wolram said:
with all the suggestions that ghosts are due to some EM
anomaly, possibly even inducing visions directly in the
human brain it should be possible to reproduce these anomalies
in the lab, has any experiment along these lines been carried
out?
There is a Canadian researcher, Dr. Michael Persinger, who has been experimenting with this phenomenon for years.
The notion that things like alien abduction experiences might be caused by anomalous EM fields was a direct result of his work.
I don't believe he has done any work on the notion this may also be responsibe for "ghosts".
Visions of people from the past are a known symptom of simple and complex partial seizures, however, and I guess it's fair to call that an EM phenomenon. If the hallucination occurs in both halves of the visual field, the apparition looks completely real and solid. If it only occurs in one half of the visual field of one eye, it looks "see through" and superimposed on the background, creating a classic "misty ghost" image.
Actually these kinds of seizure hallucinations aren't limited to people from the past. They can be of anyone or any image in the person's memory, and they can also be entirely fictional. I read about one woman who saw small elephants and rhinoceros' running around in circles on the floor in front of her, during her seizures. Another woman I know about hallucinated the image of her little poodle standing on a shelf in the room, when the actual dog was actually in the room, in a different place. This same woman hallucinated the image of her daughter, who was away at college, walking through the room. She also sees many images of people she doesn't particularly recognise.
You can see that if someone were to have this kind of seizure and hallucinate the image of someone they knew who had passed away, they would be quite prone to believe they had seen that person's ghost. I am very inclined to believe that the majority of extremely convincing ghost sightings (where the experiencer is convinced, I mean) are, in fact, this kind of neurological event.
The simple partial seizure, a small, localized incident of hypersynchronous neuronal firing, is almost unknown to the general public who think that a seizure always involves muscular convulsions. However, statistics show that the majority of people will have at least one simple partial seizure during their lives. The common
deja vu is an example of a very common kind of simple partial seizure.
It is less common to hallucinate full blown images of people but it happens quite a bit.
There is at least one team of "ghostbusters" I saw on TV who are very careful to check on the background EM levels of any haunted house they investigate, to rule out the possibility of EM triggered simple partial seizures. Persinger, likewise, will not subject anyone with known epilepsy or mental illness to his E fields, and goes out of his way to screen such test candidates out.
