When Seeing Isn't Believing... The Art of Misperception

To truly understand what is 'paranormal' we need to appreciate what is normal. People have been reporting seemingly paranormal events since time began. However, many reports on futher investigation have turned out to have quite normal explanations.

Even quite rare or totally coincidental phenomena once an explanation has been found appears quite normal. From a scientific viewpoint ghosts can't and don't exist. There I've said it. If they did they would have been proven by now. Yet quite sane, rational people still believe they have had paranormal experiences. And reports of ghosts and hauntings still continue. Why is this?

Youre probably reading this thinking 'ok, this bloke doesn't believe in ghosts, why the hell does he waste his time searching for them?' I do believe there is still a lot not known or understood about our world, ghosts and spirits being one of them. At this moment in time conventional thinking would suggest that typical paranormal phenomena is explainable as normal but ambiguous in nature. As a paranormal investigator what drives me on is the challenge of explaining the phenomena itself rather than proving that ghosts and spirits exist. I'm fascinated by the way the human brain interprets the information it perceives. I'm neutral in my belief of ghosts, I neither believe nor disbelieve. I'd rather have the proof either way before I can decide.

A term that has been coined for normal events that are seemingly paranormal is Xenonormal, this means 'foreign normal'. This is an umbrella term given to events and experiences that on first appearance look paranormal but once they are investigated and understood have a normal explanation. Very simply the xenonormal is unfamiliar but natural.

Let me give you an example. If someone hears an odd noise that they can't explain they might put it down to their house being haunted, although a plumber hearing the same noise would immediately think about fixing that annoying airlock in the central heating.

It is the unfamiliar that is behind most paranormal reports. Many people see or hear things they don't readily recognise, or understand. Their perception causes them to think they've witnessed paranormal activity. 99% of paranormal activity can be explained naturally. Of course the 1% might just be down to spirits!

Likely factors in people's perception of the apparent paranormal event might be unfamiliarity with certain phenomena, the person's cultural and religious background, over-concentration on detail, lack of background information, misperception and just plain coincidence.

Many of us go through life blissfully unaware of our normal surroundings. We only become aware of something when the unexpected happens. This then leads to anxiety. Facing the unfamiliar or unexpected forces our brain to make sense of what it has perceived. If it cannot come up with a logical explanation it increases the anxiety further affecting perception. Coincidence may make the occurence happen again, reinforcing paranormal belief and the whole experience escalates.

Misperception is misinterpreting something seen, heard, felt or otherwise sensed. Hallucinations, by contrast, originate inside your brain, so they don't require any 'something' in the real world (a sensory stimulus). Between them, misperceptions and hallucinations probably account for a great many reports of apparent paranormal phenomena.

Hallucination is more difficult than misperception to detect. With no 'sensory stimulus' to look for, detecting hallucination requires examining what was happening to the witness when they experienced the apparent paranormal phenomenon. If they were on the verge of sleep at the time, for instance, you might suspect hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucination. If they felt paralysed then it might be sleep paralysis. Many people experience one or two episodes of sleep paralysis in their lives. Other causes of hallucination include sensory deprivation and absorption. Some other types of hallucination may be caused by medical conditions (like epilepsy) or by taking certain drugs, so you could check witnesses's medical history. A small number of hallucinations may be induced by such things as certain magnetic fields.

As optical illusions illustrate, our brains can easily be fooled. Misperceptions are caused by ambiguous, insufficient or conflicting sensory information reaching our brains. Ambiguous sensory stimuli may present aspects of different objects, forcing our brains to decide which is really present. When our brains get insufficient sensory information they may 'edit in' likely objects from memory in order to make sense of an experience. Sensory conflicts may arise between different senses which our brains have somehow to resolve. In all such cases, it seems our brains 'resolve' such problems BEFORE presenting sensory information to our consciousness. Thus we are presented with a seamless experience which may, sometimes, not reflect the real world.

This same kind of process that occur in vision perception happen with sound. If you listen to speech in a noisy environment, your brain will 'fill in' likely sounding words that it didn't actually hear. And with ambiguous sounds, you can hear different things, often determined by expectation and suggestion. Flowing water (a kind of near white noise) can sound like whispering or music in certain circumstances. Once again your brain is faced with conflicting or ambiguous cues and has to make a choice.

Another problem that our brain has in constructing the 'picture in your head' is in paying attention. Change blindness is a hot topic in neuroscience at the moment. We seem to only have a limited amount of 'attention' and we only notice so much change, missing any more that happens. For instance, people do not usually notice gradual changes in scenes, even if they are big alterations. We also frequently miss changes if we are distracted while the change is happening. Unfortunately, change blindness can leave us open to not noticing vital clues to natural causes for apparent paranormal phenomena. If an unstable stack of objects was gradually slipping, over several seconds or minutes, we might not notice the change until it finally falls over. We might conclude that the stack had looked perfectly stable until it fell over, because we didn't notice it shifting to an unstable position. We might conclude that the 'object movement' was paranormal when it is not.

As a result of investigation, we know that most reported paranormal experiences have mundane causes. It is generally thought that misperception is the biggest cause of such reports. Therefore, we should be able to see the effects of misperception in many paranormal reports. The closer you look for the paranormal, the more elusive it becomes - this has been widely noted, particularly on vigils and among primary witnesses - it can be explained by the fact that the more attention you pay to a misperceived phenomenon, the less likely it is to be misperceived
children are often said to report more paranormal phenomena than adults - this might be because they are less resistant to the idea of the existence of the paranormal as they are routinely, and uncritically, exposed to stories that include it.

Next time you witness something really unexplainable, have a closer look and see if its normal before immediately labelling it paranormal.