Tag Archives: anomalous experiences

The mystery of the silent aliens

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For copyrights, see :Image:Gliese.JPG (the ori...

“Sixty years ago, space aliens were the preserve of lunatics and eccentrics, thanks to decades of sci-fi schlock, flying-saucer nonsense and Lowellian fantasies of Martian canals. Then, in 1950, came Enrico Fermi and his paradox – “Where the hell is everyone?” – and, 10 years later, the first attempts to put the search for ET on a scientific footing, courtesy of Frank Drake, who pointed a radio telescope at Tau Ceti and heard… silence.

Since then, a modestly funded programme to detect alien radio transmissions has stepped up a gear, and we have made significant astronomical discoveries pertinent to the question of alien life. Despite this, Fermi’s paradox has deepened, as the sheer size and antiquity of the universe has become increasingly apparent.

Today it is rare to meet an astronomer who doesn’t believe that the universe is teeming with life. There is a feeling in the air that light will soon be shed on some of science’s most fundamental questions: is Earth’s biosphere unique? Do other minds ponder the universe?

In April, the world will celebrate the quinquagenary of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, so it seems a good time to take stock of the silence. Three new books tackle the issue in three different ways. One, an immensely readable investigation of the SETI enterprise (with a surprising conclusion); the second, a technical guide to what we should be looking for and how; and the third, a left-field argument that the alien question has already been answered…” (New Scientist)

Deciphering Cryptozoology

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“Loren Coleman defines cryptozoology and says, once and for all, that it is science. On the one hand, Loren Coleman is a skeptic, firmly grounded in scientific principles. On the other hand, his particular branch of science, cryptozoology, gives equal credence to suspected bird species, say, and near-mythical creatures like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Cryptozoology—the search for and study of animals whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated—is frequently treated as an easily dismissed bastard child of science. If that’s the case, then Coleman is the unrepentant modern father of the field. Besides authoring nine books on the topic, he also owns the International Cryptozoology Museum, which he runs out of his home in Portland, Maine. A former psychiatric social worker and university professor, he now makes his living writing, lecturing, and consulting about cryptozoology, which he’s studied since before the word existed in English. Coleman’s out to show that there’s much more to cryptozoology than chasing down Bigfoot or plumbing the depths of Loch Ness for its most famous resident.” (The New York Review of Ideas)

US UFO Hotspots Map

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April 14, 1561, Nuremberg Germany

“Where is UFO country? PM went to the Center for UFO Studies’ database to find out where the top counties for UFO spotting reside and how they coincide with air traffic control boundaries. Here are the top regions for UFO spots along with tips on how to report a sighting.” via Popular Mechanics

As it turns out, I live within 50 miles of Rockingham County, NH, which has logged 183 reported UFO sightings in the 1947-2005 interval tabulated here.

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The Curious Case of Street Lamp Interference

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It’s about midnight and you are heading home. Suddenly, the street lamp above turns off without reason, and you find yourself in the dark. It is natural to experience a chill. But what would you think if street lamps kept turning off when you passed them by?

It is something that many of us have experienced, at least once. Many don’t take notice, but others do and wonder if the cause of such interference lies inside them…

The idea is that there appears to be an effect that is not consistent with our current knowledge of how people interact with the physical world, and which occurs in specific circumstances.

Four explanations for SLI have been proposed…”

— Massimo Polidoro, an investigator of the paranormal, author, lecturer, and cofounder and head of CICAP, the Italian skeptics group. Via The Skeptical Inquirer. I have previously mentioned SLI here, given my own experiences with a particular pair of streetlights on my block.

Strange Experiments Create Body-Swapping Experiences

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Art´s imagery of humanoid

“Scientists now have manipulated people’s perceptions to make them think they have swapped bodies with another human or even a “humanoid body,” experiencing the sensations that the other would feel and giving the illusion of being inside the other’s body.

The bizarre achievement hearkens to body swaps portrayed on numerous TV shows and movies such as Freaky Friday and All of Me.

In real life, the cognitive neuroscientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet succeeded in making subjects perceive the bodies of mannequins and other people as their own. The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. It also worked whether the subject was immobile or was making voluntary movements. However, it was not possible to fool the subjects into identifying with a non-humanoid object, such as a chair or a large block.”

via LiveScience

UFO enthusiasts call on Obama to release X-Files

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Baptism Of Christ By Aert De Gelder

“UFO enthusiasts are pressing Barack Obama to release classified documents about sightings of alien spacecraft, encouraged by support from within the President-Elect’s own White House team.”

via Telegraph.UK

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Patternicity

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Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise: Historian of science and Skeptics Society foun...Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer: “…whenever the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of not believing a real pattern, natural selection will favor patternicity.”

via Scientific American

By the way, I am enamored of the term apophenia for this phenomenon. Patternicity seems too cutesy. As a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of psychosis, I think apophenic thinking is at the heart of the paranoid process and one of the core disturbances in schizophrenia. But Shermer’s argument that natural selection will favor patternicity when it has the best adaptive cost undercuts his crusade against irrational belief, doesn’t it? As I have previously pointed out in discussions of apophenia, finding patterns (in the sense of “believing superstitions“) has helped human groups to survive.

Cortex, Volume 44, Issue 10 (November-December 2008)

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Example of a subject in a Ganzfeld experiment.Ganzfeld experiment

This is a special issue on the ‘Neuropsychology of Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs’

Contents include:

  • The paranormal mind: How the study of anomalous experiences and beliefs may inform cognitive neuroscience (Peter Brugger, Christine Mohr)
  • Visual attentional capture predicts belief in a meaningful world (Paola Bressan, Peter Kramer, Mara Germani)
  • Sentences with core knowledge violations increase the size of N400 among paranormal believers (Marjaana Lindeman, Sebastian Cederström, Petteri Simola, Anni Simula, Sara Ollikainen, Tapani Riekki)
  • Apophenia, theory of mind and schizotypy: Perceiving meaning and intentionality in randomness (Sophie Fyfe, Claire Williams, Oliver J. Mason, Graham J. Pickup)
  • Believing in paranormal phenomena: Relations to asymmetry of body and brain (Günter Schulter, Ilona Papousek)
  • Paranormal experience and the COMT dopaminergic gene: A preliminary attempt to associate phenotype with genotype using an underlying brain theory (Amir Raz, Terence Hines, John Fossella, Daniella Castro)
  • Event-related potential correlates of paranormal ideation and unusual experiences (Alex Sumich, Veena Kumari, Evian Gordon, Nigel Tunstall, Michael Brammer)
  • The transliminal brain at rest: Baseline EEG, unusual experiences, and access to unconscious mental activity (Jessica I. Fleck, Deborah L. Green, Jennifer L. Stevenson, Lisa Payne, Edward M. Bowden, Mark Jung-Beeman, John Kounios)
  • Ganzfeld-induced hallucinatory experience, its phenomenology and cerebral electrophysiology (Jirí Wackermann, Peter Pütz, Carsten Allefeld)
  • Magical ideation and hyperacusis (Stéphanie Dubal, Isabelle Viaud-Delmon)
  • Psychological aspects of the alien contact experience (Christopher C. French, Julia Santomauro, Victoria Hamilton, Rachel Fox, Michael A. Thalbourne)

Highlights include:

  • part of the variance of strength of belief in paranormal phenomena can be explained by patterns of functional hemispheric asymmetry that may be related to perturbations during fetal development
  • an inconclusive attempt to correlate a specific phenotype concerning paranormal belief with a dopaminergic gene (COMT) known for its involvement in prefrontal executive cognition and for a polymorphism that is positively correlated with suggestibility.
  • a study concluding that (a) religious people have a stronger belief in meaningfulness of coincidences, indicative of a more general tendency to maintain strong schemata, and that (b) this belief leads them to suppress, ignore, or forget information that has demonstrably captured their attention, but happens to be inconsistent with their schemata.
  • electrophysiological findings suggesting that paranormalideation may be associated with alteration in contextual updating processes, and that nusual experiences may reflect altered sensory/early-attention (N100) mechanisms.
  • EEG patterns of subjects with high levels of belief in paranormal phenomena and more frequent unusual experiences were similar to those found in schizophrenic-spectrum disorders.
  • People reporting contact with aliens (‘Experiencers’), compared with matched controls, were found to show higher levels of dissociativity, absorption, paranormal belief, paranormal experience, self-reported psychic ability, fantasy proneness, tendency to hallucinate, and self-reported incidence of sleep paralysis.
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Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception

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Book cover of Book cover via Amazon

Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky, Abstract: “”We present six experiments that tested whether lacking control increases illusory pattern perception, which we define as the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli. Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions. Additionally, we demonstrated that increased pattern perception has a motivational basis by measuring the need for structure directly and showing that the causal link between lack of control and illusory pattern perception is reduced by affirming the self. Although these many disparate forms of pattern perception are typically discussed as separate phenomena, the current results suggest that there is a common motive underlying them. (Science, 3 October 2008, Vol. 322. no. 5898, pp. 115 – 117)

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Years ago, there was a psychiatric paper I can no longer dig up proposing that belief in ESP was correlated with a history of sexual abuse and other trauma, the link being the experience of the lack of control in abuse. It is more comforting to believe that the skill to foresee, and potentially avoid, disastrous events exists (even if one failed dismally at foreseeing events in the abuse situation; one can believe in the possibility one may not fail the next time…) than to believe that no foresight is possible and that disastrous things defy our abilities to control them.

And on a cultural level, I recall being fascinated by attempts to explain ritual and religion as efforts to exert an illusory control over contingent events. (If we perform our rituals perfectly, the gods won’t send that famine. When it comes, it is because we were imperfect in our observance.)

So some distorted, “magical thinking” can come from experience, but it can also come from neurochemical imbalances or abnormalities of neural network formation, as in schizophrenia and other psychoses, especially of the paranoid type, in which too much credence is given to coincidence and patterns are found where there are none. And this amped-up ability to see patterns may not, of course, always work against one. A gifted few seem to have an enhanced ability to make order out of chaos, as per an article from New Scientist to which I blinked in March of 2002.

I have also written further about this on FmH in a discussion of pareidolia and apophenia which touched, among other things, upon William Gibson‘s preoccupations in the aptly-titled Pattern Recognition (2003).

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