When I was reading in the forum yesterday, there was a link to The Creepy Scientific Explanation Behind Ghost Sightings | Cracked.com
I already knew that infrasound ist the cause of fear and many paranormal experiences like Tandys apparitions. However, I didn´t know that tigers make infrasound. Could that be the explanation why apparently harmless infrasound scares many people and lets some of them think there was a beiing that really isn´t there? Could the real danger of real predators making infrasound in the Stone Age be the reason why many people are afraid when they notice infrasound though there is nothing dangerous to see or hear? A biological heritage?
Or often, when someone is alone in a very dark room (for example a testperson in a psychological test or a little child at home), he often thinks to see red eyes or to hear breathing. Maybe this is also a vestige of the times when people were never safe before enemies and dangerous animals, so that they better believed in a lion hidden in a bush und ready to eat them than think that all was well? Especially in the night, where humans are so much more helpless than most animals?
And if someone wakes up in the night and mistakes the expanding and shrinking wood for human steps and thinks that it must be a ghost because nobody else is in the house - could it be possible that the brain instinctivly looks out if there is no enemy when one wakes up, because in the Stone Age there might have been? And - to be on the safe side - interprets harmless noises as dangerous?
Any other examples?
You ought to watch the series “Brain Games” on the National Geographic Channel, which has many examples of cognitive quirks in our brains. Confirmation bias is just one. When you hear or see something on a dark night that you can’t quite identify, you feel the goose bumps because you assume it must be something dangerous. Horror movies have traded on that tendency since their very beginning!
Richard Wisemans blog goes into this, though I can’t link to it. Just search “Richard Wiseman Paranormal”.
You ought to watch the series "Brain Games" on the National Geographic Channel, which has many examples of cognitive quirks in our brains. Confirmation bias is just one. When you hear or see something on a dark night that you can't quite identify, you feel the goose bumps because you assume it must be something dangerous. Horror movies have traded on that tendency since their very beginning!Makes sense. Lois
I know Wiseman. I read his book “Paranormality". It was very funny, especially the topic of the mungo Gef.
When you hear or see something on a dark night that you can't quite identify, you feel the goose bumps because you assume it must be something dangerous.Yes, because in acient times, the possibility that it really was dangerous was much bigger than nowadays. Today it is unlikely that a lion or tiger stands before ones bed. In the Stone Age it might have been possible.
Horror movies have traded on that tendency since their very beginning!Yes. But I once switched to a movie with a Yeti on TV. He hunted people to eat them and he was very ugly. But I was bored because the Yeti could be seen the whole time.
They just recently had a Brain Games episode specifically about how our brains jump to conclusions about the paranormal. Check it out. National Geographic TV Shows, Specials & Documentaries
When I was reading in the forum yesterday, there was a link to http://www.cracked.com/article_18828_the-creepy-scientific-explanation-behind-ghost-sightings.html I already knew that infrasound ist the cause of fear and many paranormal experiences like Tandys apparitions. However, I didn´t know that tigers make infrasound. Could that be the explanation why apparently harmless infrasound scares many people and lets some of them think there was a beiing that really isn´t there? Could the real danger of real predators making infrasound in the Stone Age be the reason why many people are afraid when they notice infrasound though there is nothing dangerous to see or hear? A biological heritage?...I'm not sure how much validity there is behind this experiment, but have you heard of the "God Helmet?" If not, here's a 2:00 video on it. It seems magnetic fields can affect a sense of presence in our vicinity, though I've heard the experiment has as much skepticism, as it does merit.