Why Do People Claim to See Ghosts? | Alison Gopnik

Whatever you do, don't look behind you – because the answer isn't there, says psychologist Alison Gopnik. The real ghosts are glitches in your brain, and in a way, that's even scarier.

Gopnik's latest book is "The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship Between Parents and Children"

Transcript:

There is a fascinating line of research recently trying to explain why people see ghosts. And it's a phenomenon that people have talked about for a long time that someone will suddenly feel as if there's this presence of another person that's near by. And it turns out that you can actually artificially induced that sense of another presence that's nearby. And you can do it by using the sense that we have of our own presence. So as I'm sitting here now I have a fairly strong sense that I am sitting here now; that there's this person who's me who's sitting here. And part of that is because of my kinesthetic appreciation of the way that my own body works. The fact that when I try to do something my body follows. So what they did in this experiment was to set up a situation where I'm say moving a stick I feel a stick behind me touching my back. So even though I couldn't actually be bringing about that movement it's highly correlated with my own movements, the way that my hand waving is correlated with my intending to wave my hand. So here it is I'm intentionally moving this stick and I'm feeling the stick moving in exactly the same way on my back.

It turns out that when you do that people report, even though they know it's not true, they report that there's this other person that somewhere out there. There's a presence that's there that's responsible for what's happening to them. And when you look at people who report this feeling of presence it's a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage which affect this kind of kinesthetic sense we have of our own bodies. So the sense that I had that I'm here inside of me not over there that's generated by particular brain areas and with damage to those brain areas that system gets so messed up one of the results is that you think that there's another person there.

Spooky Science: Why Do People Claim to See Ghosts? | Alison Gopnik