The Real-Life Ghostbusters of the Brain

This article was originally posted on Inverse. By Yasmin Tayag "In a sense, we are absolutely the ghosts we are sensing," Giulio Rognini, Ph.D., a senior scientist at EPFL's Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, says. Rognini is part of a team of researchers at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne that might be best described as the real-life ghostbusters. The team is attempting to understand what makes our brains want to believe that apparitions are ghosts. While he's more than willing to admit that ghostly sensations are completely real, he'll be the first to point out that they're not actually caused by ghosts. In his work, he's discovered that many such "encounters" are actually caused by a series of brain malfunctions, which trick us into attributing our movements and sensations to someone else. Rognini's particular line of research focuses on a particular type of ghost encounter referred to by scientists as the feeling of a presence. "Typically, people report the type of apparition that they see," Rognini says. "Our kind of apparition is more the sensation that someone is nearby when no one is actually present." These kinds of encounters are most often reported by people with neurological disorders, like epilepsy and stroke, but they're also common in people who do extreme, exhausting sports, like long-distance cycling or mountain climbing. If ghosts aren't real, then what's triggering these experiences? Rognini and his colleagues -- who speci...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news