This is a spooky time of Year. Summer has gone past and we enter into the crisp air of the fall season. Fall in New England is famous for its kaleidoscopic exuberance of colors which render a surreal and almost unreal experience. It is also a time to invoke the spirits as we close in on Halloween. In India, we observed a fortnight dedicated to our deceased ancestors which ended on New moon day famous as “Sarva Pitari Amavasya”. That definitely calls for a discussion on Paranormal or supernatural Phenomena popularly known as Ghosts. That’s a topic very close to the heart of many. Imagine discussing this on a dark night and amidst a spooky ambiance with close-knit friends: Sharing Ghost Stories over a warm cuppa on a cool autumn night. Many of us surely have been there and done that.
Do you believe in Ghost: How many times we have been asked that? Many of us believe in the positive energy beyond our explanation. They may call it Divinity. Nature or the universe loves to establish a balance. To balance this positive energy there must be a negative one. Some may call it evil. Can ghosts be a small form of that energy? So why not believe in this argument? We culturally believe the Ghosts to be some form of spirits whose desires are unfulfilled and the souls lie in limbo between life and salvation or rebirth. Different cultures have multiple variations and explanations. The entertainment industry has used the horror genre to an extent of overkill barring a few exceptions like Omen or some parts of paranormal activity where you really tend to believe in the Ghost, the rest all turn into a gory fest. All Ghost stories have one thing in common very few people claim to be protagonists, whereas most know of someone who went through that. But having assumed the veracity of those few, for me conclusion lies that our minds are the hosts where Ghosts reside. They are figments or part of our imagination and nothing more. Rest all is entertainment.
Recently on this topic, I studied a psychological paper explaining whether Ghosts exist. Are ghosts real? The paper said that the current science can’t prove that there are spirits walking through walls or screaming below floorboards. Our spooky sightings, however, have certainly felt real. Humans have been spotting specters for as long as we’ve been around, and to some degree, we can explain why. Thanks to campfire tales and multimillion-dollar horror flicks, spooky notions can infiltrate our subconscious even without any real-life supernatural encounters. We have such a tendency because the human mind is highly suggestible. We’ve evolved to take cues from the outside world to escape threats like an animal chasing us, so a well-placed hint can make us see things that aren’t there. Our preconceptions can also cause us to find supernatural evidence in garbled noise or blurred images. If a ghost hunter or psychic instructs you to listen for a certain phrase, then your brain (which loves identifying patterns) tries as hard as it can to create those exact words from various bits of random sound. We are conditioned. According to the experts, there are six reasons that human minds believe that Ghosts exist.
First of that is: You’d Rather Not Risk It. What if they exist? It’s easy to disregard the notion of paranormal activity in broad daylight, but everything changes when you head into a dark basement. Unfamiliar and threatening environments kick our survival instincts up a notch. Our ancestors had to keep a constant lookout for stealthy hazards like leopards and snakes, and folks with a “better safe than sorry” attitude were more likely to survive and reproduce. When it comes to our habitats, humans tend to think of places as safe when they offer two things: prospect (a clear view of the outside world) and refuge (the opportunity to hide from danger). A poorly lit old house gives us neither of those two accommodations, blocking our ability to see what’s around the corner and providing plenty of shadows in which malicious entities could lurk.
The second point which makes you believe in Ghost is at the bottom of your subconscious mind you need company. Some occurrences provided “instantaneous relief from painful grief symptoms,” while others strengthened preexisting religious views. Mental Benefits such as a sense of connection to others is something you can derive from believing in their existence
The third reason is that your brain is unwell. Ghostly occurrences can be the result of larger problems in our gray matter. For some, hearing voices or experiencing a vision can be an early indicator of medical conditions such as schizophrenia. Some evidence even suggests that people with underlying brain disorders tend to have paranormal confrontations that are more intense and negative than the average brush with the beyond.
The fourth reason is sometimes as simple as Bad Vibrations and Sound. Sometimes people experience an otherworldly encounter simply because something in their environment is making a strange noise that sends their bodies into disarray. Most of us don’t regularly carry around audio gauges, so it’s hard to know how many hauntings might be explained by a buzzing fan or a rumbling fridge.
Fifth Reason is the Place: A far more troubling circumstantial peculiarity is the notion that mold and other pollutants—often found in old buildings—can mess with people’s minds. Disturbances in the planet’s magnetosphere, which are usually caused by anomalous outer-space events like solar flares, might mess with the inner workings of the brain, scrambling our perceptions in strange ways. So far, the evidence supporting this hypothesis is pretty thin.
Finally, Your Mind is playing tricks: seizures in the temporal lobe—the area of your noggin that processes visual memory and spoken language—might trigger ghost sightings. Electrical disturbances in this brain area could make us feel connected to otherworldly realms.
So relax and be entertained but don’t get scared: Ghosts live in your mind.
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