Can ghosts be proven to exist or not?

[zoobyshoe]

But then again, didn't you just say the other day that you believe in telepathy? Weren't you also arguing that consciousness is simply a byproduct of the neural circuitry using existing laws of physics, rather than some new mysterious forces? All these opinions seem contradictory. If you don't believe we are all linked by some magical spiritual force, then how can you believe in telepathy? And if you can debunk ghosts on the grounds of the scientific method, then why not telepathy?

You can certainly debunk any report of telepathy I make. There are probably a dozen rational alternate causes that could be suggested to explain any instance of it I have experienced. When I say I "believe" in it, I am more or less merely reporting a gut level, knee-jerk reaction I have whenever one of these incidents occurs. I think that, if I said I did not believe in it during a lie detector test that answer would register as a lie: it's a deep level automatic reaction, not the end product of informed analysis. That says something about me and nothing at all about telepathy.

To the extent I feel there is anything authentically unexplained about the incidents I am reacting to, I am more apt to suspect it is because there are neurological and psychological dynamics at work which haven't been completely defined and isolated as subjects of study. These are spin-offs of the matter of "rapport" which comes up so often in material about NLP and hypnotism.

In this youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwvA0rJ6rC0&feature=related

Derren Brown causes these strippers to feel that he has touched them when we can clearly see he hasn't.

On the subject of rapport Brown says:

"I develop that rapport by learning to see the situation from the perspective of the other person, not my own. Consider what happens in a normal conversation. Someone sits and talks about themselves, while you pick up on a few things that relate to you. You wait for then to finish so that you can say, 'Yes, I ...' and then start talking about yourself. They then respond by returning to their own stories and opinions, and so the dialogue continues. In other words, you are listening to someone to see how the conversation relates to you.
Now consider the alternative: you listen to whatever they have to say to learn how the content of their conversation relates to them. You build in your mind a representation of their way of seeing the world, and you piece together their patterns. People love talking about themselves, so you can happily ask any questions to complete those patterns and gain more information about their world. After a while, this will become almost second nature to you, and you will be able simply to look at someone and tell almost immediately what their reactions to various stimuli might be.

Mind control?
Once you understand someone else's perception of a situation, you can mentally exist inside their heads. If they want you to sort out a problem for them, you can do so more effectively, for you are not letting your own prejudices and ideas get in the way.
It is from this starting point that I can begin to play with the mind control for which I am known. It's not that I am really controlling other people. Rather, I am seeing events through their eyes and second-guessing their responses and thoughts. It's great fun"

Given that, you can see why he chose strippers for this demonstration. It's clear from the get-go that strippers are hyper-sensitive to being touched, and their hypervigilance against it has lead them all to become sensitive to the mere intention of touch inherent in a client's movement. I don't think he'd be able to demonstrate this eyes-closed ability on anyone who wasn't trained to be hypervigilant about being touched, and I don't think it would work without him working himself into the authentic intention to touch. At any rate, with strippers he is sure to have hypervigilance to work with.

He might have presented this somewhat differently as a demonstration of telepathy, of the girls' ability to read his mind, but he actually ends up demonstrating that they are perhaps not actually being touched all the times they accuse their clients of it.

This is all pertinent because it directly bears on some of the "telepathic" experiences I have had. Here's one:

I was in a store and there was a customer ahead of me who was taking a long time to wait on. Bored, I started examining the face of the cashier, (which is normal for me since I like to draw portraits). I'd seen her there before but never taken a good look. As I stared at her I began to realize that she was a lot more attractive than I'd ever noticed. The more I observed her, the more attractive her face looked. At some point this perception rose to become formulated as a sentence in my mind. I thought to myself: "My God! What a sweet face!"

She turned to me then, and mouthed the words "Thank you!" Then went back to helping the guy in front of me.

Needless to say, I was startled and felt my face turned red.

It seems at times to me that the intention to do or say something is mysteriously perceived by the other person as actually having been done or said. Not quite telepathy, but something that can convincingly present as telepathy. It doesn't require that we be linked by some "magical, spiritual force," just that the ability to read body language, facial expressions, the meaning of movements, is a great deal more precise and subtle than we might suppose, and also that, some people are prone to taking the information they pick up this way and developing it, synesthesia-like, into the actual experience of it: strippers feeling touched when they actually weren't, a woman hearing an enthusiastic compliment when none was actually uttered.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Why do you assume that telepathy requires some "magical spiritual force"? You should probably withhold judgement on this until you know more about what he is claiming.

As a whimsical example: Perhaps he has access to some obscure studies that show how alpha brain waves can affect other people at very short distances. That requires no magical spiritual or mysterious forces.

I'm not saying he's right, or that he even has a leg to stand on, just that your judgment seems premature.

I haven't read any studies like that, but I often wonder to what extent we can be directly physiologically affected by another's presence. When we talk about the "vibes" that people give off we mean their body language, facial expressions, the quality of their movements, the tone of their voice. If A sits next to B can A entrain B into his brain wave pattern by force of the above mentioned "vibes"? I can't help but think it often happens. It's clear that certain people elicit certain moods from us and that we prefer some people to others citing the effect they have on us.

edit: I do have A Leg To Stand On, by the way, and it's funny you mention it because I was just re-reading it last night:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0684853957/?tag=pfamazon01-20

 

[junglebeast]

She turned to me then, and mouthed the words "Thank you!" Then went back to helping the guy in front of me.

Needless to say, I was startled and felt my face turned red.

Well, you're right I do have a rational explanation for that: girls are so hyper sensitive to being gawked at that they almost have a sixth sense for noticing when it happens. She was probably just glad that you preferred staring at her face than her boobs!

From the sounds of it, you might have been pretty obvious about it, and even if she wasn't looking directly at you, it's not hard to notice being stared at out of your peripheral vision.

It seems at times to me that the intention to do or say something is mysteriously perceived by the other person as actually having been done or said. Not quite telepathy, but something that can convincingly present as telepathy. It doesn't require that we be linked by some "magical, spiritual force," just that the ability to read body language, facial expressions, the meaning of movements, is a great deal more precise and subtle than we might suppose,

Well, I certainly can't argue with that...but I think it's a bit misleading to refer to it as telepathy.-- on telepathy --
I don't think it would be impossible to build a biological sensor for detecting and interpreting brain waves, I just don't see any evidence that humans have such a sense...and if they did, it would surely be limited to extremely short ranges due to wave interference and signal decay, which would make it either impractical or redundant in comparison to vocalization.

--cool idea--

I do think it would be possible to create telepathy artificially. From what we know the brain is quite plastic and capable of interpreting signals. For example, people have learned to see through interpreting the electrical signals from digital sensors that have been fused into their visual cortex, or even from muscle patterns felt on their chest. Therefore, I suspect that it would also be possible to build a radio that was fused into the brain with a receiver and transmitter that the brain could then learn how to interpret and send messages with, provided there was feedback.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Well, you're right I do have a rational explanation for that: girls are so hyper sensitive to being gawked at that they almost have a sixth sense for noticing when it happens. She was probably just glad that you preferred staring at her face than her boobs!

From the sounds of it, you might have been pretty obvious about it, and even if she wasn't looking directly at you, it's not hard to notice being stared at out of your peripheral vision.

Even if she was well aware of me staring with a look of approbation for her appearance on my face, which I don't doubt, it would still be highly peculiar for her to stop what she was doing and mouth the words "Thank you!" It's way too specific to what I was thinking: "My God! What a sweet face!" and the timing of that thought.

Well, I certainly can't argue with that...but I think it's a bit misleading to refer to it as telepathy.

I usually qualify "telepathy" with "or something that convincingly presents as telepathy". The point is, it always seems more uncanny than mere body language reading, while being less impressive than long distance telegraphy of distress signals, as you often hear about in stories: "I had a weird feeling he was in pain. I don't know why. Then the phone rang, and it was the police saying he'd been in a car crash!"

I don't think it would be impossible to build a biological sensor for detecting and interpreting brain waves, I just don't see any evidence that humans have such a sense...and if they did, it would surely be limited to extremely short ranges due to wave interference and signal decay, which would make it either impractical or redundant in comparison to vocalization.

What is your explanation for the strippers thinking they'd been touched, and knowing the number of times he almost touched them? Suppose they heard his jacket rustling. Why did they then feel a physical touch?

 

[junglebeast]

What is your explanation for the strippers thinking they'd been touched, and knowing the number of times he almost touched them? Suppose they heard his jacket rustling. Why did they then feel a physical touch?

Notice that he made 3 quick touching gestures over the first girl's hand, and she specifically reported feeling 3 touches. That's probably not a coincidence. By the nature of the experiment, she was expecting to be touched lightly at least once, so it is conceivable that she felt the air currents from those three gestures and interpreted them as light touches given her hyper-sensitive state of awareness. However, the second girl, having just witnessed what he did to the first girl, would be prepared to be touched zero times, and would therefore not fall for a subtle suggestion of touch that wasn't real. The fact that she was very confident in being touched tells me that she was touched, most likely by some sleight of hand trick where he dropped a grain of sand onto her hand or something.

If she was not actually being touched, then why would Derren make touching gestures? It would certainly be more convincing to have someone perceive being touched if your hand wasn't poking around in the air right next to it. A trickster wants his tricks to look as good as possible, so if it wasn't necessary to poke around like that as part of the trick, he would have not done that. This is another strong argument for sleight of hand.

 

[atyy]

What is your explanation for the strippers thinking they'd been touched, and knowing the number of times he almost touched them? Suppose they heard his jacket rustling. Why did they then feel a physical touch?

http://www.mlive.com/living/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/03/post_4.html

 

[zoobyshoe]

http://www.mlive.com/living/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/03/post_4.html

Yes!

He told them he was going to touch them and where, so they were primed for that, (as opposed to having a word whispered in their ear, or some other sensory experience) and so they reacted to some small sound of his clothing rustling when he moved, or air moving, by creating the hallucination of his touch, just the way people create the hallucination of a vibrating cell phone!

 

[Ms Music]

I have a friend that does massage, and energetic healing - I think it is called cranial sacral? I don't know anything about it at all, but one time she needed a body to practice on, so she used me. (its so hard to turn down a free massage!) She apparently found something that wasn't working right, so she started the energetic healing part, and still couldn't get it to "work right", what ever that meant. I decided to tell myself to focus my energies to help her, and literally within 5 seconds of my making the decision in my mind, when suddenly she says "Whoa! I have never felt this before! I couldn't get (this part) to move right, then suddenly all this extra energy came out from nowhere and now it is working right!"

Now I know nothing of what she does. But if people like her can "heal" with their own energies, and I apparently did something to help her, can't that be proven somehow? I watched part of the video posted in #101 (although I don't have speakers to hear what he said), I didn't find anything interesting in that at all (too easy to explain away). But I find zooby's story very interesting, and possibly proof of something that we can't fully understand yet. But can't science determine if something is changing within a body based on this stuff? How does science so readily wave this away as being hocus pocus?

 

[junglebeast]

Now I know nothing of what she does. But if people like her can "heal" with their own energies, and I apparently did something to help her, can't that be proven somehow? I watched part of the video posted in #101 (although I don't have speakers to hear what he said), I didn't find anything interesting in that at all (too easy to explain away). But I find zooby's story very interesting, and possibly proof of something that we can't fully understand yet. But can't science determine if something is changing within a body based on this stuff? How does science so readily wave this away as being hocus pocus?

Concentrating your mental energies to heal yourself is a completely different thing from telepathy. I've heard a lot of convincing evidence suggesting that many biological functions which are not generally thought to be under conscious mental control can, through training, be controlled.

 

[Ms Music]

Why is it different? If someone can make energetic healing changes within me, how is that different from zooby being telepathic? I mean, on the surface I understand the differences, but fundamentally, why is it so different?

 

[junglebeast]

Why is it different? If someone can make energetic healing changes within me, how is that different from zooby being telepathic? I mean, on the surface I understand the differences, but fundamentally, why is it so different?

Because your brain is already physically connected to your body, and your thoughts are obviously able to control many body functions (eg, muscle movement). You may be able to heal yourself mentally, but that doesn't mean somebody else can heal you just by thinking about you...your brain is not connected to someone else's brain...so there's no way to communicate directly.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Why is it different? If someone can make energetic healing changes within me, how is that different from zooby being telepathic? I mean, on the surface I understand the differences, but fundamentally, why is it so different?

I think you have misunderstood my posts on this subject: I did not claim I was telepathic. The claim I made was that the cashier seemed to be telepathic. Also, you need to watch the Derren Brown video with sound and then also read the article linked to by Atyy:

http://www.mlive.com/living/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/03/post_4.html

The overall thing I am calling attention to is that there seems to be situations where the intention to say or do something can be experienced by someone else as the fact of it being said or done. My proposed mechanism for this is hypersensitivity to a particular stimulus coupled with a primed hallucination when properly triggered.

In the case of your massage I would explain it by saying your friend has done it enough to figure out when someone is somewhat resisting the experience or when they let go and completely put themselves in her hands. There's a number of different, purely physical, reactions she could get this information from, and then proceed to hallucinate the sensation of "energy" flowing in her hands, according to her beliefs about what's going on. To her, it feels completely real, just like the phantom cell phone vibration feels so real that people take their phones out and check them, and are surprised when there is no actual call.

 

[Ms Music]

You may be able to heal yourself mentally,

I can? Well, I guess I will just cancel that doctors appointment then! Who needs medical science when I can heal myself! (sorry for my sarcasm, I say that in fun only)

but that doesn't mean somebody else can heal you just by thinking about you...

But that was my point. Some people "apparently" CAN heal others, and it is something my friend is apparently gaining the ability to do. Okay, so maybe it involves touching the person to sense what is sick in the body. But once again, how is that different from zooby? Couldn't that be considered telecommunication with cells in another persons body?

 

[Ms Music]

There's a number of different, purely physical, reactions she could get this information from, and then proceed to hallucinate the sensation of "energy" flowing in her hands, according to her beliefs about what's going on. To her, it feels completely real, just like the phantom cell phone vibration feels so real that people take their phones out and check them, and are surprised when there is no actual call.

This is the point I was leading to. thank you. But can science monitor if something is truly happening?

I think you have misunderstood my posts on this subject: I did not claim I was telepathic. The claim I made was that the cashier seemed to be telepathic.

Sorry for my twisting it.

 

[zoobyshoe]

This is the point I was leading to. thank you. But can science monitor if something is truly happening?

Absolutely. Mental events have physical consequences: the release of hormones, blood vessel dilation or constriction, and others. The thought of danger alone starts the fight or flight response in a person. That's important to understand: the thought alone! Thinking and the consequent emotions it provokes have measurable physical consequences.

Back when Transcendental Meditation was the big fad there were many studies done in which people were hooked up to EEGs, heart and breathing monitors, etc, and it was shown beyond doubt that meditation produced remarkable changes in all these readings: brain waves slowed down, blood pressure dropped (maybe other stuff I don't recall, too).

Extended periods of mental stress have been shown to lead to less effective immune system responses. To the extent a person can be made to relax by meditation or massage it puts the body in a much better position to heal itself naturally.

This is why the thought you are being touched can, under the right circumstances, cause all the neurons involved in feeling a touch to fire, even when they haven't actually been stimulated by touch receptors in the skin. They've proven this with magnetencephalography: some people who are going deaf sometimes hallucinate hearing music. Scans of their brains show that the part of the temporal lobe involved in hearing music is actually firing and active, just as if actual music were being played.

 

[Ms Music]

So someone seeing a ghost is no different than the fact that I have The Cure in my head right now.

 

[junglebeast]

But that was my point. Some people "apparently" CAN heal others, and it is something my friend is apparently gaining the ability to do. Okay, so maybe it involves touching the person to sense what is sick in the body. But once again, how is that different from zooby? Couldn't that be considered telecommunication with cells in another persons body?

But the example you gave was not an example of a person healing another...

here was your example:

She apparently found something that wasn't working right, so she started the energetic healing part, and still couldn't get it to "work right", what ever that meant. I decided to tell myself to focus my energies to help her, and literally within 5 seconds of my making the decision in my mind, when suddenly she says "Whoa! I have never felt this before! I couldn't get (this part) to move right, then suddenly all this extra energy came out from nowhere and now it is working right!"

The only thing this is an example of is her feeling that your muscles became more relaxed while massaging you after you consciously made an effort to relax. How is it that you interpret that to be an example of her using mental powers to heal you of anything? As far as I can tell, you did not even have a problem that needed to be healed.

 

[Ms Music]

My point was actually very similar to zooby's story. I didn't heal myself, I just told myself to think like she does and told my "energy" to help her. She just happened to notice it immediately, just like the cashier noticed zooby making the mental comment on her sweet face. I have no idea what she thought was wrong with my body, or what she or I did. All I know is I made a mental decision, and she noticed the energy flow.

And I didn't say she healed me. I say some claim to be able to.

 

[zoobyshoe]

So someone seeing a ghost is no different than the fact that I have The Cure in my head right now.

What?

 

[DaveC426913]

My point was actually very similar to zooby's story. I didn't heal myself, I just told myself to think like she does and told my "energy" to help her. She just happened to notice it immediately, just like the cashier noticed zooby making the mental comment on her sweet face. I have no idea what she thought was wrong with my body, or what she or I did. All I know is I made a mental decision, and she noticed the energy flow.

And I didn't say she healed me. I say some claim to be able to.

No, she noticed it by touching you. Before: bad, after: good. No mysterious forces there.

The only thing that could be considered a mystery is you healing yourself.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Hey Zooby, while I know that you bring a wealth of great information to the discussion, you are getting specific enough wrt TM and physiological effects such that some references would be appropriate.

 

[atyy]

http://books.google.com/books?id=CXYa_Khlk9kC&printsec=frontcover#PPA233,M1

 

[zoobyshoe]

Hey Zooby, while I know that you bring a wealth of great information to the discussion, you are getting specific enough wrt TM and physiological effects such that some references would be appropriate.

Abstract from a 1970 study:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/167/3926/1751

Oxygen consumption, heart rate, skin resistance, and electroenceph-alograph measurements were recorded before, during, and after subjects practiced a technique called transcendental meditation. There were significant changes between the control period and the meditation period in all measurements. During meditation, oxygen consumption and heart rate decreased, skin resistance increased, and the electroencephalogram showed specific changes in certain frequencies. These results seem to distinguish the state produced by transcendental meditation from commonly encountered states of consciousness and suggest that it may have practical applications.

From American Medical Association:

Overall, of the 103 participants who were enrolled, 84 (82 percent) completed the study. At the end of the trial, patients in the Transcendental Meditation group had significantly lower blood pressure; improved fasting blood glucose and insulin levels, which signify reduced insulin resistance; and more stable functioning of the autonomic nervous system. “These physiological effects were accomplished without changes in body weight, medication or psychosocial variables and despite a marginally statistically significant increase in physical activity in the health education group,” the authors write.

“These current results also expand our causal understanding of the role of stress in the rising epidemic of the metabolic syndrome,” they continue. “Although current low levels of physical activity, unhealthy eating habits and resultant obesity are triggers for this epidemic, the demands of modern society may also be responsible for higher levels of chronic stress.” Such stress causes the release of cortisol and other hormones and neurotransmitters, which over time damage the cardiovascular system.

http://www.tm.org/american-medical-association

 

[sepfield]

Let's stay on topic. No more personal comments please.

well said sir ! - just popped back into say that to be fair ,i was just fishing to see the GENERAL tone of the board and Dave unfortunately fell right into my trap - so i offer Dave a full apology for bating him - so sorry mate nothing personal

the whole point of the exercise is to show that when we start talking about the nebulous concept of "ghosts" it appears there are just 2 camps the skeptics - who will brook no argument and the believers who also will brook no argument

unfortunately - the skeptical tend to use the same dismissive set of tactics each time - hence my original comment of " been here before " - and i just wondered if this board was any different ?? - obviously not

anyways - i will thank you all for your time - and forbearance - oh and for the record Dave

yea i do believe in them - as like a lot of other things not accepted by science ( par ce ) - to do otherwise is the height of folly - or the height of arrogance - not too sure which

have good and safe lives all - and whatever you believe - be comfortable with it - because at the end of the day YOU and YOU alone have to live with it - the rest out there ?- do they REALLY care a jot WHAT you think or believe in ??

one to ponder

thanks again for your time all

my best regards to you all

sepfield has NOW left the building

byeeeeeeeee

 

[zoobyshoe]

This should probably also have a reference, and needs a couple corrections:

This is why the thought you are being touched can, under the right circumstances, cause all the neurons involved in feeling a touch to fire, even when they haven't actually been stimulated by touch receptors in the skin. They've proven this with magnetencephalography: some people who are going deaf sometimes hallucinate hearing music. Scans of their brains show that the part of the temporal lobe involved in hearing music is actually firing and active, just as if actual music were being played.

(I said "magnetoencephalography" when it was actually a PET scan. Also, the activity is not described as being in the temporal lobe but in the "music processing regions of the brain", which are not limited to the primary auditory cortex of the temporal lobe.)

Griffiths has taken this research further. He studied six elderly patients who developed musical hallucinations after they began to go deaf. The music they heard ranged from rugby songs to the hits of British singer Shirley Bassey. Griffiths scanned his subjects' brains with a technique known as PET (positron emission tomography). He injected a radioactive marker into their bloodstream, which accumulated in the most active parts of the brains of his subjects. Each time he scanned his subjects' brains, he asked them whether they had experienced a musical hallucination during the scan. If they had, he asked them to rate its intensity on a scale from one to seven.

Griffiths discovered a network of regions in the brain that became more active as the hallucinations got more intense. He was taken aback by their pattern. "You see a very similar pattern in normal people who are listening to music," he says. The main difference is that musical hallucinations don't activate the primary auditory cortex, the first stop for sound in the brain. When people hallucinate, they use only the parts of the brain responsible for turning simple sounds into complex music.

Griffiths has used these results to build a hypothesis: The music-processing regions of the brain are continually looking for patterns in the signals arriving from the ears. As these regions recognize a tune, they amplify certain sounds that fit the music and minimize extraneous sounds. That's how you can hear the melody of a piano in a noisy lounge. When no sound is coming into the ears, Griffiths argues, neurons in the music network sometimes spontaneously fire off random impulses. The brain can seize on these signals and try to impose some structure to them, rummaging through its memories for a match. A few notes may suddenly turn into a familiar melody.

http://carlzimmer.com/articles/2004.php?subaction=showfull&id=1177189852&archive=&start_from=&ucat=7&

 

[DaveC426913]

well said sir ! - just popped back into say that to be fair ,i was just fishing

The word you're looking for is trolling.

 

[Ms Music]

What?

Sorry, that comment was relating to this part of what you said:

This is why the thought you are being touched can, under the right circumstances, cause all the neurons involved in feeling a touch to fire, even when they haven't actually been stimulated by touch receptors in the skin. They've proven this with magnetencephalography: some people who are going deaf sometimes hallucinate hearing music. Scans of their brains show that the part of the temporal lobe involved in hearing music is actually firing and active, just as if actual music were being played.

If I hear music in my head, my brain is active as if I was actually hearing it. So if someone sees a "ghost", their brain is probably firing in the same way as if they had actually seen a person. I believe the brain is capable of making people think they have experienced something, but that is just their neurons firing. And that my friend thinking she is moving things in my body energetically just might be the same thing, also. But her (or someone better) being able to heal energetically should be easier to prove than proving ghosts. Same as if zooby can prove the cashier actually "heard" his thought.

The only thing that could be considered a mystery is you healing yourself.

But I didn't heal myself. If I could heal myself, I would be ecstatic. No more doctors visits! But unfortunately, I am in the doctors office far more than I care to be. No mysteries there, no healing myself.

 

[DaveC426913]

But I didn't heal myself. If I could heal myself, I would be ecstatic.

Look, since there's no physical evidence that she fixed you, why would you assume it is she that did it? Why do you find it easier to believe that someone else can make you feel better from a distance than that you can make yourself feel better from within? You know perfectly well this is possible. It is well-documented that people can psychosomatically make themselves ill as much as they can make themselves better.

Your claim is that you don't know how to heal yourself. But you also don't know that she can heal anyone. All you have is her belief in herself. But believing something does not make it so.

I know you want to believe that your friend can and did heal you with her energies. But ask yourself, given the circumstances under which it happened, do you really, dispassionately, think that is the most logical conclusion?

 

[zoobyshoe]

If I hear music in my head, my brain is active as if I was actually hearing it.

The people in the study, people with musical hallucinations, 'hear' the music as totally real. They do not doubt it's coming from some radio or TV or CD player, and they spend a great deal of time at first hunting around for the source, but they can't find one. It sounds external to their head and is distinctly different from normal imagining of music that anyone might do, which can't be mistaken for being "real". It takes a long time for people with musical hallucinations to logically put the facts together and realize it's an hallucination.

So, I can't really answer your question because I don't know if when you say "hear music in my head" you are saying 'imagined' music sounds as real to you as what comes from an ipod or CD player. There is some confusion in my mind because of the way you put it.

At any rate, what Griffiths discovered was that the brains of people with musical hallucinations were almost as active as those listening to real music, the difference being that the primary auditory cortex, which is where imput from the outside would be received, is not active. Processing areas after that are active, though, and the patterns he saw were "remarkably similar" to the patterns of people listening to actual music.

So if someone sees a "ghost", their brain is probably firing in the same way as if they had actually seen a person.

"In the same way" meaning whatever picture they construct of the "ghost" gets inserted into their perception of the visual field as if it were actually in the visual field, when it isn't.

I believe the brain is capable of making people think they have experienced something, but that is just their neurons firing. And that my friend thinking she is moving things in my body energetically just might be the same thing, also. But her (or someone better) being able to heal energetically should be easier to prove than proving ghosts. Same as if zooby can prove the cashier actually "heard" his thought.

The basic idea is that if you have a pattern of neuronal firing set up in your brain, as with the experience of cell phone vibration coupled to anticipation, that whole sequence can be triggered from within the brain without the cell phone actually vibrating. It's much like Pavlov's dog.

My telepathy notion is that the whole thing can get very much more sophisticated than that.

 

[DaveC426913]

The people in the study, people with musical hallucinations, 'hear' the music as totally real. They do not doubt it's coming from some radio or TV or CD player, and they spend a great deal of time at first hunting around for the source, but they can't find one. It sounds external to their head and is distinctly different from normal imagining of music that anyone might do, which can't be mistaken for being "real". It takes a long time for people with musical hallucinations to logically put the facts together and realize it's an hallucination.

So, I can't really answer your question because I don't know if when you say "hear music in my head" you are saying 'imagined' music sounds as real to you as what comes from an ipod or CD player. There is some confusion in my mind because of the way you put it.

At any rate, what Griffiths discovered was that the brains of people with musical hallucinations were almost as active as those listening to real music, the difference being that the primary auditory complex, which is where imput from the outside would be received, is not active. Processing areas after that are active, though, and the patterns he saw were "remarkably similar" to the patterns of people listening to actual music.


"In the same way" meaning whatever picture they construct of the "ghost" gets inserted into their perception of the visual field as if it were actually in the visual field, when it isn't.

The basic idea is that if you have a pattern of neuronal firing set up in your brain, as with the experience of cell phone vibration coupled to anticipation, that whole sequence can be triggered from within the brain without the cell phone actually vibrating. It's much like Pavlov's dog.

My telepathy notion is that the whole thing can get very much more sophisticated than that.

Oliver Sacks goes into this in great detail in his book http://www.musicophilia.com/" . Fascinating stuff. Then again, everything Sacks studies always is.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Oliver Sacks goes into this in great detail in his book http://www.musicophilia.com/" . Fascinating stuff. Then again, everything Sacks studies always is.

Yeah, that book is where I found out about Griffiths:"In 2000, Timothy Griffiths published a detailed and pioneering report on the neural basis of musical hallucinations; he was able to show, using PET scans, that musical hallucinations were associated with a widespread activation of the same neural networks that are normally activated during the perception of actual music."

Oliver Sacks
Musicophilia
p.8420+ years ago I knew a family; a guy, his wife, and his mother. The mother was in her late 60's. The guy made fun of her behind her back to me one day because she was always chasing around, he said, trying to find out where this music was coming from, music no one else could hear. I thought it was very peculiar because the mother was a no-nonsense, level headed person.

Anyway, some years later I read the two cases of the same thing Sacks put in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. Then, as you know, he goes into even greater depth about it in one chapter of Musicophilia. It turns out to be extremely common, not the rare thing he supposed when he wrote about it the first time. People don't tell their doctors a lot of things, Sack's says, because they're afraid they're going to be label as "crazy" or, in a lot of cases, they assume these things just happen, and don't think of them as "symptoms" of anything.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I just remembered that in Seeing Voices Sacks describes a similar hallucinating what you expect, or mental filling in of some sensory piece that is missing from a pre-established habit of concurrance of inputs from two separate stimuli. In this case it can happen to people who become deaf after having had hearing long enough to learn language. He describes David Wright, here, who became deaf at age seven:

Wright speaks of the “phantasmal voices” that he hears when anyone speaks to him provided he can see the movements of their lips and faces, and of how he would “hear” the soughing of the wind whenever he saw trees or branches being stirred by the wind. He gives a fascinating description of this first happening - of its immediate occurance with the onset of deafness:

"[My deafness] was made more difficult to perceive because from the very first my eyes had unconsciously begun to translate motion into sound. My mother spent most of the day beside me and I understood everything she said. Why not? Without knowing it I had been reading her mouth all my life. When she spoke I seemed to hear her voice. It was an illusion that persisted even after I knew it was an illusion. My Father, my cousin, everyone I had known, retained phantasmal voices. That they were imaginary, the projections of habit and memory, did not come home to me until I had left the hospital. One day I was talking with my cousin and he, in a moment of inspiration, covered his mouth with his hand as he spoke. Silence! One and for all I understood that when I could not see I could not hear."

Though Wright knows the sounds he “hears” to be “illusory” - “projections of habit and memory” - they remain intensely vivid for him throughout the decades of his deafness. For Wright, for those deafened after hearing is well established, the world may remain full of sounds even though they are “phantasmal”.

Seeing Voices
Oliver Sacks
Pp 5-6

 

[veattaivatsan]

I was in a store and there was a customer ahead of me who was taking a long time to wait on. Bored, I started examining the face of the cashier, (which is normal for me since I like to draw portraits). I'd seen her there before but never taken a good look. As I stared at her I began to realize that she was a lot more attractive than I'd ever noticed. The more I observed her, the more attractive her face looked. At some point this perception rose to become formulated as a sentence in my mind. I thought to myself: "My God! What a sweet face!"

She turned to me then, and mouthed the words "Thank you!" Then went back to helping the guy in front of me.

Needless to say, I was startled and felt my face turned red.

I have examined many girls for a hour or so,like this! but not even a single girl responded or acknowledged!
not even single said "thank you"!

 

[zoobyshoe]

I have examined many girls for a hour or so,like this! but not even a single girl responded or acknowledged!
not even single said "thank you"!

Heheheh. It seems like it would make things so much easier doesn't it?

 

[veattaivatsan]

But that was my point. Some people "apparently" CAN heal others, and it is something my friend is apparently gaining the ability to do. Okay, so maybe it involves touching the person to sense what is sick in the body.

No.It may not be healing ability of the other,but the rise in faith in you.Your hope raises when someone touches you while in stress or fear!
I have experienced it a lot. When you feel tensed,just hug or keep hand on others shoulder,you may feel the tension reducing suddenly. and also if someone hugs or touches your shoulder or head , while you're nervous or anxious,you will feel comfortable . This is becuase,your mind believes that "ok,I have someone to help me or to stand by me" , and will divert its attention to some other things. thereby reducing your fears ! When you're ill, a experienced doctor will touch and feel your heat rather than keeping thermometer in your mouth. touching can heal,not because of toucher's ability,but because your mind catches hope in that touch. That why touching or patting lightly on baby will make him/her sleep. If you want to reduce your friend's anxiety or illness,just hug or touch them .It will be best than speaking and consoling them for hours.(dont do this in case of swine flu ).

 

[veattaivatsan]

Yes!

He told them he was going to touch them and where, so they were primed for that, (as opposed to having a word whispered in their ear, or some other sensory experience) and so they reacted to some small sound of his clothing rustling when he moved, or air moving, by creating the hallucination of his touch, just the way people create the hallucination of a vibrating cell phone!

Ya,I had this cell-phone-ringing-when-it-doesnt many a times. I don't text a lot using my cell,but sometimes,I feel or hear ringing and after few seconds,the cell will ring! It scares me many times.I don't even expect and sit near cell,but I may be in other room and may suddenly come hearing the tone. but the cell doesn't ring,I turn back and suddenly the cell really rings.
One of my friends also told me about the vibration in his pants! BUt not all experiences this! only one or two of people i have met told of this when asked!

 

[veattaivatsan]

Heheheh. It seems like it would make things so much easier doesn't it?

No.
Here,in India,girls never approach a guy nor say a word.Its an unwritten rule here that guys should go behind girls!
leave it. I think we need to debunk this "approach"!

 

[catawampous]

For a start, one has to disprove that ghosts do exist... not prove that ghosts do not exist as this is impossible. Silly really because disproving the existence of ghosts is also impossible.. for now anyway. Though I am totally looking for theorists to explain the paranormal, instead of the closed minded skeptics ranting on and on without a shred of usable evidence...

 

[zoobyshoe]

For a start, one has to disprove that ghosts do exist... not prove that ghosts do not exist as this is impossible. Silly really because disproving the existence of ghosts is also impossible.. for now anyway. Though I am totally looking for theorists to explain the paranormal, instead of the closed minded skeptics ranting on and on without a shred of usable evidence...

Damn bastard skeptics. If they would only go away anything would be possible!

 

[catawampous]

Damn bastard skeptics. If they would only go away anything would be possible!

anything is possible... just skeptic the skeptics...

 

[Ivan Seeking]

For a start, one has to disprove that ghosts do exist... not prove that ghosts do not exist as this is impossible. Silly really because disproving the existence of ghosts is also impossible.. for now anyway. Though I am totally looking for theorists to explain the paranormal, instead of the closed minded skeptics ranting on and on without a shred of usable evidence...

You have things a little backwards. Claims of the paranormal require evidence, not the other way around. Skeptics have nothing to prove.

 

[catawampous]

You have things a little backwards. Claims of the paranormal require evidence, not the other way around. Skeptics have nothing to prove.

yeah, claims do require evidence... but what I mean is that proof requires that a thing can not be disproven. Like, god can not be disproven, therefore there is still a chance God exists, the same as ghosts.

 

[CEL]

yeah, claims do require evidence... but what I mean is that proof requires that a thing can not be disproven. Like, god can not be disproven, therefore there is still a chance God exists, the same as ghosts.

You are right. You cannot prove a universal negative. So you cannot prove that ghosts, alien visitors, gods, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy don't exist.
The impossibility of proving their existence does not mean that they do exist and says nothing about the likelihood of their existence.
As Ivan said, believers in those things must present only one instance of those beings to prove their existence. While no instance is presented there is no proof one way or another.

 

[Ms Music]

I told myself I wasn’t coming back to this thread…… In fact, I shouldn’t be here now, as I don’t get a lunch break for the 2nd day in a row. But I decided I am tired of seeing myself quoted when I never finished what I was trying to get to. And it probably is only fair to you guys that I finish explaining. I rarely have time to spend on posting, so it can take several days to finally get enough said to make my point. And we seemed to disagree on a certain sticking point….. So it may take me all day to type this response, and hopefully I can finally get it all said. I wasn’t trying to prove that my friend did anything special, nor that I did anything special. I was just using an example to get to a point in a round about way.

So now, with my disclaimer handled, on to what I was trying to get at way back when.

But that was my point. Some people "apparently" CAN heal others, and it is something my friend is apparently gaining the ability to do. Okay, so maybe it involves touching the person to sense what is sick in the body. But once again, how is that different from zooby? Couldn't that be considered telecommunication with cells in another persons body?

The reason I said “apparently”, is that there are people that believe they can heal, and there are people that believe they have been healed by the healers. This should be testable (with fMRI). It is the same with telecommunication. What happened with Zooby is very testable. Did you ask her if she “heard” your comment? If so, you definitely have your own proof that there was telecommunication between the two of you. If you didn’t ask her, all you have is your own perception of what you want to believe happened. And what happened could be as simple as my assuming that when you had the thought “what a cute face”, that a tiny smile actually crossed your own face. She sees that tiny smile, and realizes that you are being patient and understanding while she deals with this difficult customer. So she looks at you and whispers “Thank you” [for your patience and understanding] while the difficult customer is looking away.

I just remembered that in Seeing Voices Sacks describes a similar hallucinating what you expect, or mental filling in of some sensory piece that is missing from a pre-established habit of concurrance of inputs from two separate stimuli.

Explains exactly what I was describing above. With my example of cranial sacral, there is no proof that there was anything wrong with me, there is no proof that she (or I) did anything to fix me. It is easy to “hallucinate what I/you expect” that she or I healed something. It is possible that something similar to an fMRI could be used to show what was going on in the brain, since FMRI can be used to show blood flow increasing when neurons are activated. Without some sort of physical proof of what occurs during cranial sacral, there is no proof that anything at all happened, especially if it can’t be duplicated. But it doesn’t mean that it can’t be proven in the future.

The same with ghosts. You can’t prove something was observed. But that doesn’t mean it won't be provable in the future. Which means you can’t disprove ghosts. People will believe what they want to believe, but it isn’t in any way proof neither for, nor against the existence of ghosts. It is possible it is merely a hallucination, but it is also possible that there really is something there. Non believers have just as much to prove as the believers do.

Same with string theory. It hasn’t been proven yet, but it definitely explains what we are observing.

Okay, now I hope I am a little closer to what I was trying to get at. If you want to believe I healed myself, you first need a leap of faith in the “chi”. If you want to believe that there are ghosts, you need a leap of faith that ghosts exist. If you DON’T want to believe that ghosts exist, then you must have a leap of faith that there is no such thing as a ghost. So far, it isn’t testable either way.

Oh, and I wanted to make a comment on the cell phone thing. It really isn’t anything special to know you are getting a phone call before the phone rings. I use a wired hands free when driving, because I don’t like Bluetooth. When my phone is about to ring, there is a very faint click that I hear in the ear bud one to two seconds before the phone actually rings. So if you know your phone is about to ring, you probably are just picking up on the signal going into your phone. It just takes a couple of seconds for your phone to “wake up” and ring.

Aren’t I just a party pooper?

And now I see that others have said similar things through out the day… <sigh>

 

[sganesh88]

I have examined many girls for a hour or so,like this! but not even a single girl responded or acknowledged!
not even single said "thank you"!

In that case, she would have to thank a dozen others too.

 

[zoobyshoe]

What happened with Zooby is very testable. Did you ask her if she “heard” your comment? If so, you definitely have your own proof that there was telecommunication between the two of you. If you didn’t ask her, all you have is your own perception of what you want to believe happened. And what happened could be as simple as my assuming that when you had the thought “what a cute face”, that a tiny smile actually crossed your own face. She sees that tiny smile, and realizes that you are being patient and understanding while she deals with this difficult customer. So she looks at you and whispers “Thank you” [for your patience and understanding] while the difficult customer is looking away.

Why you damn bastard skeptic! How DARE you suggest the PARANORMAL isn't REAL?!??

(Heheh Just kidding.)

I don't have any loyalty to my experience, and I'm not about to try and defend it. I am just reporting what seemed to have happened. You're quite right that she could have smiled and said "thank you" for some completely different reason than it seemed. Or, I could have hallucinated her reaction due to low blood sugar or something. I have noticed that I become extremely physically uncomfortable when standing in lines: my muscles start to tense and hurt, and my stress level rises, and my breathing becomes shallow, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out that a review of the security camera revealed that she did not once even look at me before she actually waited on me.

What's interesting to me is that because of this, and other incidents, I have a acquired a knee-jerk belief in telepathy. After, like, three solid instances like this, you get conditioned. I don't really see this as necessarily saying anything about telepathy. After I was rear ended three times in one year while at red lights and stop signs I went through a period of hawkishly watching the rearview and calculating the level of attention of the drivers pulling up behind me. Stuff happens: you form a mental filter about it.

 

[veattaivatsan]

Well,let me put forward my view on how we can convince ourselves that ghosts doesn't exist!
Instead of taking every living being as having soul,we can see them as conglomerate of cells.Cells with different functions and different secretions,yet interdependent on each other for living.
for example,the cells that make up the eyes are cells that live converting lights into electrical signals.And they receive their nutrition from blood supply and liquid filled in aqueous and vitreous chamber.We can observe that though the level of memory and logical thinking varies between animals,yet their eyesight is perfect except any aberrations created by external sources. SO,we can assume that cells that made up eye in multicellular organisms were once unicellular organism which lived on light and emitted ions when light rays fell on them.and when these cells form a colony and gets attached to nutrient rich cell group,it got its rich nutrition and so on it merged with the other cells that made up the first multicellular organism.similarly,the other cells of the respective organ merged and some went dormant while others remain active in due course of time. So there is nothing called "soul". we , living beings , are combination of cells which were not created for purpose but joined us for their purpose! so there is nothing which gives us life. the cells live,therefore we live. the cells feed and the cells are fed,so we live.
After a limit had reached,the congress of cells might have become over dependent on nourishing part of our body - blood! so the actions which stops provision of blood to specific areas of cells makes it inactive thereby resulting in death of the cells . If heart cells are not fed with blood or reduced the supply of blood,heart attack occurs.as heart is pumper of blood for whole body,most of cells in our body doesn't get their feed and dies. similarly stands for all kinds of death!
So,death denotes the death of cells of organ which serves as the sole bread-supplier of all the cells of human body! so the cells of eye,ear,tongue lose their nourishment and cease their work.so escape of soul is not death,but stopping of function of cell is death. that's why we can transplant organs after death(within sometime.before cells gets zero nourishment) to a body of cells which can nourish it.

as the role of a "soul" is ruled out,how can there be an escaped soul roaming out??
so "ghosts" do not exist!

This is my own idea! may be or may not be right! but I believe in this theory(of mine)!

 

[Ivan Seeking]

First of all, you are assuming that alleged ghosts are the souls of dead people. Who says that they are?

Secondly, simply explaining a biological process does not rule out that souls could still exist.

 

[sganesh88]

First of all, you are assuming that alleged ghosts are the souls of dead people. Who says that they are?

Wordweb defines ghost as "The visible disembodied soul of a dead*person"
merriam-webster.com says "A disembodied soul ,especially the soul of a dead person believed to be an inhabitant of the unseen world or to appear to the living in bodily likeness"
Dictionary.com declares "The soul of a dead person, a disembodied spirit imagined, usually as a vague, shadowy or evanescent form, as wandering among or haunting living persons."

If ghosts aren't defined as disembodied souls, they simply cease to cause a lasting fear or curiosity. 'Ah just another species perhaps' would be a passing comment.

Secondly, simply explaining a biological process does not rule out that souls could still exist.

True.. There is either an external hand like soul or a beauty not-yet-unraveled in the so called 'biological processes'. I'd personally prefer the latter.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Haha, well you've got me on the popular definition! I never realized that it was so limiting. Suffice it to say that is only one interpretation of what is reported. In many cases, people claim to experience hauntings [attributed generally to "ghosts"] without ever claiming to observe an apparition of a person. What they are really reporting is unexplained phenomena. In fact there are people who believe that reported ghostly apparitions of dead people are not actually the souls of the dead, but they still call them ghosts.