Real Life Ghosts

Ivan Seeking

One more point that comes to mind. "The likelihood of truthfulness" is a completely subjective interpretation based on expectations. This is not a scientific measure. The concept has little value within the context of potentially dramatic and inexplicable phenomena. Or put another way, if the claim is beyond my comfort zone, I ain't buying it. This is human nature. There have been a number of times that even after our experiences in Glendale, I would hear a ghost story and think "yeah right", and then realize that my story would sound very much the same to someone else. My story is true but that guy is full of it! What an odd reaction, eh?

If a claim is simply "unbelievable", if it doesn't seem to pass the truth test because it sounds too outrageous to believe, then it seems to me that if verfied, it is likely to be a significant discovery. This suggests to me that the most interesting mysteries are the most likely to be discarded as nonsense, even if they're genuine.

Ivan Seeking

Here you go. If this isn't the same thing that I saw, it sure sounds like similar research.

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500368_162-650656.html

zoobyshoe

You have misunderstood the article. The imaging during the implantation of false memory allows them to predict which false memories will later be remembered as real.

It does not provide a way to sort out which memories are false after the fact.

Here's the actual paper:
http://faculty.kutztown.edu/rryan/cl...e_memories.pdf

Ivan Seeking

I didn't really misread the report. I was referencing a previous report and found a similar article. Whether this is the same thing or not, I'm not sure. But it does show that research is advancing in this arena.

nitsuj

To your point, we know far less of the brain than we do most other physical stuff such as electromagnetic energies.

SuperiorPrep

"scientific explanation" and "ghosts" sounds like an oxymoron

Ivan Seeking

Correction, that is pretty much what has happened with ball lightning. There is far more evidence for ET-UFOS, or at least anomalous UFOS, than there is for ball lightning, but we can get our heads around the concept of ball lightning [we assume we can explain it using existing models], so it is generally accepted as real based on nothing but anecdotes and a few photos.

While there have been things somewhat like ball lighthning produced in the lab, and while there are a good many papers on the subject, some of the key features such as being self-sustaining, the lifetime, size, and the alleged ability to pass through surfaces, to my knowledge have never been duplicated.

Ivan Seeking

Implicit in your statement is the assumption that any real "ghostly" phenomena is necessarily "supernatural", and therefore doesn't exist. Right?

How about if we consider the option of "real" but not supernatural?

zoobyshoe

Since they knew which memories were real in this study, they could actually already check if there's a difference between a brainscan of someone recalling a false memory and a real memory, if they wanted to.

It wouldn't settle anything, though, because a memory can be real and still not prove anything about what's remembered.

As far as I'm concerned the memory you and your wife have of something "sitting" at the foot of the bed is real, in so far as something actually disturbed the bed. Proving by brain imaging that this memory is real would do nothing to explain what disturbed the foot of the bed, just as proving that someone really saw something in the sky that was saucer shaped wouldn't tell you anything about what that thing actually was.

Eliminating hallucination or false memory still doesn't get you to the paranormal or ET.

I've told this story before: my high school physics teacher's apartment was periodically disturbed by a feminine-sounding ghostly whine. Each time it happened he investigated but it always stopped before he found the source. Finally one day he tracked it to the toilet water supply tank. Opening that, he found the copper float was vibrating like crazy and this is what was causing the whine. He surmised there was some leak in the water supply line that cause a vibration at the resonant frequency of the float (pretty freaky and against the odds). He replaced it with a plastic one and the whine never happened again.

His memory of the whine would be just as real had he never been able to track the cause and, had he never found the cause anyone could interpret it as evidence of the paranormal, based on the argument "it was never explained to my satisfaction", without it actually being evidence of the paranormal.

Ryan_m_b

Zoobyshoe has already addressed this but unless you have the person hooked up to a machine as the memory is being made (and you have the events to compare) you're back to square one.
Obviously when starting a line of enquiry about an unknown phenomenon you start by building out from what you already know. In the case of ball lightning the reports somewhat match what we know about regular lightning and so from their studies can be done. It's not that difficult to take what resources we have (our understanding, our electrical equipment, the sky above us) and test.

In the case of ghosts there are so many contradictory, illogical and fake claims that it's hard to know where to start. As with anything though we must start with what we know, so we start with looking for what could make someone see a ghost. Is it a trick of the light? A hallucination? A scam? etc. Eventually if we haven't got any good reason and we can't see any other avenue to explore then we have to leave it as unknown for now. If you can't find any evidence that suggests it was a hallucination, if there's nothing that could have caused an illusion and beyond reasonable doubt you think the people are telling the truth then what can you do?

zoobyshoe

Had they scanned these subjects twice, both during the formation of the memories and also during the recall, it might have turned out that there was a tell-tale on the brain scan when they were recalling false memories as real.

That tell-tale, if it existed, could later be used to screen for false memories even when you had no data about the formation of the memory. That is: anyone could be screened at any time to see if a memory were real or false in the complete absence of a scan taken while the memory was being formed. This is the sort of thing Ivan is hoping for.

They didn't think to try this, and the chances are there is no tell-tale, that all memories recalled as real have the same "signature" whether they're false or real.

The point I was making is just that they could already test for this tell-tale if they wanted to. No innovations necessary.

Dotini

Lots of those papers on ball lightning make reference to the neutrino, notorious for its alacrity to penetrate solid structure. Oddly enough, the neutrino is sometimes referred to as the "ghost particle"

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

Ivan Seeking

I disagree. As I have stated a number of times, there are cases involving multiple witnesses that leave little doubt, if the stories are truthful. The ability to know the memory is real would be even more helpful, but a reliable lie detector could go a long way towards changing the landscape. Again, I cite the Travis Walton case as a great example. And by the way, a lie detector was used in that case. IIRC, four of five witnesses passed and the other was hiding a criminal record. But the test could be flawed, so it means nothing.

A reliable test may not stand as proof of what happened, but stories like this would unavoidably take on much greater credibility if the witnesses could be reliably tested for truthfulness... and they passed.

Ryan_m_b

I'm not sure why we're still stuck on this, perhaps I'm missing something. Where is the research that can tell if a memory is false without having to have the participant in the machine when the memory is laid down?

Also lie detectors as in the polygraph are not a credible machine. AFAIK no polygraph test has ever stood up to a properly done blinded peer review test.

Ivan Seeking

My point was that we don't need the ability to determine if a memory is real, though it would be helpful. Reliable lie detection using brain imaging technology seems to be available now, or nearly so. At very least it seems to be reasonable to hope for this soon. That alone would be tremendously helpful. For example, when we have five or six witnesses to an alleged event with distinctive details, such as "a beam of light from the UFO lifted Travis several feet off the ground and threw him backwards fifty feet, and at that point we thought he was dead" [actually a paraphrase, not a direct quote], and if it can be shown that Travis Walton wasn't involved in a hoax, then what is left?

There is an entire world of skepticism that depends solely on the claim that the witnesses of the alleged event X were lying.

We saw that here with the Iran 1976 UFO discussion. When all else fails, the skeptical explanation defaults to a cheesy conspiracy theory.

Ryan_m_b

True but I wonder if there will be some backfire when a group of witnesses are determined to be telling the "truth". None of them may be lying but they could be A) telling false memories and B) making conclusions based on faulty reasoning.

Ivan Seeking

Well, explain how that would be possible in the Travis Walton case. I use this as an example because it is difficult to imagine any other reasonable explanation, except that it was either an elaborate hoax played by Walton, or they were all lying. What else is possible?