This idea has its equivalents today in various countries. In Kenya, a murdered person may become an ngoma , a spirit who pursues their murderer, sometimes causing them to give themself up to the police. Or in Russia the rusalka is the spirit of a dead woman who died by drowning and now lures men to their death.
She may be released when her death is avenged. Ghosts can also be friends and protectors. In the Sixth Sense spoiler alert , the ghost character played by Bruce Willis helps a young boy to come to terms with his ability to see ghosts and to help them to find peace. Many people are comforted by thinking that their deceased loves ones are watching over them and perhaps guiding them. Many cultures around the world have had beliefs that the dead can communicate with the living, and the phenomenon of spiritualism supposes that we can communicate with the spirits of the dead, often through the services of specially talented spirit mediums.
Halloween TV schedules are full of films where a group of usually young volunteers spends a night in a haunted house with gory results.
We seem to enjoy the illusion of danger and ghost stories can offer this kind of thrill. This view of ourselves makes it easy for us to entertain the idea that our mind could have an existence separate from our body — opening the door to believing that our mind or consciousness could survive death, and so perhaps become a ghost. Looking at how the brain works, the experience of hallucinations is a lot more common than many people realise.
The SPR, founded in , collected thousands of verified first-hand reports of visual or auditory hallucinations of a recently deceased person. One can be personally skeptical of the ultimate validity of mystical beliefs and leave properly theological questions strictly aside, yet still investigate the salutary and prophylactic potential of these phenomena. However, questions of belief versus evidence are not the exclusive domain of scientific and historical research.
No matter if we are committed to scientific orthodoxy or to an open-minded perspective on ghostly visions and other unusual subjective experiences, both will require cultivating a relentless scrutiny of the concrete sources that nourish our most fundamental convictions — including the religious and scientific authorities on which they rest perhaps a little too willingly. This article first appeared on Aeon. Share your perspective on this article with a post on ScrollStack, and send it to your followers.
Contribute Now. Pxfuel CC0. Respond to this article with a post Share your perspective on this article with a post on ScrollStack, and send it to your followers. Read Comments. After her mother died, Julie started hearing her voice. It called her a slag, slut and whore.
Thankfully, negative experiences are rare. These experiences hardly ever require psychiatric treatment. Indeed, if people find the first hallucination pleasant, they typically want it to happen again. This prediction is then revised using feedback from the world, and forms the basis of what we perceive. Perception is edited hallucination. So one way to understand hallucinations is as uncorrected predictions my recent book explains this in more detail.
If someone has been a consistent, valued presence in your life, the brain is so used to predicting them that it may continue to do so, overruling the world. The obvious answer is that hallucinations are often stigmatised.
In countries such as the UK and US, people are typically taught that they are a sign of madness. Not one had told their doctor. Although most could give no reason for why they had not told anyone, those who did most often cited a fear of ridicule.
0コメント