Business Management, Scientific Research Publishing, 15 Mar. 2017, https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=74721.
2. Miranda, Gabriela. “2 In 5 Americans Believe Ghosts Are Real and 1 in 5 Say They’ve Seen One, Survey Says.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 28 Oct. 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/28/do-ghosts-exist-41-percent-americans-say-yes/8580577002/.
3. James, William. Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. EDITORIUM, 2020.
4. Schizophrenia.” World Health Organization, World Health Organization, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophrenia.
5. “Belief in the Paranormal and Its Relationship to Schizophrenia-Relevant Measures: a Confirmatory Study.” National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.
6. “Neurological and Robot-Controlled Induction of an Apparition.” Blanke et. al. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(14)01212-3#secsectitle0040.
7. Paulas, Rick. “The Neuroscience of Ghosts.” Pacific Standard, Pacific Standard, 15 Feb. 2016, https://psmag.com/environment/bloody-mary-bloody-mary.

This article was written by Abraham Niu (and inspired by his roommate Kurtis LaMore) who studied cognitive science as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, and was edited by Oliver Krentzman and Luc LaMontagne, former Publications Leads of Neurotech@Berkeley

This article was originally published in Neurotech@Berkeley’s Fall 2021 Edition of Mind Magazine: Change My Mind. To read more, visit neurotech.berkeley.edu/mind.html