Why have so many of us seen ghosts?

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One in 5 Americans say they’ve seen a ghost. But what if it was really our brain that had tricked us into thinking we saw something we didn’t?

In the “Science of the Supernatural” psychology professor Melissa Maffeo argues how a paranormal experience could be our brains misinterpreting the external world.

Guests

Melissa Maffeo, teaching professor of psychology at Wake Forest University. She’s the author of the new book, “Science of the Supernatural: Critical Thinking for the Mind and Brain.”

Part I

Part I  

SHANNON: This thing tormented me every night. It was feeling of fear, just such intense fear, the most intense fear, panic actually, that you can imagine.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The thing wasn’t exactly a ghost, it was a looming powerful entity which felt very present, very real to Shannon when she was a child.

SHANNON: I was the youngest one in the family and I had to go to bed first and even as late as eleven years old my mother would have to practically drag me upstairs. She just didn’t understand why I was afraid. And it was so hard for me to explain because there was nothing I could see exactly that she would understand. And I loved it when I could go to someone else’s house, anyone else’s house to stay the night because I wouldn’t feel that heavy weight of overwhelming dread and horror that I knew was waiting for me.

People said it was just a stage and then that I would outgrow it. I never outgrew the fear of that thing. I just got better at hiding it. Let’s fast-forward to when my mother was living alone in the house. Everyone else had left, and she was the only one living in that house. And one morning, it was broad daylight, bright sunshine coming in through the window.

She was up, she was dressed, she was cleaning her bedroom, and she said she turned around and she saw a figure that was all black. And I said, “Oh, my goodness.” I said, “What do you mean? Like a shadow?” And she said, “Darker than that.” She said it was in the shape of a man, but it was entirely black. And I said, “Oh, my goodness.”

I said, “Were you scared?” And she said, “Yes, I was.” I said, “What did you do?” And she said, “I said the Lord’s Prayer, and it disappeared.”

CHAKRABARTI: That’s Shannon of Yankton, South Dakota. And by the way, not long after that encounter, her mother sold the house. But Shannon and her mother are not alone. In fact, three-quarters of Americans say they believe in some form of paranormal activity.

So today we’re gonna investigate whether the paranormal truly exists. Is there evidence to prove it? Or if we’re going to be rigorous about our science, is there evidence to disprove it? Maybe our brains are tricking us into believing that we’re seeing things that simply aren’t there. That’s exactly what psychology professor Melissa Maffeo is trying to explore in her new book, The Science Of The Supernatural: Critical Thinking For The Mind And Brain, and she’s a psychology professor at Wake Forest University, and she joins us from Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Professor Maffeo, welcome to On Point.

MELISSA MAFFEO: Hi, Meghna. Thanks for having me on.

CHAKRABARTI: So I would like to know what inspired you to write this book. Have you had paranormal experiences yourself?

MAFFEO: I have never had an experience that I personally have interpreted as paranormal, but I grew up on a steady diet of The X Files and Stephen King novels and it’s always been a fascination of mine.

CHAKRABARTI: Ugh. Okay, you have no idea how much that makes my heart sing because I was a passionate fan of The X-Files. Every Friday night, I would sit in front of the TV with my popcorn and allow myself to get scared out of my socks.

But we’re actually, I’m gonna reference back to The X-Files several times in this conversation. Because I actually think it’s a really useful tool in understanding the cultural touch points that the paranormal has. So how are you defining paranormal in the context of your book?

MAFFEO: Paranormal has a very broad definition. In the context of my book I’m defining it as anything that defies any kind of logical explanation or a measurable explanation. … It could include an experience of a ghost an experience of a psychic phenomenon or someone experiencing something where they know something that they have no real reason for knowing.

Really anything like that.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So ghosts, sensations, physical experiences, predictions of the future even? Like psychic readings?

MAFFEO: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Now is there something, actually let me get back to the 75% of Americans that say they believe in some form of paranormal activity. How does that number land with you?

MAFFEO: It’s very high. It’s very high and it’s very interesting. And it makes me wonder about what people are experiencing and how they interpret their own experiences. If there are, if 75% of people believe in ghosts or some aspect of the paranormal, and all of those people are right, and there is some kind of paranormal anything out there, we should absolutely study it. Because right now we don’t have any concrete evidence of it, but it would teach us quite a lot about our world and our experiences.

But also, if there is no paranormal activity and the 75% of people are wrong then it’s interesting to question psychology and say why is that so many people have this similar belief? That explains their worlds in a way that works for them. So we should study that as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, I would actually like to jump to a specific example that you use in the book. Because it’s really demonstrative of how the brain operates when the body’s actually physically experiencing something, but we can’t explain what it is.

And that’s sleep paralysis. And this one really grabbed me Professor Maffeo, because I actually, when I was a teenager and into my mid-20s I experienced sleep paralysis regularly, and it was really scary. Fortunately I was, I’m living in time where I understood what it was. But the sensation of being awake but not being able to move your body or open your eyes, and I was having difficulty breathing.

When I looked back in history over several centuries ago, there are drawings, there are depictions I think, what did people used to call it? Like they said it was a demon sitting on their chests?

MAFFEO: There’s lore in almost every culture in the world, but yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And people even made these elaborate drawings of what it felt like to have, or what they thought the demon was sitting on their chest. And the reason why I wanted to ask you more about that is, so this is something that was real, it was actually happening to people, but the sort of cognitive tools that we had for several centuries were limited to, you know very sort of new scientific methods and religion.

So we used the tools we had to understand what was happening.

MAFFEO: Exactly. Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: So tell me more about you know your thoughts on sleep paralysis.

MAFFEO: Sleep paralysis is something that occurs during the REM stage of sleep. The way we think about sleep and waking is that we have the wakeful brain, we have the brain that is in non-REM sleep, and we have the brain that is in REM sleep.

REM sleep is what many people have heard of and if you were to look at the electrical signature of the brain it would actually look like an awake brain. Whereas in non-REM sleep the sleep, the brainwaves are very slow and synchronous. During that time, we are paralyzed because that is also when we do our most vivid dreaming, and we have evolved this mechanism to paralyze our muscles so that we don’t inadvertently act out our dreams and hurt ourselves.

So all of us are paralyzed during REM sleep. Some people, I think it’s roughly 20% of the population, experience what we call sleep paralysis where they wake up during REM sleep but yet their body is still paralyzed. So their brain is sending the signal to their muscles that they need to move their body, but their body is not responding, and that is a very scary feeling.

Some people experience exactly what you described, inability to breathe, pressure on the chest. Some people experience like weird sounds or buzzing lights or even might even see a figure or an apparition in wherever they are that’s sleeping. And you’re right, if you have access to the internet and you Google those symptoms it’ll probably come up with sleep paralysis, but you’re going to interpret that based on the resources that you have at your disposal, and that might end up being a supernatural explanation.

CHAKRABARTI: But what you’re saying is that we now have a scientific explanation for what’s going on?

MAFFEO: Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: And you’re just waiting for science to disambiguate these other paranormal experiences?

MAFFEO: Yes, but that’s a little bit complicated too because I’m not interested in telling people that they haven’t seen a ghost or that they haven’t experienced something because they did experience something.

I’m interested in the scientific explanation of what they experienced and I think a lot of people who experience an episode or several episodes of sleep paralysis can learn about the scientific nature of sleep paralysis and say oh yes, that is what was happening to me. Turns out it wasn’t supernatural at all.

But a lot of people might not agree with that explanation and say I know what I saw and I know what I experienced and I don’t accept the explanation of supernatural. And that kind of leads us into interpretation of our own experiences, priming, suggestibility, other cognitive biases that we have, so it’s never really just one thing.

It’s an experience that we have that our brain interprets in one way or another.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Just to let you know, a little later in the show I am going to present you with a scientific defense of the possibility that the supernatural exists, okay?

MAFFEO: Okay awesome. I look forward to it.

CHAKRABARTI: But the sleep paralysis example I think really brings to the fore what is essential issue in our belief in the paranormal and it has to do with how we process reality.

That reality actually is a fungible thing depending on how our brains are interpreting the signals that are coming into it. You talk about near-death experiences. We actually did a show about exactly this in our brain series and there’s science out there that says when a body is close to death, the brain is actually hyperactive in certain ways.

So the person experiencing a near-death experience is actually, they actually are seeing, feeling, experiencing whatever it is that they’re seeing because their brains are doing that. So it may not be, quote-unquote, paranormal, but it is something that’s real to them because it actually is real in their brains.

MAFFEO: Absolutely. Your experience is not what is subjectively or objectively happening around you. It’s your perception is construction, constructed based on your opinion of the situation.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: I want to give a very huge measure of thanks to all of you On Point listeners who sent us your stories of the experience of the supernatural. We’re going to play as many of them as we can across the course of this conversation.

There were so many. So here’s another one. And before we play it, I just want to offer a quick warning because the story that you’re about to hear from an On Point listener involves a story about suicide. So if you or anyone you know is struggling, please do call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 988.

And it’s free, and it’s a confidential service available 24/7. Okay. So Greg told us that he has had several paranormal experiences throughout his lifetime. He lives in Wayne, Nebraska where he runs a small brewery. And in 2020 Greg bought the building next to his business, and that building used to be Wayne’s City Hall.

And the building was 114 years old.

GREG: And I went down in the basement for the first time and was just checking it out after we bought it, making sure that things were not out of the ordinary. And right in the middle of the room underneath a beam was a metal folding chair just out in the middle of the room to trip on.

And so I was like, “Ah, that’s kind of weird that there’s a folding chair just in the middle of the room.” That was really the only thing that was down there. And so couple weeks later, just talking to the original owner and joked around with him and said, “Hey, thanks for leaving that folding chair in the middle of the room for me to trip on.”

And he’s like, “That’s really weird, I didn’t leave a folding chair down there.” And he’s like, “I don’t know why I would have left a folding chair, and definitely wouldn’t have left it in the middle of the room.” And then he got this weird look on his face and he’s “That’s really weird because the firemen used to go down in the basement and play cards. And there was a fireman who had a really hard time in life and decided to hang himself from a beam in the middle of the room.”

And so the next time I went into the building, I went down in the basement to check it out, and there is no metal folding chair. And I’m the only one with keys to the building.

I’m the only one that definitely would have been down in the basement until then I looked around and there’s no metal folding chair like that anywhere in the entire building.

CHAKRABARTI: So that’s Greg in Wayne, Nebraska. Okay, Professor Maffeo. I was about to call you Scully. (LAUGHS) All right, Scully, explain that one.

MAFFEO: Please do.

CHAKRABARTI: What do you think of Greg’s story?

MAFFEO: That’s amazing and really impressive, and I am so curious about that folding chair.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. The thing is that Dana Scully would frequently say on The X-Files, that the simplest explanation is most often the correct one. I think she was, what, paraphrasing Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.

Is that kind of what you found as you explored what science is known about all, about a variety of supernatural experiences? That people want to, people want to attach a narrative to things that are actually otherwise quite maybe easily explained?

MAFFEO: Exactly. Our brains love to turn all experiences into narratives even when it’s not really a narrative, so that’s one piece of it.

We like to have a story. We don’t always know everything that happened in our external world. We don’t know who might have moved furniture or who might have had keys. And not to debunk anything, I don’t intend to do that at all. I certainly don’t know what happened in this particular instance.

However, I think that there are a lot of times that we feel like we have all of the information, and we don’t necessarily have it, or even if we do have it, we don’t really have it consciously available to us. Humans usually often, and all of us do this, every single person falls victim to a bias that we call confirmation bias, where we’re more likely to pay attention to information that supports our belief, and we’re more likely to ignore information that does not support our belief.

The problem is that you don’t consciously have an awareness of what information you are paying attention to and what information you’re ignoring. So it could be that there is a perfectly rational explanation for why a thing happened, and maybe you even have been exposed to that explanation, but your brain isn’t internalizing it.

CHAKRABARTI: Again, like I said, the X-Files references just come so easily. They do. Do you remember in Mulder’s office, I think in season one, there’s a poster on the wall and it’s of a UFO. And on the poster it says, it doesn’t say believe. I think it says, “I want to believe.”

MAFFEO: That is exactly what it says because I have the same poster in my office.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) Oh, my gosh. No, and the reason why that comes to mind is because I also am not pooh-poohing our human need to create narratives around what we experience that doesn’t always make sense. Because I think it’s a evolutionarily powerful tool, sense making in our chaotic environment, right? I mean, you’re the psychology professor. Can you tell me, are there psychological advantages to being able to do that?

MAFFEO: Absolutely. If we can construct a narrative about sensory information that we’re taking in, we’re more likely to remember it, and that memory will aid us in future situations that maybe are similar, that our survival might depend on.

And I completely agree with you. Yes, I am a skeptic. I do want to believe. I think skepticism is not the same as disbelief. Skepticism is what sort of information or evidence do I need to have to actually believe this? And I personally have not had any of that evidence.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let’s go back to our listeners because we got a whole raft of really moving experiences, they were quite beautiful and tender, that had to do with people who had experiences with ghosts of loved ones.

And again, I just want to say thank you to everyone. Because anytime an On Point listener shares their story, whatever it is, you’re trusting us to hold it tenderly and to treat it with respect. So thank you so much. Let’s listen to a bunch of these folks. First, let’s start with Barbara from Frederick, Maryland.

She says she had a paranormal experience four years after her beloved husband died.

BARBARA: The rest of the family gathered in my son’s backyard for a picnic, and he said, “This is so great, the family all gathered. The only thing that would make it perfect would be if my old man was here.” I looked over, and standing a few feet away from us as clear as day was my husband.

And I said, “Don’t worry, he’s here.” And when everybody turned to look, he was gone, but I saw it very clearly and that’s a true story.

CHAKRABARTI: Here is Diana from Buda, Texas. She’s 69 and says there have been three times in her life when she’s felt a strong paranormal presence including this one.

DIANA: After my father passed away when I was in my twenties, I was alone in my apartment at night and I was washing dishes doing just something mundane and I felt his presence very strongly behind me and I had a sense that he had called out my name and the moment lasted for two or three minutes and then he was gone.

CHAKRABARTI: Here’s one more. This is Paul from Columbia, Missouri and Paul’s story really actually stopped me in my tracks because on November 10, 2002, Paul’s twenty-year old son Benjamin was killed instantly in a car crash.

PAUL: That night I had a paranormal experience where my son’s soul and mine merged and I heard him say, or rather I felt him say, “Sorry dad.” Now that is an experience, that is gnostic one. In other words, it’s an experiential thing. I cannot describe it to you as something you have to experience in order to comprehend. It’s as bizarre as tasting color, feeling words is like something that I’ve never had any other experience compare.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Maffeo, what do you think about those stories?

MAFFEO: I think they’re all beautiful and deeply moving.

CHAKRABARTI: And how do you explain them? Or do we have a science yet that’s able to explain them?

MAFFEO: We don’t have anything that’s definitive. There really is no definitive way to explain any of these.

I would say for many experiences like these when someone experiences loss, we naturally are searching for closure. We’re naturally searching for peace. We don’t understand loss. We don’t understand death, so I think our brains grasp out for any kind of search for meaning. I do really appreciate that one of the people who called in talked about his experience as saying it’s like tasting color, which is something that many people cannot imagine what that’s like.

But there is a real neurological explanation for it, and it’s called a condition of synesthesia where the parts of their brains that are important for perceptions of different senses crosstalk. So you might have a color perception, and then you might have your perception of taste, but those neurons essentially are cross-wired.

So you cross your perceptions of those sensations, and so you might end up tasting color, which is something that is unimaginable to those of us who can’t.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, let’s get into some of the other areas of research and the paranormal that you write about in the book. You write about a psychologist named Chris French who had something called The Haunt Project.

What was that?

MAFFEO: He is one of my favorite anomalistic psychologists. So he is a professor at Goldsmiths College in London, and his lab group published this very ingenious experiment several years ago. There has been a claim that has been around for really hundreds of years that magnetic or electrical activity might relate to the presence of ghosts.

And now if you watch any of the Ghost Hunters shows, they’re usually attempting to measure paranormal activity with a device that measures electromagnetic fields. So we maybe have a correlation between electromagnetic field and paranormal experiences, but as an experimental psychologist, Chris French wanted to see if there might be a causal link between those things.

So in his lab at Goldsmiths College, he and his lab group built what they call a haunted room. So in this room that people, participants could come walk through the room, each session lasted a little less than an hour, and they controlled different variables. So they had some participants exposed to electromagnetic frequencies, and some were not exposed.

Some also were exposed to something called infrasound, which are sound waves that are just slightly too low for humans to be able to detect it. So we can’t consciously detect it, but there’s evidence that might also be related to the experience of the paranormal. So the participants were either EMF present or absent, infrasound present or absent, a combination of the two, and neither.

And they had several participants walk through this lab with a little notebook and just write down any experience that they had, supernatural or not supernatural, just anything they noticed at all. And when the lab group analyzed the results, they saw that there were actually quite a few anomalistic or possibly supernatural experiences. I believe that one person was even so afraid that they had to leave the study because their experience was so profound.

So this was really fascinating, but then they looked a little bit closer at the data and saw that there was no actual relationship between the presence or absence of infrasound and EMF, and the experience of the paranormal.

CHAKRABARTI: What? Really? Oh, that’s so interesting.

MAFFEO: I know.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell me more.

MAFFEO: It was not what anyone expected with that data set.

So we don’t have a great explanation for it, right? All we can do is interpret the data. What Dr. French interprets as the most, the simplest explanation, the most parsimonious explanation, is that all participants, all because of ethics research, every participant signs an informed consent form, and in that informed consent, the participants were informed that they might experience something anomalous, I believe was what they said.

And that little piece of information might have been enough to suggest to the believers that they experienced something or that they might experience something, and then they therefore expected to experience something paranormal. Because the significant finding that the researchers saw wasn’t a relationship between EMF, ultrasound, and experience, infrasound, I’m sorry.

It was a relationship between belief and experience.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so then are we, does this go back to priming, that people who are more likely to have a belief in the existence of these EMF type paranormal experiences were, they reported them more frequently in the study?

MAFFEO: Absolutely, and we’ve seen that in many studies. This sort of thing, the belief, the suggestibility, the priming has been replicated in many studies. There are a couple of famous studies that were done a couple of decades ago by Richard Wiseman’s group, where they set up fake seances. And in these fake seances, they would have objects move, like there was a candelabra on the table that was rigged up to a string that no one could see, that they would pull across the table.

And sometimes Dr. Wiseman would suggest to the participants that the table that they were sitting at was actually levitating, and then in some conditions he did not make that suggestion. And what they saw after the fact when they surveyed the participants was that a very high number of them remembered the table as levitating when it had been suggested to them but it had never actually levitated.

CHAKRABARTI: You actually do include several examples in the books that would fall into the category of people just being hoodwinked I would say, right?

MAFFEO: That happens too.

CHAKRABARTI: Like you talk about… Uri Geller and his spoon bending phenomenon. And like performers and entertainers who- it’s still a very powerful form of entertainment today. Oh yes. Yes. But I’m wondering if why did you choose to include those in the book because to me it seems like just everyday entertainment based chicanery is not the same as the experiences people report when there’s no one around to try to, you know, manipulate their blind spots.

MAFFEO: I chose it first, I love magic.

I love watching magic shows. It’s one of my favorite things to do. And I think I love it so much because the best magicians don’t claim to be supernatural at all. They say everything they’re doing is perfectly natural, it’s just a skill that I have practiced. But yet my brain is fooled every single time I see it, even when I know exactly what’s happening.

So to me, magic, sleight of hand, those types of things are evidence that our brain really is not always accurate when it’s interpreting the world, and here is proof of that. Because I have this magician in front of me that is tricking me to think that something is in his hand, and it’s really not in his hand or whatever.

And it shows me where my mind is likely to look for proof. And that’s usually the wrong place.

CHAKRABARTI: Let me ask, you had a psychic reading done on you, right?

MAFFEO: Yes, I’ve had several.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, tell me about those.

MAFFEO: The one I wrote about in the book it was a very pleasant experience.

I very much liked the person that I spoke with. I personally was not wowed by it. Statistically there are many things that would probably be true of people of my general demographic. And let’s see, one of the things that they told me —

CHAKRABARTI: This was in person?

MAFFEO: It was in person, yes.

Okay. I went to his house. I found him on Google Reviews.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) You want to know the real psychics? The real psychic is Google and all the data that we’re getting.

MAFFEO: Yeah it’s Instagram and my targeted Reels.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s listen to another one of the fantastic stories that was sent to us by an On Point listener.

This is Tracy, and a while back, Tracy moved into an older home in Christiansburg, Virginia. She moved there with her then husband. Now this house actually was really old. It was specifically built in 1888.

TRACY: For three nights we were woken up by the sound of footsteps in the hallway immediately outside our bedroom door.

They were so physical and loud that we actually got out of bed expecting that there was someone there. I saw a small woman dressed in a black Victorian era dress. On the third night, I spoke to her silently and explained that we had moved into the house and were trying to make it beautiful and take care of it. And then I asked if she would please not wake us up while we were sleeping.

It never happened again.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s listener Tracy. She now lives in Farmville, Virginia. Professor Maffeo, I promise you we’ve got more stories like that from our listeners to get to before the end of the show, but I wanted to let you finish telling us about the experience you had with a psychic reading. So you went to this guy’s house.

Our engineer wants me to ask you if he was expecting you. (LAUGHS)

MAFFEO: He was. I had an appointment … and I shared my location with a girlfriend just in case. And we talked for an hour, and I think it was a really pleasant conversation. One of the big things that stuck out to me was he told me that I was going to witness a car accident, and I said, “Okay,” “when?”

And he said that he didn’t know, it would just be sometime in the future. And I said, “Like a big car accident or a fender bender type car accident?” And he said he didn’t know. And then I said, “Am I gonna see it happen, or am I gonna see it after the fact?” And he said he didn’t know, it could be any of those, but also, it could just be on television.

CHAKRABARTI: I’m sorry, but continue.

MAFFEO: So yeah, so I had the same reaction. And maybe he’s right, and in all honesty because of my own confirmation bias, I very well could have seen a car accident since then on television, in real life, large or small, and I don’t think that I would connect those two experiences.

He did say other things though. He said my father, my parents live in a cold area, and they live outside of Boston, so to me, that’s basically the Arctic. So that was accurate. And at the end of the conversation, he said I think I did pretty good. I think I got about 80% right.

And I said, “How do you know that?” And he said, “I feel it.” And I said, “Okay.”

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, you know what’s interesting to me about psychics is that I think they do have a skill, and you actually write about this in the book. Their skill is an exquisite ability to read the micro messages that we send to them, that we don’t even know we’re doing it. And it’s a power of observation. And that coupled, even though you’re a psychologist and you went there, went to this reading fully prepared, do you feel like you were also still maybe unconsciously giving him little signals or little reactions that might have told him, hey, he’s onto something?

MAFFEO: I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that. I tried not to. And I tried to be really aware of my own behavior, but we can’t always be aware of our own behavior, and I think that’s part of it too. We might try to feel like we are being completely stoic, but in fact, we’re giving a lot away by our facial expressions.

CHAKRABARTI: And the choice of saying that you’re going to see a car crash, I think is pretty indicative of another technique, right? Which is picking something that seems specific but is actually quite generalized in life. Because I think the chance of any of us seeing a car crash, especially on TV is pretty high. … There’s another area of paranormal experience that that you talk about in the book, and that’s premonition. And we have an example of here. This is Rex of Bettendorf, Iowa. And Rex has had several paranormal experiences, and here’s one.

REX: The experience of one person that was going to be dying, somebody that was close to me.

I had a spirit-like thing wake me up at night and tell me this is going to happen in three days, and in three days it did. His wife called me. I had to say, “I’ve known for three days.”

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Maffeo, what’s going on there? Because premonition is something people report frequently. I even have my own little premonition story, but I want to hear your explanation first.

MAFFEO: Okay, I definitely want to hear yours. Again, there are many. They can relate to some of the cognitive biases that we’ve already talked about. Another one is just sheer coincidence. Humans like to construct narratives, and coincidence is almost too simple of an explanation. So humans are notoriously bad at understanding the probability of things occurring together.

So if someone had a premonition where they are told or they know that something is going to happen in a certain amount of time or maybe probably most of us have had a premonition that someone is going to call us or text us, and then they do, and that happens. And it seems very meaningful.

But a lot of times, it probably is just simply a coincidence. Because there are probably many times you’ve thought about that person, and they didn’t text you at that moment.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, but we don’t notice those, right?

MAFFEO: We don’t notice those.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so we assign special significance to the times that we notice.

Again, it’s that pattern-seeking desire, I think, of the human brain. It’s so powerful. Okay, so here’s my story. Help me pick this apart. So this happened when I was in college, and I was a mentor for my former high school’s astronomy club. Because I used to be in it when I was in high school, and my brother was in the club, high school astronomy club at the time.

And every year we used to go on this field trip, I grew up in Oregon, so it’s Central Oregon in the high desert there. Because there’s a really big telescope, and there’d be this three or four day field trip. Okay. So my friend and I who were some of the mentors, we actually had to leave early from the field trip, and it was during the daytime when the high school kids were going on this hike in a canyon.

So we’re driving along the road and leaving the Bend, Oregon area, and we see this County Mountain Rescue van on the side of the road. And it was near the area where we knew the kids and the mentors who had stayed behind were hiking. So I tell my friend, I’m like, “I think we need to pull over and see what’s going on.”

That’s sensible enough, right? Because, like, we were also mentors of this group. Get out of the car, and we start walking down into the canyon, and Professor Maffeo, I still tell you to this day, about 50 yards into the canyon, I turned to my friend and I was like, “It’s my brother. It’s my brother. He’s been injured.”  And I knew it with a kind of certainty that I know when I’m looking at my watch and tell the time. I absolutely knew it was him, and I start tearing down into the canyon, running down the path, jumping over a couple of boulders, and lo and behold, look up to my left, and on the side of this shallow canyon, my brother is strapped to a basically one of those portable body boards, and he’s being hauled up outside, out of the rim of the canyon.

He had actually … fortunately it wasn’t a significant injury, but he was the one who was injured. And I’ll never forget that because I cannot explain it. I cannot.

MAFFEO: Wow, that must have been so horrifying.

CHAKRABARTI: I mean it was horrifying but more comforting in fact because it was better than the shock I think I would’ve felt if I was like, “Oh my God, it’s him,” seeing him, being attended to by paramedics. Like I actually felt better knowing in advance. Psychologically, I mean how do you explain that?

MAFFEO: Yeah. So first I don’t want to at all discount your experience or say that didn’t happen the way you described it.

I am gonna play a little bit of devil’s advocate here and try to pick it apart with psychology and neuroscience. So the first thing, you see the paramedic van, and you automatically jump to the worst fear, that it’s your brother that’s there, as opposed to maybe someone in the group that you’re less close with.

If it had been a false alarm or someone besides your brother or someone that wasn’t even in your group, you probably wouldn’t have thought of that premonition again, I think because everyone in your group would’ve been perfectly safe and story over, right? But it became your brother, and it was your brother, and of course you’re flood with emotions when you see your brother on that stretcher.

You’re scared, you’re confused, your sympathetic nervous system is going into this fight or flight mode. You don’t know what to do. And what happens is that there are many hormones in our body that can retroactively impact our emotions and also our perceptions of the experiences. So a lot of time the way we experience something is actually we experience the events and then we have a physiological response to the event, and then we go back in our mind and reinterpret the memory.

So I don’t want to ever say, no you did not know with certainty that it was your brother, but it’s your memory that you know with certainty. You can’t go back to that moment and interrogate yourself at that moment. You can only interrogate your memory of that moment. And our memories are reconstructive.

They’re never a recording of what transpired at that event. So that’s my take but again —

CHAKRABARTI: I love it. I do not feel broken apart at all. I mean, I think what it’s coming down to is you’re telling me that I am not the coldly rational person that I would like to think that I am.

CHAKRABARTI: All right. So let’s hand it back to a couple more listener stories. This is Sue. Sue bought a house in Crown Point, New York back in 2011, and she says anyone who knows about this house says it’s haunted.

SUE: About two years ago my husband and I were in the house and it was raining, and I have to say it’s an old dairy farm, and then we have an old barn. So we were inside the house and it was raining, we were standing in the kitchen and we clearly heard a cow mooing up in the second-floor bedroom.

Unmistakable sound, period. Now we have no cows. There are no cows on our farm anymore.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, thank you for that Sue. Here’s Jane of Glen Burnie, Maryland.

JANE: I grew up in central New York in a Revolutionary War era city. And when I was eleven, I woke up in the middle of the night to a young woman dressed in period clothing standing at the foot of my bed staring directly into the mirror of the bedroom.

I was petrified through the covers over my head within this lifetime some people are given the choice to believe or not and others are not! And I’ve been a believer ever since.

CHAKRABARTI: And one more. This is Natalie who used to work at the historic Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas, which was built in 1886.

NATALIE: We would regularly have interactions with ghosts, never saw like a person but in my office, you’d regularly smell cigar smoke when there’s absolutely no smoking in the building or anywhere around that area. You hear typing at night there were so many people on the staff who had experiences and many of them were very serious. Very sober people.

So yeah, there was always some energy floating around. I don’t really believe in like ghosts as like disembodied spirits. But I definitely think when a place has been around a long time and had a lot of different experiences contained within it, that just leaves a mark on the energy there. 

CHAKRABARTI: So once again, thank you to all of you On Point listeners who sent us your stories.

Okay Professor Maffeo, in the last couple of minutes that we have together here, comes my scientific defense of the possibility of the paranormal. Because actually I thought about this when you wrote about things Like psychedelics. Because again It gets back to the fact is that there’s difference between what people say reality is Like y’know–like “This table” “Is hard.” Versus the reality that’s being constructed in my brain.

And when I think about how much that reality that’s being constructed in my brain is influenced by As you’ve Been telling Us about cognitive biases Let’s For the sake Of Scientific Rigor Wonder or ask that could you as a researcher who’s prone to not believe in the existence of the paranormal have a cognitive bias such that you are seeking out the studies or naturally attracted to the pattern of information that confirms your bias that there’s no such thing as the paranormal?

MAFFEO: Absolutely. Absolutely. I have had times where I have maybe heard a voice. I’ve gone with paranormal investigators to haunted houses and have been in situations where they were believing that we were having an experience, and I was not believing that we were having an experience. So absolutely, my brain constructs reality the same way everyone else’s does. My brain as a skeptic and truly as a non-believer tells me that there’s a rational explanation, just it’s my inner Scully. So that’s the evidence that I’m going to be looking for.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so speaking of that, one of my other favorite, ugh, favorite quotes from The X-Files comes from Fox Mulder, where he says that something may be highly unlikely but not outside the realm of extreme possibility. And the reason why I asked that is science itself, there are edges of science, I’m thinking of theoretical physics and astrophysics, string theory or people who study black holes and then say the math tells us that on the other side of a black hole there are white holes,” there’s no way to actually test, prove, or disprove any of these things, but science accepts it as a possibility.

So I’m wondering if the same thing may be true of the paranormal, that eventually one day we may find an explanation of the ghosts that people are seeing, they are an actual phenomena. We’re interpreting it as ghosts, but it’s an actual physical phenomena. We just don’t have the tools to explain them just yet.

MAFFEO: Absolutely, I completely agree that is a possibility. We experience only a small fraction of the physical stimuli that are out in the world. You know, for example, we can only hear a small range of frequencies. We can only see a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. There are so many different physical stimuli out there that humans do not have the physiology to detect. So is it possible that there is stimuli in the world that because we can’t detect it, we haven’t developed a technique to measure it? And I think, yes, that is a possibility. I don’t know what it is and I don’t totally think that’s true but there is a fraction of a chance.

CHAKRABARTI: I want to end with this phrase that you often tell your students about trust. What is that phrase?

MAFFEO: Trust yourself but don’t trust yourself.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.