GHOSTS, what exactly are they ?

Ghosts 'all in the mind'

My postings on ghosts have attracted a great deal of interest. They have always been a source of fascination to psychologists .In the nineteenth century William James wrote extensively about the supernatural a topic which also interested his brother Henry. Modern psychology considers ghosts to be the mind's way of interpreting how the body reacts to certain surroundings.

Dr. Wiseman of Hertfordshire university has carried out one of the most extensive studies of ghostly phenomena. Dr Wiseman's team used hundreds of volunteers
A chill in the air, low-light conditions and even magnetic fields may trigger feelings that "a presence" is in a room - but that is all they are, feelings.

This explanation of ghosts is the result of a large study in which researchers led hundreds of volunteers around two of the UK's supposedly most haunted locations - Hampton Court Palace, England, and the South Bridge Vaults in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Dr Richard Wiseman and his colleagues say their work has thrown up some interesting data to suggest why so many people can be spooked in the same building but provides no evidence that ghosts are real.

Clustered experiences

In Hampton Court - alleged to contain the ghost of the executed Catherine Howard, 5th wife of Henry VIII - the volunteers were asked to face their fear.

UNUSUAL EXPERIENCES

The top image was taken in South Bridge Vault 9
The bottom image was taken just five minutes later
How does one explain the white fuzz? An artefact of processing?
They had to record any unusual experiences, such as hearing footsteps, feeling cold or a presence in the room, as well as marking the location and intensity of the experience on a floor plan.

Before this, candidates were also asked to reveal any prior knowledge of hauntings at the site.

The researchers then examined the distribution of unusual experiences.

In a "normal" setting, you would expect the ghostly encounters to be evenly spaced, but in classic haunting, they would be clustered around certain places.

The results were striking: participants did record a higher number of unusual experiences in the most classically haunted places of Hampton Court, areas such as the Georgian rooms and the Haunted Gallery.

And in the Edinburgh vaults, the result was the same - the vaults considered most haunted were the locations where the most unusual encounters occurred during the study.

Environmental cues

The researchers interpret this as evidence that hauntings are a real phenomenon because they are concentrated in specific places over time.

THE ROLE OF MAGNETISM

When we measure houses where pervasive haunts occur, the place where the occupants find they can sleep, by trial and error, has the most consistent and normal magnetic field strengths
Dr Michael Persinger

Indeed, it is known for people from different cultures to consistently report similar experiences over perhaps hundreds of years.

"Hauntings exist, in the sense that places exist where people reliably have unusual experiences," Dr Wiseman said "The existence of ghosts is a way of explaining these unusual experiences."

But are the ghosts real? Dr Wiseman and his colleagues are not so sure.

They claim, somewhat paradoxically, that the hauntings exist but the ghosts do not.

"People do have consistent experiences in consistent places, but I think that this is driven by visual factors mainly, and perhaps some other environmental cues," he said.

Sensitive people

Making detailed measurements at each place, such as temperature, light intensity and room space, Dr Wiseman thinks that people are responding unconsciously to environmental cues and the general "spookiness" of their surroundings.


He cites examples of mediums successfully indicating haunted areas of buildings with no prior knowledge of them and suggests that they may be particularly sensitive to magnetic fields.

Spiritualists interpret this as evidence that the ghosts are there, but another explanation is that the mediums are simply more sensitive to the environmental cues that result in haunted feelings - not sensitivity to the ghosts themselves.

Sceptics have long maintained that ghostly encounters are influenced by a person's knowledge of the place and its history, the "prior knowledge hypothesis".

But this study refutes that explanation, as the statistics showed that prior knowledge did not affect the areas in which strange experiences were recorded.

"We found little if no evidence that people's prior knowledge mattered," said Dr Wiseman. "If anything, it made them veer away from having experiences in the known haunted sites."

So, in a sense, the question is still open, there ARE phenomena - just not necessarily supernatural.

Dr Wiseman and colleagues report their to the BPS.

Last year I published a ghostly picture of an airman at Gosport. Here is another of a woman dressed in 1940's clothes on the balcony of St.Botolph's church. It must be a fake obviously since there are no such things as ghosts...Is it that our mind takes a random pattern of light and shade and creates an image from it which actually isn't there:like the face of Jesus in a piece of toast, or a face in the clouds ?




ST BOTOLPH'S CHURCH

Bishopsgate. London EC2.

In 1982, photographer Chris Brackley took a picture inside this historic old church. The only people present were himself and his wife. When the photograph was developed he was astonished to note that a woman in old-fashioned garb was standing on the balcony to the right of the altar. The negative was subjected to considerable expert analysis, which revealed that that there was no double exposure to the film and it was also proved that none of Chris’s equipment was faulty. The only explanation for the mysterious figure was that someone must have actually been standing on the balcony when the picture was taken. A few years later Chris was contacted by a builder who had been employed on restoration work in St Botolph’s crypt. He explained that, in knocking down a wall he had inadvertently disturbed a pile of old coffins. One had come open to reveal a reasonably well-preserved body the face of which bore an uncanny resemblance to the figure that had made an uninvited appearance in Chris’s photograph.

Ear Worms and Us!

What triggers an Earworm - the song that's stuck in your head?

PYT was triggered by the letters EYC 

All of us, at one time or another have a tune stuck in our head. It might be " All Things Bright and Beautiful after school assembly. In fact,the brain has its own jukebox. A personal sound system for your private listening pleasure. The downside is that it has a mind of its own. It often chooses the songs and it frequently gets stuck, playing a particular tune over and over until you're sick of it. Psychologists have nicknamed these mental tunes "earworms" (from the German Ohrwurm). A study from 2009found that they can last anywhere between minutes to hours, but that they're only unpleasant in a minority of cases. Now a team led by Victoria Williamson, in partnership with BBC 6 Music and other international radio stations, has surveyed thousands of people to try to find out the various triggers that cause earworms to start playing. Radio listeners and web visitors were invited to fill in an online form or email the station about their latest earworm experience and the circumstances that preceded it.

Just over 600 participants provided all the information that was needed for a detailed analysis. Predictably, the most frequently cited circumstance was recent exposure to a particular song. "My bloody earworm is that bloody George Harrison song you played yesterday," one 6 Music listener wrote in. "Woke at 4.30 this morning with it going round me head. PLEASE DON'T EVER PLAY IT AGAIN." In relation to this kind of earworm-inducing exposure, the survey revealed the manifold ways that we come into contact with music in modern life, including: music in public places, in gyms, restaurants and shops; radio music; live music; ring tones; another person's humming or singing; and music played in visual media on TV and on the Internet.

However, a song doesn't have to be heard to worm its way inside your head. Many listeners described how earworms had been triggered by association - contact with certain people, rhythms, situations, sounds or words - sometimes with quite obscure links. "On my journey, I read a number plate on a car that ended in the letters 'EYC' which is NOTHING LIKE 'PYT' (by Michael Jackson)," said another listener, "but for some unknown reason, there it was - the song was in my head."

Memories also triggered earworms - for example, driving along the same stretch of road that a song was first heard. And also anticipation. Another listener had "Alive" by Pearl Jam stuck in their head in the days before attending a Pearl Jam concert.

Mood and stress were other triggers. "Prokofiev 'Montagues and Capulets' opening theme. I was writing an email about a distressing subject. I suspect the mood of the piece matched my mood at the time," said an amateur musician. Another listener had Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror playing in her mind ever since she'd been thinking about the star non-stop and feeling sad (the survey coincided with his death in 2009).

A final theme to emerge from the survey was the way that earworms start playing when we're in a "low attention state", bored or even asleep. "My earworm is 'Mulder and Scully' by Catatonia. In fact I dreamt about running through woods and this was the sound track in my head," said a 6 Music listener. Another survey respondent experienced K'naan "Waving Flag" when mind wandering through a monotonous lab task.

Theoretically, Williamson and her colleagues said earworms can be understood as another manifestation of what Ebbinghaus in the nineteenth century identified as "involuntary memory retrieval". They could even provide a new window through which to study that phenomenon.

"While musical imagery is a skill that many (especially musicians) can utilise to their advantage, involuntary musical imagery (INMI) is an involuntary, spontaneous, cognitive intrusion that, while not necessarily unpleasant or worrying, can prove hard to control," the researchers concluded. "The present study has classified the breadth of circumstances associated with the onset of an INMI episode in everyday life and provided insights into the origins of the pervasive phenomenon, as well as an illustration of how these different contexts might interact."

What about you? What earworms have you experienced lately and what was the context? Please use comments to share your earworm experiences.
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Williamson, V., Jilka, S., Fry, J., Finkel, S., Mullensiefen, D., and Stewart, L. (2011). How do "earworms" start? Classifying the everyday circumstances of Involuntary Musical Imagery Psychology of Music DOI: 10.1177/0305735611418553

Why do we like HORROR ?

Fear coils in your stomach and clutches at your heart. It’s an unpleasant emotion we usually do our best to avoid. Yet across the world and through time people have been drawn irresistibly to stories designed to scare them. Writers like Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Clive Barker continue to haunt the popular mind. Far longer ago, listeners sat mesmerised by violent, terrifying tales like Beowulf and Homer’s Odyssey.

‘If you go to your video store and rent a comedy from Korea, it’s not going to make any sense to you at all,’ says literature scholar Mathias Clasen based at Aarhus University, ‘whereas if you rent a local horror movie from Korea you’ll instantaneously know not just that it’s a horror movie, but you’ll have a physiological reaction to it, indicative of the genre.’

Why is horror the way it is?

Fresh from a study visit to the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Clasen believes the timeless, cross-cultural appeal of horror fiction says something important about humans, and in turn, insights from evolutionary psychology can make sense of why horror takes the form it does. ‘You can use horror fiction and its lack of historical and cultural variance as an indication that there is such a thing as human nature,’ he says.

This nature of ours is one that has been shaped over millennia to be afraid, but not just of anything. Possibly our ancestors’ greatest fear was that they might become a feast for a carnivorous predator. As science writer David Quammen has put it, ‘among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat’. There’s certainly fossil evidence to back this up, suggesting that early hominids were preyed on by carnivores and that they scavenged from the kill sites of large felines, and vice versa. Modern-day hunter-gatherers, such as the Aché foragers in Paraguay, still suffer high mortality rates from snakes and feline attacks.

Such threats have left their marks on our cognitive development. Research by Nobuo Masataka and others shows that children as young as three are especially fast at spotting snakes, as opposed to flowers, on a computer screen, and all the more so when those snakes are poised to strike. Modern-day threats, such as cars and guns, do not grab the attention in this way. That we’re innately fearful of symbolic threats is known as ‘prepared learning’. The snake is a very powerful image imprinted in the human mind.

Another study published just this year by Christof Koch and his team has shown how the right amygdala, a brain region involved in fear learning, responds more vigorously to the sight of animals than to other pictures such as of people, landmarks or objects.

Viewing the content of horror fiction through the prism of evolutionary evidence and theory, it’s no surprise that the overriding theme of many tales is that the characters are at risk of being eaten. ‘Do we have many snakes or snake-like creatures or giant serpents in horror fiction?’ Clasen asks. ‘Yes we do: look at Tremors – they were really just very big snakes with giant fangs’. In fact, many horror books and movie classics feature oversized carnivorous predators, including James Herbert’s The Rats. Alien is, for this reason one of the most frightening films - lizard like, violent and carnivorous -lovely :)

Are we Blind to Internet Banners ?

It's a line of research that Google doesn't want you to know about. Many studies suggest people have a habit of simply ignoring web banners on Internet sites - a phenomenon known as banner blindness. The evidence for this ad avoidance is based largely on tests of people's explicit memory of ads after they've browsed a site. Of course that doesn't mean that the participants hadn't looked at the ads, nor does it mean that the ads hadn't lodged their message subconsciously.

Now Guillaume Hervet and his team have attempted to address these points in an eye-tracking study. Thirty-two participants read eight web-pages about choosing a digital camera. On the third, fourth, seventh and eighth pages, a Google-style rectangular text ad (180 x 150 pixels) was embedded in the right-hand side of the editorial content. The second ad was different from the first, and then the same two ads appeared on the seventh and eighth pages, respectively. Also, half the participants were exposed to ads that were congruent with the camera topic of the web-pages; the other half to incongruent ads. All advertised brands were fictitious.

The results may be of some consolation to Google and their advertisers. Eighty-two per cent of the participants did actually look at one or more of the ads. Or put another way: of the 128 ad exposures, 37 per cent were looked at once or more. Had the ad content made a lasting impression? To test this, after the browsing phase, the participants attempted to read the same ads presented in varying degrees of blurry degradation. Their performance was compared to a new group of control participants who hadn't done the earlier web browsing. If performance was superior among the participants who'd earlier been exposed to the ads, this would suggest they had a lasting memory of the ad content. In fact, performance was only superior for web-browsing participants who'd earlier been exposed to ads in a congruent context.

Another aspect to the results is how the participants' behaviour changed over the course of the web browsing. The first and third ads were looked at for longer than the second and fourth ads. This is probably because the second and fourth ads appeared on pages that had been preceded by a page with an ad on it in the same location - the participants seemed to have learned to ignore that area of the page. On the other hand, it seems a couple of pages without ads was enough to restore ad-looking behaviour.

The lessons for web advertisers are clear: don't advertise on every page, vary ad location, and make sure the ad topic is congruent with the web-site content. 

DISGUST: its psychological function....

Total Recoil

Survival of the primmest

Chances are, there's a special something that's guaranteed to turn your stomach. Perhaps it's the sight and smell of a decomposing pigeon at the side of the pavement, maggots wriggling from its vacant eye sockets.

Or perhaps you squirm whenever you think of your grandma's mucky dentures by her bedside.

Whatever your pet hate, disgust is a basic emotion common to all humans. But for decades, nobody really understood why it existed. Scientists now believe we can find the answer by examining the things that disgust us.

Easy queasy

At the end of the 1990s, Dr Valerie Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine began to survey people in different countries to find out what things they found disgusting. Curtis uncovered some interesting cultural peculiarities. For example, food cooked by a menstruating woman was a frequent cause of disgust in India. While fat people scored highly as disgusting in the Netherlands.

But overall, people kept reporting the same things as revolting wherever they were from. It seems that whether we live in Islington or Isla Pinta, Margate or Marrakech, we are all disgusted by:

• Bodily secretions - faeces (poo), vomit, sweat, spit, blood, pus, sexual fluids
• Body parts - wounds, corpses, toenail clippings
• Decaying food - especially rotting meat and fish, rubbish
• Certain living creatures - flies, maggots, lice, worms, rats, dogs and cats
• People who are ill, contaminated

These universal sources of disgust led Curtis to hypothesise that disgust might be genetic; hard-wired in our brains and imprinted on our biological code by millions of years of natural selection. But what persistent force in our past drove us to evolve such a powerful emotion?

The origin of faeces

Excreta is most common cause of disgust around the world.

The things people consistently find disgusting also make us ill. This link convinced Curtis that disgust was a biological mechanism for avoiding infectious disease. Faeces, pus and corpses are all sources of dangerous bacteria and viruses; faeces alone being the source of more than 20 dangerous bugs.

The genes for disgust probably arose by accident and then became common through natural selection. The observation that most animals avoid eating each other's faeces suggests that disgust could have evolved a very long time ago.

Unwashed genes

Curtis still believes that upbringing plays an important role in determining what we find disgusting. But she believes that we have evolved genes that predispose us to find some things more disgusting than others.

"Imagine a child had never come into contact with either a rat or an orange. If you showed the rat and the orange to that child for the first time, they would probably be fascinated not disgusted," says Curtis.

"If you then decided to condition that child to be disgusted by both things, I think you would find it easier to get them to be disgusted by a hairy, smelly rat than to be disgusted by a nice round orange," she adds.

Out of sight, out of mind

Crucial to this instinctive reaction are visual rules of thumb, which we use to decide what is and isn't a disease threat.

Visual cues are so powerful, we often squirm at the sight of things we know are harmless, simply because they happen to look like a disease threat.

Take worms for example. While many species of worm are harmless - like the humble earthworm - some have evolved to become human gut parasites. Over millions of years, we have evolved an instinctive avoidance of gut parasites in animal meat. And this same visual aversion to long, slimy, wriggly animals makes us squirm at the harmless earthworm.

The gum of a man's mouth infected with larvae from a sarcophagid fly during a nap in the open.

The photograph on the left is of an elderly Israeli man who is thought to have been infected when he sat down under a tree to sleep. A sarcophagid or 'flesh' fly crawled inside his mouth and deposited its live larvae in the gaps between his gums and teeth.

The smell of fear

Another vital trigger is our sense of smell. Smell causes such a powerful response in the brain that the US Army has been trying to develop a stink bomb with an odour foul enough to be used for riot-control. The Metropolitan Police have already expressed an interest in the weapon.

But we can override the disgust response. People find family less disgusting than strangers. And when it comes to sex, we compromise between our instinctive avoidance of disease and our urge to reproduce.

Opposing views

But not everyone believes that we have a genetic predisposition to be disgusted. Unlike Curtis, Paul Rozin of Penn State University thinks that disgust is culturally acquired.

Rozin carried out his own survey on the things people found disgusting and discovered that causes of death rated the highest amongst his North American subjects.

"Anything that reminds us we are animals elicits disgust," Rozin writes. "Disgust functions like a defence mechanism, to keep human animalness out of awareness."

People around the world use the same expression to display their disgust.

Anatomy of disgust

But few people argue that the way we express our disgust is universal. Humans use a distinctive facial expression to signal disgust.

Professor Paul Ekman of the University of California, San Francisco found that this was identical in different cultures across the globe. We make this expression by screwing up our noses and pulling down the corners of our mouths.

MRI scans also reveal that we use a special part of the brain when we get disgusted: the anterior insular cortex.

Curtis has even claimed that disgust could have been one of the first words uttered by humans. "The word 'yuck' is similar in languages all over the world. It seems to be a proto-word," says Curtis.

Despite rapid advances in medicine, disease still poses an unprecedented threat to human life in the 21st century. If disgust really is as crucial to our survival as some scientists believe, then we're likely to be saying yuck for a very long time to come.

Happy New School Year!

Welcome back to Psychblog, or Tea and Toast which has been resting over the summer examination period. We're hoping this year to host contributions from the whole school on psychological issues and debates which we will publish on the blog. One topic which has been mentioned to me by several girls is depression. I think we ought to be very clear about this topic - to be 'fed up' is a perfectly normal mood in everybody's life. Somehow society has created an expectation that we all ought to be happy all of the time this is just not possible - 'no sunshine without shadows' as my mum used to say. A clinical depression is very different and , fortunately, rare. All it needs to snap most people out of 'fed upness' is a kind word, a thoughtful deed, or a good laugh. Laughter is Dr.Brown's cure for the blues.. try it and see.

Please post comments on the school web site, what are your cures for the blues ?