Maybe There's A Ghost Behind You, Or Maybe Your Brain Is Just Lying To You

There's a scientific reason why you may feel the presence of ghosts. A lot of us have had the sense that there's someone behind us, and yet when we turn, nobody else is in the room. To researchers, that's called a feeling of presence, or FoP. It can happen to anyone, although it particularly afflicts people with Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia. A team of scientists in Switzerland was able to replicate that FoP in healthy individuals. As explained in a paper published this month in Current Biology, they used a robot that pokes individuals in the backs and managed to trigger the feeling in some test subjects that several other people were in the room, even though there was only the robot. Professor Olaf Blanke and his team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne were seeking a better understanding of neurological disorders with their experiment. But the results are also intriguing for the many mentally healthy people who believe they have felt the presence of ghosts. Blanke told HuffPost Weird News that the study indicates that sometimes "healthy subjects can experience the same hallucinations as patients suffering from schizophrenia have." "Hallucinations are quite frequent in the general population," said Blanke, a neurologist and neuroscientist. "These data and ours on FoP suggest that there is no clear-cut differences between health and disease but rather a quasi-continuous spectrum." The scientists in Switzerland first examined 12 patients wh...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news