No Sacred Cows

by David G. McAfee

  19. It’s interesting to note that this same form of faith is used to justify the beliefs of Christians who believe in Jesus’ miracles, Muslims who say Muhammad spoke with an angel and flew on a winged horse, and Mormons who think God lives near a planet called Kolob (chapters 3 and 5 in the book of Abraham).

  20. For me, sharing a quote from someone isn’t an explicit endorsement of every one of his or her views or actions. A person with whom I disagree on just about every issue can still say something valuable or true—even Adolf Hitler, who said, “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”

  21. Luke 17:11–19

  22. Sheryl C. Wilson and Theodore X. Barber, “The Fantasy-Prone Personality: Implications for Understanding Imagery, Hypnosis, and Parapsychological Phenomena,” PSI Research 1, no. (3) (September 1982): 94–116.

  23. Robert E. Bartholomew et al., “UFO Abductees and Contactees: Psychopathology or Fantasy Proneness?” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 22, no. 3 (June 1991): 215–-222.

  24. Leslie van der Leer et al., “Delusion Proneness and “Jumping to Conclusions”’: Relative and Absolute Effects,” Psychological Medicine 45, no. 6 (April 2015).

  25. As American novelist Barbara Kingsolver has said, “Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.”

  26. Bruce Bower, “Gone but Not Forgotten: Scientists Uncover Pervasive, Unconscious Influences on Memory,” Science News 138, no. 20 (1990): 312–314.

  27. Maria S. Zaragoza et al., “Misinformation Effects and the Suggestibility of Eyewitness Memory,” in “What Jennifer Saw,” Frontline, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/dna/interviews/loftus.html.

  29. Daniel J Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, “What People Believe about How Memory Works: A Representative Survey of the US population,” PloS One 6, no. 8 (2011): e22757.

  30. Alison George, “Can You Tell a False Memory From a True One?” Slate, September 8, 2013, www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2013/09/elizabeth_loftus_interview_false_memory_research_on_eyewitnesses_child_abuse.html.

  31. Lawrence Patihis et al., “False Memories in Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory Individuals,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 52 (2013): 20856–20857.

  32. Steven J. Frenda et al., “Sleep Deprivation and False Memories,” Psychological Science 25, no. 9 (2014): 1674–1681.

  33. Ralph J. Berger and Ian Oswald, “Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Behaviour, Subsequent Sleep, and Dreaming,” British Journal of Psychiatry 108, no. 455 (1962): 457–465.

  34. J. Riba et al., “Telling True from False: Cannabis Users Show Increased Susceptibility to False Memories, Molecular Psychiatry 20, no. 6 (2015): 772–777.

  35. Gaetan de Lavilléon et al., “Explicit Memory Creation During Sleep Demonstrates a Causal Role of Place Cells in Navigation,” Nature Neuroscience 18 (2015): 493–495.

  36. J. Shaw and S. Porter, “Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime,” Psychological Science, 26, no. 3 (March 2015): 291–301.

  37. Christoph Teufel et al., “Shift Toward Prior Knowledge Confers a Perceptual Advantage in Early Psychosis and Psychosis-Prone Healthy Individuals,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 43 (2015): 13401–13406.

  38. Giovanni B. Caputo, “Strange-Face-in-the-Mirror Illusion,” Perception 39, no. 7 (2010): 1007.

  39. D. I. P. V. Troxler, “Über das Verschwinden gegebener Gegenstände innerhalb unseres Gesichtskreises.” Ophthalmologische bibliothek 2, no. 2 (1804): 1–53.

  40. Viktor Khrisanfovich Kandinsky, Kritische und klinische Betrachtungen im Gebiete der Sinnestäuschungen: 1. und 2. Studie (Friedländer, 1885).

  41. Y. Kaji et al., “Do You See Something in Noise? Your Personality Trait, Emotional State and Sex Affect Your Tendency to See Pareidolia,” paper presented at the 19th annual meeting of Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, Paris, France, 2015

  42. B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953).

  43. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).

  44. “Symptoms and Causes,” Mayo Clinic, www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/schizoaffective-disorder/symptoms-causes/dxc-20258893.

  45. Teri Robert, Living Well with Migraine Disease and Headaches (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).

  46. Brian Melley, “Convict in 3 Sex Crimes Freed by DNA Tied to Fugitive Rapist,” Associated Press, November 23, 2015, bigstory.ap.org/article/e94023c7c09c4f9f8e1128f57672388d/man-convicted-3-rapes-expected-be-exonerated>.

  47. Douglas Starr, “Remembering a Crime That You Didn’t Commit,” New Yorker, March 5, 2015, www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/false-memory-crime.

  48. Memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus has also weighed in on this issue, saying courts of law should adopt a new oath for witnesses: “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, or whatever it is you think you remember?”

  49. This is only one example. You can perform the same experiment using any religion or other supernatural belief by analyzing evidence put forth by believers as though you’re on a jury.

  50. “Instructional Design and eTeaching Services,” Dating of the Gospels, Boston College, www.bc.edu/schools/stm/crossroads/resources/birthofjesus/intro/the_dating_of_thegospels.html.

  51. William Lane Craig, “A Christmas Gift for Atheists—Five Reasons Why God Exists,” Fox News, December 13, 2013, www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/12/13/christmas-gift-for-atheists-five-reasons-why-god-exists.html.

  10

  GHOSTS, SPIRITS, AND SPECTERS

  “The evidence for ghosts is no better today than it was a year ago, a decade ago, or a century ago. There are two possible reasons for the failure of ghost hunters to find good evidence. The first is that ghosts don’t exist, and that reports of ghosts can be explained by psychology, misperceptions, mistakes and hoaxes. The second option is that ghosts do exist, but that ghost hunters are simply incompetent.”1

  —Benjamin Radford

  I dismiss tales of ghosts for the same reasons I reject belief in alleged sightings of gods, angels, and aliens, and any other personal account through which someone asserts the existence of an unsubstantiated alternate reality without verifiable evidence supporting it. There are many puzzling reports about spirit activities throughout the world, but I refuse to jump to the conclusion that ghosts are the answer until there’s proof. Think about it: how many mysteries have ever been solved by simply crediting some mysterious, unproven, paranormal realm? None—and that’s exactly what many ghost believers attempt to do.

  RUMORS DON’T PROVE GHOSTS EXIST

  Ghost stories are extremely common in many cultures, but that’s still all they are—stories, peppered with the storyteller’s own personal feelings and conjecture that can make objective, rational analysis nearly impossible. These testimonies don’t qualify as strong scientific evidence, especially when positing the existence of something as extraordinary as spirits contacting us from another dimension, but that doesn’t stop many people from declaring their exploits to be “proof” of the supernatural. I don’t doubt that many of these ghost believers have had mysterious experiences, but their stories hold as much weight as those of a person who claims to have been visited by Jesus, abducted by aliens, or invited to a tea party with Bigfoot.

  More often than not, accounts of ghostly activity are actually just tales about some “strange” experience the storyteller has merely decided must have been caused by spirits. The believer’s tendency to jump from “I don’t know” to “It was a ghost” can be called the ghost of the gaps fallacy. Ghost of the gaps is a common problem for people who want to believe in the spirit world, or even for those who want to make an uninteresting story slightly more tolerable. However, considering the fact that ghosts haven’t been shown to exist, and other natural explanations are almost always available to explain such “sightings,�
� the responsible thing to do with any of these fantastical claims is to classify them as “unknown” until the real evidence is uncovered. There are many things we don’t know, and one should never feel bad for admitting that and seeking knowledge, but what should be frowned upon is making things up. Admitting you don’t know is always better than saying, “I definitely saw a disembodied human spirit that can’t be analyzed or measured objectively—and there’s no way to change my mind.”

  There are a lot of ghost stories out there, but when I hear them, thanks to scientific skepticism, I feel like I’m in a reverse Sixth Sense: everyone sees dead people but me.

  WHY ARE GHOST STORIES POPULAR?

  While there are a number of contributing factors, ghost myths are often propelled by (and perhaps based on) wishful thinking. Many people find comfort in believing their relatives live on in some form (see chapter 13), and they cling to that belief in times of despair. Hope, like the desire for everlasting life for our loved ones, can cause people to believe all sorts of things without hard evidence, such as a vague, ghostly afterlife. Personally, however, I can’t imagine that roaming the earth for an eternity without the ability to interact with anything or anyone would be a fulfilling existence. Despite that rather daunting portrayal of the afterlife, many ghost believers simply want to believe. The belief comes easy from there. Once you have the emotional desire to believe in ghosts, all you have to do is tie unrelated things together to create a compelling story and point to an unprovable spirit as the culprit, even when there is usually a much more likely natural alternative. To me, the natural answer seems more probable than the existence of visible yet disembodied spirits that can’t do anything but open your cabinets or knock on your walls, but perhaps in some ways it’s not as comforting.

  In addition to wishful thinking and the propaganda spread by ghost hunters and so-called parapsychologists, which will be addressed later in this chapter, I think the continuance of many ghost myths is largely linked to our species’ enjoyment of mysteries and propensity for storytelling in general. As author Jonathan Gottschall pointed out, humans “live in a storm of stories.”

  “We live in stories all day long, and dream in stories all night long. We communicate through stories and learn from them. We collapse gratefully into stories after a long day at work,” Gottschall wrote.2 “Homo sapiens (wise man) is a pretty good definition for our species. But Homo fictus (fiction man) would be about as accurate. Man is the storytelling animal.”

  I’m not exempt from this tendency to tell tales, even when the supernatural is involved. For example, when I was very young, I used to tell a story about a ghost I saw in the hallway of my grandparents’ house. I still remember the details like it happened yesterday. He was a short man with a fishing pole and vest, just standing in the hall one night as I walked to my room. I remember seeing him and being stunned, but then it turned into curiosity—as opposed to fear. He stood there for about a minute before taking a few steps back and disappearing completely. I told the story about seeing that ghost until I was about 12 years old, when I realized that I had no recollection of the actual event itself. I now believe that the original memory was manufactured and I was only remembering my earlier retellings of the story. The most likely explanation for this, in my case, was that I was confusing a dream for reality, or maybe I originally told the story to fit in with others as they told of their supernatural adventures. Either way, from there, the story and the reality became blurred in my mind so much so that I couldn’t distinguish the two, and I came to believe my own false account. Years after I started telling the story, I realized the event never happened and I stopped telling people about it. Since that time, I haven’t experienced anything that I would consider paranormal … but there was one other event that sticks out in my mind.

  GHOSTS IN THE BEDROOM

  About 10 years after I realized my childhood ghost interaction was most likely not a real event, when I was in college, I had a similar experience with what many people would insist was a ghostly entity. I was awoken late at night by a loud noise, and there it was—a ghost. She was right in front of me on the other side of the room, gliding slowly toward me with outstretched arms. She looked just like you’d expect a ghost to look based on horror movies: she had long, knotted black hair, pale skin, tattered clothing—the works.3 I tried to scream for help, but I was paralyzed with fear … or at least that’s what I thought was keeping me from moving or yelling. Once I was able to shake myself out of my paralyzed state and the entity was gone, I composed myself and researched possible explanations for what had just happened.

  My search led me to a variety of sleep conditions and I concluded that I was likely experiencing sleep paralysis, of which these types of hallucinations are a common symptom. Studies show sleep paralysis is experienced by between 8 and 28 percent of the normal adult population and it can be caused by any number of things,4 including something as simple as lying on your back or changing your normal sleep pattern. The most common effects include auditory and visual hallucinations, as well as difficulty breathing and chest pressure that can feel like suffocation, according to psychologist Christopher French of Goldsmiths College in London.

  “The reason sleep paralysis may explain tales of ghosts and aliens is the strong sense of a presence, usually harmful, that victims commonly feel during an attack,” French, who is also the coauthor of Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience,5 wrote for Scientific American.6 “They also report unusual kinesthetic sensations, such as feelings of being dragged out of bed, vibrating, flying or falling. These episodes can sometimes lead to full-blown out-of-body experiences.”

  Since my terrifying vision in college, I have experienced other bouts of sleep paralysis during which I felt a numbness or paralyzing sensation accompanied by unbelievable visions. In many cases I felt awake and threatened, and I often saw ghostly figures approaching me in my bed. For many believers, these experiences are linked to ghost, demon, or alien visitation, and are often conflated with reality. But if your supernatural anecdote begins with, “I was just about to fall asleep …”—or something similar—it is probably explained by sleep paralysis or a related condition. Sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, and other hallucination-inducing mental phenomena often occur during the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep, called hypnagogia, making it difficult for those experiencing them to discern waking life from dreams.

  Baland Jalal, a neuroscientist at the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cambridge, says those experiencing sleep paralysis hallucinations often respond with fear and resistance, which is counterproductive. He says his treatment, meditation-relaxation therapy, has a higher success rate.7 Jalal’s method has four steps:

  Step I: reappraisal of the meaning of the attack: at the onset of the attack, the individual should reappraise the meaning of his SP episode by telling himself that the experience is common, benign, and temporary, and that the hallucinations are a typical byproduct of REM mentation (i.e., dreaming). Eyes should remain closed throughout the SP episode and the person should stay calm and avoid movement. (Ideally, the individual would have received prior psychoeducation about the nature of SP and associated hallucinations.)

  Step II: psychological and emotional distancing: next, the individual should tell himself that since the experience is common, benign, and temporary, there is no reason to be afraid or worried. That in fact, fear and worry (catastrophizing the event) will only make the episode worse and possibly prolong it, and are unnecessary emotions.

  Step III: inward focused-attention meditation: the individual should then focus his attention inward on an emotionally salient positive object (e.g., a memory of a loved one or event, a hymn/prayer, God). He should sustain his full attention on this inner-object and engage it emotionally (i.e., reflect on all its positive aspects). Bodily symptoms and external stimuli (i.e., hallucinations) should be ignored, and whenever distracted, attention should be brought b
ack to the inner-object of focus.

  Step IV: muscle relaxation: while engaging in focused inward-attention meditation, the individual should relax his muscles and avoid flexing them; and avoid controlling breathing and under no circumstances attempt to move. He should adopt a non-judgmental attitude of acceptance toward physical symptoms.

  NHS Choices, the United Kingdom’s largest health website, has also put forth some helpful tips for those suffering from sleep paralysis and similar conditions, including improving your sleeping habits and talking to a specialist about medication.8 This is good advice, and it might help you deal with the symptoms of sleep paralysis, but it won’t necessarily address what makes the phenomenon terrifying in the first place: the belief that the entities are really there. If you move away from beliefs in ghosts, gods, and other things that require an active imagination, you will, at very least, be able to understand what you are seeing in context. Losing those beliefs can also make you less likely to hear and see imagined things—and to misattribute nonimagined events to supernatural forces.

  GRIEF-BASED HALLUCINATIONS

  Although sleep paralysis is a common explanation for ghostly events, as well as what many believe are alien and demon experiences, there are a number of other possibilities that have nothing to do with sleep. In some cases, it is even possible for a person to experience auditory or visual hallucinations of late friends and loved ones caused by nothing more than acute grief. Post-bereavement hallucinations and illusions are not uncommon, and are even considered normal by some who study the phenomenon as a helpful coping mechanism that can provide closure.9 Vaughan Bell, a neuroscientist and clinical psychologist based in London, says dead people remain in our hearts and minds, as well as “in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences.”