Fact or Fiction: The Science Behind Ghosts

By Christina P. Hooton

A phantom voice, the presence of a translucent figure, and the unexplained movement of objects are all depictions of ghosts from people who claim to have encountered them. Research suggests that many people believe in ghosts. According to a Science News Explores article, a Pew Research Center survey reported that one in five people in the United States said they’ve seen or been in the presence of a ghost.

While there is little evidence to support this, there are scientific explanations for what people experience when they see a ghost. Whether you’re convinced of their existence or you’re a firm believer in the scientific method, you’ll be fascinated by these real-world phenomena.

Life-Like Dreams

Have you ever woken up from sleep unable to move or speak? You may also see or hear figures that aren’t really there and feel frozen in place. If so, this is a common occurrence called sleep paralysis.

Dreaming is supposed to happen when we are fully asleep and is most vivid during rapid eye movement, or REM sleep. This is the stage of sleep when your eyes dart around under your eyelids, but the rest of your body is paralyzed.

It’s your brain’s job to turn off this paralysis before you awake. When that doesn’t happen, sleep paralysis occurs. The apparitions you are seeing may seem life-like, but they are just hallucinations.

Fascinating Hallucinations

Hallucinations can haunt us when we’re awake, too. You may have sensed the presence of something that is not there—laughter in another room, a figure in the shadows, or a creaky door.

As your brain engages in bottom-up processing, that is, perceiving sensations around you, it sometimes finds meaning in meaningless things. This is also known as pareidolia. It’s why we see rabbits or faces in the clouds.

These misperceptions can also be chalked up to your brain filling in the missing parts as it performs top-down processing. There is usually too much information coming from the world around you for your brain to process it all at once, so it parses out the most important information and fills in the rest. Sometimes, your brain adds things that aren’t there, like when you mishear song lyrics, and it fills in the wrong words.

Mind Games

Your brain can also miss things that are really there. Maybe you’re making a sandwich in the kitchen and notice your basement door is suddenly ajar. Was it a ghost? Or were you so absorbed in your lunch preparations that you failed to notice your sister walk through the room and open the door?

Inattentional blindness occurs when you are so focused on a task that you tune everything else out and completely miss something that is there.

Indeed, there is some spooky stuff happening here. But if we’ve learned anything, it’s that we have nothing to fear and everything to gain when it comes to better understanding our brains and our perceptions of the world around us.