If ghosts are hallucinations, why are mostly people seen?

Woomaster

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Hi.

A somewhat stupid question just came into my mind:
Many people who try to rationally explain 'ghost' sightings say that most of them are due to misperception or hallucinations. Undoubtly there are many sightings who could be explained as misperceptions, but there are also many cases where this explanation fails, because of a lack of a 'stimulus' a person could misinterpret. Someone who sees a 'ghost' standing in front of a white wall and then disappear, for example. In this cases a skeptic would say that the most likely explanation is a hallucination. I want to focus on this cases, where the best 'natural' explanation is a hallucination. Why -- and this is my (maybe silly) main question -- are mostly people (and on rare occasions animals) seen in this hallucinatory experiences and not ... ghost chairs or spooky computer ghosts or pink pig ghosts or ghostly landscapes or something like that?^^ If so many ghost sightings were due to hallucinations, wouldn't someone expect more weird sightings than just that of people who couldn't possibly be there? I myself never have had a hallucination for myself, so I don't know how it is to hallucinate, but many users of hallucinogenic drugs or something like that report very strange hallucinations, whereas the standard ghost sighting is in my view often not very spectacular? I really hope not to promote woo with this thread, but I find this question interesting.
 
Couple of points.

1) Often there is not enough detail in a report about a ghost sighting to really have an informed opinion on what the actual circumstances where.

2) Humans are "programmed" to spot other people using very little data.
 
I would add this:

When do many hallucinations occur?
When someone tries a new anti-depressant

When does someone start a new anti-depressant?
Right after someone very close dies.

When my FIL died in 2009, my MIL started taking an anti depressant, a few weeks later, hallucinations started. She of course thought they were ghosts.

She thought her husband was bringing them at night to show her. She thought he was standing outside her window. The hallucinations were also of Circus people, with freaky features, one was really tall, one was a fat clown on a string like a balloon. I tried to explain hallucinations, and how they happen when she is going to sleep, but she was adamant that they were ghosts.

I asked her to stop the meds, and the hallucinations stopped.

A few months later, we were cleaning out my FIL's closet, he was a professional commercial artist, and in his closet we found a stack of paintings he did of circus performers, some of which were very close to the descriptions of my MIL's hallucinations.

I'm pretty sure most hallucinations are intertwined with our subconscious memories. Similar to dreams, they incorporate stimuli which has been locked up in our minds for years in some cases. Of course someone who has lost somebody is going to be constantly thinking of that person, so I would think that many Anti-depressant related hallucinations are, in some form, related to that person.
 
Can I recommend a book? It's called Growing up with Lucy: How to build an Android in Twenty Easy steps. It's not really about androids but about how our brains work. Evidently there are all sorts of processes in our brains that are scanning our visual input and pre-processing it before it gets to our conscious awareness.

That's why when your driving along in poor light you suddenly think "There's a cat crossing the road!" Your pre-processing systems have identified danger, they switch your focus to the "cat" and then your conscious awareness goes "don't worry, it's actually just a paper bag."

I think some ghost sightings are a result of this sort of thing going on. Or something like that anyway. Although I was fascinated by the book, there was a lot that went clean over my head! :)
 
Also, check up on pareidolia: our brains are hard-wired to see human faces. Think of all the things that have been compared to human faces trhough history, that in reality have only the vaguest resemblence: Of cousre the numerous "Jesus on my toast" images, but even more famous things like the Man in the Moon (that doesn't really look much like a face).
 
Most of the things written off as hallucinations are not as vivid and defined as you see in the movies. It's more like indistinct shapes, visual anomalies in the field of vision, that are mistaken as resembling one thing or another. Vivid hallucinated objects are rare, even factoring in hallucinogens. It's easy to say someone saw something that wasn't real when you hear they were on drugs, but more than likely it was just mistaking something indistinct. Judgement is more effected than actual visions and people out of thin air appearing.

The drugs which induce other worlds and vivid objects are very specific and particular, deleriants like scopolamine, powerful hallucinogens like DMT. Things like LSD really only produce things like tracers, streaks and auras, colors and synesthesia. You don't see the things portrayed in fiction usually. People have exaggerated notions of how vivid and detailed hallucinations usually are.

It's because we are "wired" to recognize faces and people that often we mistake visual anomalies for those things.
 
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Because if someone saw a pig, or a talking computer, or something of that nature, they would know it was a hallucination because it does not fit in with the concept of " ghost".

So what we are left with is the people that happen to hallucinate, or misinterpret things as people shaped.

Pretty simple really.
 
People also 'see' UFOs and such, and I've heard of ghost animal sightings (not all THAT uncommon), as well as the occasional angel, fairy or elf sighting ...

We're imaginative animals, and sometimes that inagination gets the better of us.
 
I think there are two incorrect assumptions:

1) that a significant portion of ghost sightings are 'hallucinations' (as opposed to, say, pareidolia, imagination, fabrications)
2) that most ghost experiences are 'sightings'

The reality is that visual experiences are rare. The most common reports are "I felt a presence," "it got cold," "object moved when I wasn't watching it," "I heard a sound," "I smelled smoke/perfume/the ocean," &c. Visual sightings are very rare.

As for the visual sightings - I chalk most up to pareidoliaWP. People see human ghosts because we seem to be constructed to locate human forms in our visual space. Even when they're not there, apparently.
 
Woomaster said:
Hi.

A somewhat stupid question just came into my mind:
Many people who try to rationally explain 'ghost' sightings say that most of them are due to misperception or hallucinations. Undoubtly there are many sightings who could be explained as misperceptions, but there are also many cases where this explanation fails, because of a lack of a 'stimulus' a person could misinterpret. Someone who sees a 'ghost' standing in front of a white wall and then disappear, for example. In this cases a skeptic would say that the most likely explanation is a hallucination. I want to focus on this cases, where the best 'natural' explanation is a hallucination. Why -- and this is my (maybe silly) main question -- are mostly people (and on rare occasions animals) seen in this hallucinatory experiences and not ... ghost chairs or spooky computer ghosts or pink pig ghosts or ghostly landscapes or something like that?^^ If so many ghost sightings were due to hallucinations, wouldn't someone expect more weird sightings than just that of people who couldn't possibly be there? I myself never have had a hallucination for myself, so I don't know how it is to hallucinate, but many users of hallucinogenic drugs or something like that report very strange hallucinations, whereas the standard ghost sighting is in my view often not very spectacular? I really hope not to promote woo with this thread, but I find this question interesting.
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To add: I think cgordon has a good point. When the witness sees a fullsize floating person it's a ghost, but when it's a tiny floating person, they report seeing a fairy. If it doesn't look like a person, they report a UFO. If it's not translucent, they report a leprechaun. If it's a bear, it's not reported as a ghost bear, but as a 'spirit bear'. And so on.

And there are some spectres that are inanimate objects. Specifically, ghost ships and ghost trains. And the clothes and fashion accessories of the ghosts themselves. Murder weapons.
 
How does one recognise a ghost chair?
I know what a ghost train looks like, but that's about it. Ghost trees? Ghost rocks?
If 10% of the grains of sand on a beach were ghosts, would we notice?

People hallucinate. Mostly what they hallucinate , is people.
 
Soapy Sam said:
How does one recognise a ghost chair?
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Mostly defying physics. Floating, passing through walls or floors. Cannot be touched. Aflame but not warm or burning surroundings.

To complicate matters, a chair could merely be haunted by a ghost - as opposed to an actual spectral chair.



Soapy Sam said:
I know what a ghost train looks like, but that's about it. Ghost trees? Ghost rocks?
If 10% of the grains of sand on a beach were ghosts, would we notice?

People hallucinate. Mostly what they hallucinate , is people.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure this is not true. Most hallucinations seem to be very generalized. ie: hallucinating that everything is a movie set, or that one is flying through the landscape instead of walking, or that the colour blue is especially angry today.
 
Also, I would suggest that most "ghost sightings" do not involve sight. It's a creaking sound or a cold spot or something moved or an "electronic voice phenomenon," or the dog acts funny or an appliance turns on. None of these involve seeing a person and yet these seem to be the most common ghost manifestations. Seeing a translucent human being seems to be extremely rare.

Ward
 
wardenclyffe said:
Also, I would suggest that most "ghost sightings" do not involve sight. It's a creaking sound or a cold spot or something moved or an "electronic voice phenomenon," or the dog acts funny or an appliance turns on. None of these involve seeing a person and yet these seem to be the most common ghost manifestations. Seeing a translucent human being seems to be extremely rare.

Ward
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It would be worth trying to find out if manifestations have been inventoried anywhere. Alternatively, a sampling of report databases would be interesting.

There will be some quibbling over inclusion criteria. eg: when a medium contacts an informer type spirit... is this a ghost experience if the spirit is "communicating from the other side" and not manifesting locally?

I read a few years ago, that sentient manifestations were rarely people. Horses were the most common, followed by dogs and slugs. Humans were fourth most common.

Taking random stabs through my ghost texts just now, I get the impression that reporting of non-human manifestations has declined over the last century. Also a higher reporting of what would be called spectres vs manifestations.

Just to clarify that last part: if your deceased wife is visiting you, plain as day (not floating, not glowing or translucent) it's a manifestation, but not a spectre. These were a much more common experience a century ago. Dead son comes to visit and they play chess for a few hours. That sort of thing.
 
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sadhatter said:
Because if someone saw a pig, or a talking computer, or something of that nature, they would know it was a hallucination because it does not fit in with the concept of " ghost".

So what we are left with is the people that happen to hallucinate, or misinterpret things as people shaped.

Pretty simple really.
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The ghost pig union wishes to speak to you...
 
LTC8K6 said:
The ghost pig union wishes to speak to you...
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To be fair, i thought my apartment was haunted by a ghost cat 5-6 years back. Turns out a female friend of a friend who lived in the same building lost a large white ferret and it chose my home as its base to wander the apartment buildings.
 
I wouldn't necessarily claim 'hallucination' for ghost stories of the calibre being described - in part because I've never heard of anyone having such a complicated spectral claim outside of crappy movies and, of course, bad reality television, where people have a reason to confabulate.

But, try this on for size...

As you are falling asleep, you see a shadowy something or other pass by your door. You bolt upright in bed and look straight over there, and it's gone. Now, we've evolved to freak out over predators, or perceived threats. The most threatening thing you could see passing by your door? A person. Maybe if we were surrounded by saber toothed tigers we'd see something else.
 
I wonder sometimes if the fear causes the vision? Noises out of place, someone scared, then more noise makes them terrified, isn't that a situation ripe for confusion?
I have been so scared of noise that I could hear noises from inside my body! Other people would feel those noises were not from them.The difference is I thought the noises that woke me where human (burglar) not ghosts.
 
Are apparitions censored?

Ghostly monks, circus freaks or departed relatives are identified by their clothing. A modest spirit drapes themselves in robes instead of appearing as they were born – naked.

If a ghost is the soul of once living being, why do they take goods and chattels with them?
 
RemieV said:
I wouldn't necessarily claim 'hallucination' for ghost stories of the calibre being described - in part because I've never heard of anyone having such a complicated spectral claim outside of crappy movies and, of course, bad reality television, where people have a reason to confabulate.

But, try this on for size...

As you are falling asleep, you see a shadowy something or other pass by your door. You bolt upright in bed and look straight over there, and it's gone. Now, we've evolved to freak out over predators, or perceived threats. The most threatening thing you could see passing by your door? A person. Maybe if we were surrounded by saber toothed tigers we'd see something else.
Click to expand...
Exactly. To any person the most helpful and the most dangerous thing is another person. We are very concerned about people, and rightly so. Humans are social creatures and spend a whole lot of time looking at other people—seeing what they do, how they act, what they look like, where they are looking, their hand movements, their facial expressions. Of the information stored in your brain, you probably have more information about faces and people than anything else.

So if a person hallucinates, or catches something out of the corner of their eye, or sees a shape they can’t immediately identify, the brain is first going to check for the most expected images, then the most dangerous/helpful images, then the most familiar images. Those would all be people.

So when the brain manifests an image, it is much, much more likely to be a face or a person than a kangaroo or a vacuum cleaner. Even if it is not an image, our first inclination is that is may be a person because a person would be the most significant result.
 
Some of the stories could be attributed to sleep-paralysis, in which the victim is actually dreaming, and not hallucinating. The person is asleep, but the REM sleep cycle, intrudes into the N1 sleep cycle. They think they are aware of the happenings around them, but are dreaming, and usually paralyzed.

They think they are seeing things in their periphrial, however they are not.

This condition is often seen in people with narcolepsy.
 
Hamlet Saw his fathers ghost.
Anything is possible. ;)
And I think its not halluncinations.
It is something real that comes to you when truly justice is not done otherwise.
 
wellwhatif said:
Hamlet Saw his fathers ghost.
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Hamlet was a fictional character. It was a story, not a true account.

wellwhatif said:
Anything is possible. ;)
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No, not anything is possible. I promise you that it's impossible to survive for an hour without any source of air. Please don't try to prove me wrong on this, just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I want you dead.

wellwhatif said:
And I think its not halluncinations.
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You're entitled to your opinion.

wellwhatif said:
It is something real that comes to you when truly justice is not done otherwise.
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This sentence doesn't make any sense. Please elaborate or clarify this thought.
 
Some of the explanations may be that (as hinted upon earlier) the human brain is extremely good at constructing faces and human forms out of something non human. I think it’s part of the evolutionary survival instinct.

How many times have you thought you saw a person (or ghost?) standing beside or behind you and you’ve gotten a fright and turned round?

Now compare that to the number of times someone has been standing there and your brain has told you nobody is there.

I am guessing the former happens a lot more than the latter.
 
thebigm said:
Now compare that to the number of times someone has been standing there and your brain has told you nobody is there.
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Uh, if you thought nobody was there, how would you know there was?

Evidence indicates that parts of the image are edited out before they even make it to the conscious levels. You routinely don't even "see" most people in a scene, if you're focusing on something else. So, yes, there will be a lot of times that someone is standing right in front of you, but if you're focusing on something else and they're not doing something to make them a more immediate concern, your brain will tell you that there's nobody there. Or rather, won't tell you that there is.

But of course you won't remember how often you didn't notice someone, because, well, you didn't notice them.
 
Woomaster said:
Hi.

A somewhat stupid question just came into my mind:
Many people who try to rationally explain 'ghost' sightings say that most of them are due to misperception or hallucinations.
Click to expand...

Same thing with UFOs and many other phenomena, yes.

Undoubtly there are many sightings who could be explained as misperceptions, but there are also many cases where this explanation fails, because of a lack of a 'stimulus' a person could misinterpret.
Click to expand...

How, exactly, did you check for lack of such a stimulus. Hell, even in near-complete darkness people see shapes and movements where there are none. I should know. Don't forget that imagination and expectation also play a large role in sightnings.

Why -- and this is my (maybe silly) main question -- are mostly people (and on rare occasions animals) seen in this hallucinatory experiences and not ... ghost chairs or spooky computer ghosts or pink pig ghosts or ghostly landscapes or something like that?^^ If so many ghost sightings were due to hallucinations, wouldn't someone expect more weird sightings than just that of people who couldn't possibly be there?
Click to expand...

I have no idea what you mean there, but most people don't see ghosts. I know of no more than one person who claims to have seen one.

I myself never have had a hallucination for myself, so I don't know how it is to hallucinate
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We're not talking about drug-like hallucinations here, bloke.
 
Same people has the same hallucinations. They might have taken hallucinogens same dosage at the same time. That explains.
 
Hellbound said:
Also, check up on pareidolia: our brains are hard-wired to see human faces. Think of all the things that have been compared to human faces trhough history, that in reality have only the vaguest resemblence: Of cousre the numerous "Jesus on my toast" images, but even more famous things like the Man in the Moon (that doesn't really look much like a face).
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Hell, I see faces in LETTERS. :boggled:
 
Does Bigfoot count as people?

I did a poll on the old Bigfoot Forums, and around 40% of respondents answered 'yes' to the question;

'Have you ever hallucinated while driving?'

So I don't know if 40% is a general percentage of people who have had minor hallucinations, or if a Bigfoot Forum attracts a higher percentage of people prone to hallucinating.
 
I draw a lot of very intricate drawings in my work, flowing details and amorphous shapes and things. Something that really gets on my nerves, particularly in some of my friends from the psychedelic days, is their tendency to tell me the shapes they see in my pictures as if it's some kind of compliment. They think I am hiding these vague facial expressions or something as if it's more clever than just an ancient twisted tree. And yet, I didn't do that at all. They are just latching on to vague shapes and seeing faces and figures in them.
 
DevilsAdvocate said:
Exactly. To any person the most helpful and the most dangerous thing is another person. We are very concerned about people, and rightly so.
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As thebigm also said, I think this is the reason that ghosts are usually people, or at least recognizably important things (animals, monsters, etc.) rather than toasters or notebooks.

Ever notice how a dog will focus more on another dog in a crowded area, than all the people? I think we're the same way, only with other people.

thebigm said:
How many times have you thought you saw a person (or ghost?) standing beside or behind you and you’ve gotten a fright and turned round?

Now compare that to the number of times someone has been standing there and your brain has told you nobody is there.

I am guessing the former happens a lot more than the latter.
Click to expand...

The latter happens to me a lot more than the former.

I'll turn around just to look behind me or head in the other direction, and be surprised that someone has come up right there. I see it happen often to other people, too, when I'm in a busy store for example and someone turns around and almost bumps into me, not realizing I'm there.

Can't remember the last time I thought someone was behind me and there wasn't anyone there. Actually, I do--was talking to my wife, thought she was still in the room behind me, said something again and she'd actually gone into the other room. But I don't think that's what you mean.

Don't know if I'm just odd, or if only certain kinds of people spend more time thinking people are behind them when they're not.
 
Why would aliens, presumably spanning the interstellar gulfs in very advanced spaceships indeed, bother to make big piles of rocks?
Wouldn't they turn the power-source for their spaceships and other technology to quickly producing snazzy nano-assembled condominiums and pools and shopping malls? And some of those nifty gravity-defying landspeeders to get around on?
Not to mention the alien equivalent of Hardee's and McDonalds..

But no, they stack rocks and scratch symbols in the dirt.
 
Bikewer said:
Why would aliens, presumably spanning the interstellar gulfs in very advanced spaceships indeed, bother to make big piles of rocks?
Wouldn't they turn the power-source for their spaceships and other technology to quickly producing snazzy nano-assembled condominiums and pools and shopping malls? And some of those nifty gravity-defying landspeeders to get around on?
Not to mention the alien equivalent of Hardee's and McDonalds..

But no, they stack rocks and scratch symbols in the dirt.
Click to expand...

Maybe the Earth is used for "roughing it" survivalist-style weekends for aliens.....
 
Some people see lights and blobs on cameras and in photos. They just claim that they are the spirits and souls of people. I think some people have seen ghost animals before, it's just that more people beleive in it people exclusive to people. They most likely see what they want to see by interpreting and organizing what they see.
 
Zanders said:
Some people see lights and blobs on cameras and in photos. They just claim that they are the spirits and souls of people. I think some people have seen ghost animals before, it's just that more people beleive in it people exclusive to people. They most likely see what they want to see by interpreting and organizing what they see.
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Those blobs of light on photos (or "orbs", as they're known) are reflections of the flash in motes of dust.
 
DevilsAdvocate said:
Exactly. To any person the most helpful and the most dangerous thing is another person. We are very concerned about people, and rightly so. Humans are social creatures and spend a whole lot of time looking at other people—seeing what they do, how they act, what they look like, where they are looking, their hand movements, their facial expressions. Of the information stored in your brain, you probably have more information about faces and people than anything else.

So if a person hallucinates, or catches something out of the corner of their eye, or sees a shape they can’t immediately identify, the brain is first going to check for the most expected images, then the most dangerous/helpful images, then the most familiar images. Those would all be people.

So when the brain manifests an image, it is much, much more likely to be a face or a person than a kangaroo or a vacuum cleaner. Even if it is not an image, our first inclination is that is may be a person because a person would be the most significant result.
Click to expand...

If I could add on, a little bit, to yours and RemieV's post; because of faulty memory issues with human beings, we tend to fill in what we don't fully remember. I don't believe it's always intentional but "ghost" sightings tend to be exaggerated over time. We have a very limited concept of time when it comes to recollection so a momentary flash of an image becomes stretched in our memories to occur over a period of seconds or even minutes.
 
Woomaster said:
Hi.

A somewhat stupid question just came into my mind:
Many people who try to rationally explain 'ghost' sightings say that most of them are due to misperception or hallucinations. Undoubtly there are many sightings who could be explained as misperceptions, but there are also many cases where this explanation fails, because of a lack of a 'stimulus' a person could misinterpret. Someone who sees a 'ghost' standing in front of a white wall and then disappear, for example. In this cases a skeptic would say that the most likely explanation is a hallucination. I want to focus on this cases, where the best 'natural' explanation is a hallucination. Why -- and this is my (maybe silly) main question -- are mostly people (and on rare occasions animals) seen in this hallucinatory experiences and not ... ghost chairs or spooky computer ghosts or pink pig ghosts or ghostly landscapes or something like that?^^ If so many ghost sightings were due to hallucinations, wouldn't someone expect more weird sightings than just that of people who couldn't possibly be there? I myself never have had a hallucination for myself, so I don't know how it is to hallucinate, but many users of hallucinogenic drugs or something like that report very strange hallucinations, whereas the standard ghost sighting is in my view often not very spectacular? I really hope not to promote woo with this thread, but I find this question interesting.
Click to expand...
When I see a hat stand in the dark I often mistake it for a human.

When I see a rock in the dark I often mistake it for a human.

When I see a small tree in the dark I often mistake it for a human.

Why? I don't know. Maybe in our past other humans have been our greatest threat and our minds are tuned to spot them everywhere.
 
Hardwiring in the brain to recognise shapes. Babies can only see a short distance but smile when they see a pattern that resembles eyes and a mouth.

Also, it's about expectations. If I went into a morgue in the middle of the night, or if a close family member died and I was home alone & heard a noise, it would be natural to be keyed up to interpret sounds/movement/shapes as people.

You're not likely to think "I went to Aunt Milly's funeral today and I just saw a shape outside the window. Oh... I think it's a ghost horse" If you believe in ghosts your first reaction would be to assume it's Aunt Milly.

I'm a strongly skeptical atheist but in a 'haunted' house I would still be thinking "I know ghosts are make believe... but wouldn't it be interesting/creepy if..."
 
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