Ghosts: working notes (Part One)

“That stole the only girl I loved
And drowned her deep inside of me”
— The Cure, Just Like Heaven

I’ve written a lot on UFOs recently, a topic where I know relatively little so I’m just going to write a little bit about ghosts.

My current working hypothesis is as follows, and very simple, so please feel free to critique it…

I think when we see ghosts our brain processes the image. This is exactly the same as when we see a cat or a house or a film or anything else.

We see normally with our eyes. Light reflected off an object hits the surface of our eyes where we have cells called photoreceptors. These convert the light impressions in to electrical impuses that travel from the optic nerve to the brain. Various bits of the brain in fact: the Lateral geniculate nucleus is the most important. You can look up the LGN if interested or vision and the brain; for now all we need to now is the signals are processed and sent on to the Primary Visual Cortex, a small part of the brain at the back. You don’t need to know the technical stuff – it is brain science – but then lots of bits of the brain work together to create the picture you seem. (In fact if there is one rule that often works well with the brain its that almost any function is spread out over many different parts).

So we see with our eyes AND the brain. You need both as a human to see. If you close your eyes you don’t see, and if you remove your brain the same thing, (though you could still post on some parts of the web and noone would notice. 😉 ).

So can we see with our brain’s Visual systems without our eyes? I can’t as I can’t “see” images but most people can close their eyes and imagine seeing a green triangle, a chess Knight or a traffic light. It might be fuzzy or brief but you can see with your mind. However there is another way we can do it, even if we can’t control it normally – this morning I was on a cruise ship in the Carribean when Becky messaged me and I woke up in my bedroom at home. In dreams we see mental landscapes as if through our eyes, and yet we are seeing in the brain.

Can we add mind images to eye inputs? Yes some people do this naturally owing to chemical problems with the brain, but they can superimpose mental images know top of the input from their eyes. They might see aliens coming out of the walls, a friends face turn in to a serpent or be followed by a terrifying black puma – all real examples from patients I knew. Fortunately we have medicine that can treat these hallucinations – false Visual inputs.

You can also cause hallucinations by altering the chemical balance of your body in other ways – fasting, starvation, alcohol, nutritional imbalance, exhaustion or most famously psychedelic drugs.

All these states seem to be false Visual inputs, tricking your mind in to seeing something not there. We tend to think of Hallucinations as always untruthful – but in fact our brain constantly fills in data, editing and processing what we see, filling in the blind spot in out Visual input.

So what is a ghost? A hallucination, a mind created image not involving the eyes. Is it just an illusion? Some ghosts undoubtedly are. The SPR researchers pointed out though that there are veridical ghosts, which imply something more is going on and they are called veridical cases

1. When the ghost is seen by multiple people at once.
2. When the same ghost is seen by multiple people over time.
3. When their ghost appears at the same time as someone’s death.
4. When the ghost tells you something you could not otherwise know.

There are other possibilities: and of course other ghost experiences that don’t meet these criteria could be more than a false hallucination, we just can’t prove it.

The early SPR researchers had to explain where the signal came from that caused these veridical cases — they formulated the notion of telepathy to explain it. Telepathy is direct mind to mind contact, and might be originated from a living or a dead mind. Phantasms of the living, or ghosts of the dead – either was possible.

Of course some people might be more “psychic(al)” – more tuned in. And as ghosts live in our brains there is no point in ghosthunting, if by that we mean using cameras and recording equipment.

In part 2 I’ll look at this in more depth and raise the obvious objection – for now though please do share your thoughts. I’ll post on UFOs again tomorrow.