Spooked

on our encrypted signal and tunnel into the office. We are in the midst of an investigation into some of the most mystical, disorienting experiences a person can have, and the brain science that's involved might help explain big important chunks of being human, stuff like religion and creativity. So you'll forgive me if I have to gently tape you to your chair until we're finished. Security in the podcast

sector has gotten pretty intense. Okay, music is up. There we go, and we're off this time a Deeply Human. We're heading into the science of perception to discover why we're so eager to find signs of life in our surroundings, eager enough to see faces in the clouds or tweak out when the house creeks at night, even when you were alone, why might you sometimes feel like someone's with you? To find out, we begin with a story beneath the surface of the ocean. I was diving in a cave

known beautifully as the Mermaids Layer. That's researchers Stephanie s Faba, who studies the rock and microbiology of underwater caves known in the Bahamas as blue holes. She took a life changing dive. I swam in and the water felt amazing. It was perfect temperature. When you go into these underwater caves, you have to lay down a guideline. If you don't have this guidelining back out to the entrance, then you may not find your way back out and you will

die in the cave. Stephanie is a big deal, recognized around the world as a top diver, and her work is dangerous. Rob my late husband, had died a few months before in a diving accident, and he and I had always worked in that cave. Stephanie describes Rob as the love of her life, and her grief was still very fresh. This was her first dive since its death, and the whole time she's in the cave, she's sort of subconsciously expecting him to swim along and check in

like he used to do when they dove together. And then I went with the mainline further into the cave, quite pleased with what I had found. And then I turned my head to look for my guideline and realized that I had lost contact with it and also visual with it, and it all came together at me suddenly at once that you know, Rob wasn't there to help me, and now I was in deep, deep trouble. I didn't know where it was, and I was trying very hard. You know, at that moment, you hear your heart beat

in your ear. I mean it literally is thumping like crazy. And I looked at my air supply. I had probably maybe fifteen minutes left, and I think at that point I became angry, really angry at myself for being so stupid, and then I got really angry at Rob for not being there. And then I heard something in my head that Rob always said to me, and I kind of thought it was kind of a cool phrase, except there believe you can believe you can't either way, you're right.

It was an interesting feeling because it was like he was there Stephanie is one of many adventurers who have reported experiences like this, a feeling of presence during a moment of crisis. Sailors, prisoners of war, astronauts and aviators, and distress have made similar reports. To understand why all these people suddenly perceive a mysterious presence and sometimes hear them too, we have to start with how we perceive our own bodies. So I right now I am someone

or something that is embodied. I occupy a volume of space that is my body. I have a sense of ownership about my body, my arms and leg and indeed my entire body feels like my own. Batman in possession of his own arms and legs is a nil Anto Swami. He's a science journalist and a research fellow at M I T. And although I think I get it pretty chill during our conversation, I've been a fan for a minute.

When we think about where ourselves are really located, you know, we don't even if it feels like our whole body is ours, Our sense of consciousness doesn't seem like it's headquartered in our knees or in our hips. Where does the self live within the body, That center of awareness. It really recites in our heads. We we have the sense that we are somewhere right behind our eyes actually, and that turns out is also something that the brain works really hard to position the center of awareness in

that place. But our brains are not foolproof, and sometimes that center of awareness gets displaced, which can make for an out of body experience. People will say that, oh, I'm observing myself lying on the bed, but I am somewhere near the ceiling. It's very clear now from experiments done in labs and from just the study of the brain, that this is an illusion that nothing actually leaves the body. But it's certainly the case that people definitely have this experience.

They reported as being a very strong experience, a very strong sensation beneath the water line of consciousness. Our brains work really hard to create a smooth, consistent perception of the world in our place within it. Let's say you go for a solo jog. Well, your brain has to compensate for the bouncing of your visual field so that you don't get motion sick, just piloting your own body through the park, and it's constantly integrating signals from the

outside world. Birds song, a whiff of diesel exhaust with signals coming from inside your body. I have to be my right knee is doing that clicking thing again. But sometimes the signals get miscategorized, and signals from inside I perceived just coming from outside, and that can get really really spooky, like someone's knees clicking, And if it's not mine, then who's someone else's be here? You know, It's like I've accepted I'm in trouble, I've screwed up, I'm probably

gonna die. So back to Stephanie. She's lost, she's running out of air, and suddenly she gets this sense that she has company, that her late husband Rob is with her. I mean, I could hear his voice so clearly. I didn't feel alarm. And when I kind of just settled down from that and it was almost accepting my situation, I looked up and I saw what I thought was a little piece of line, a white line that it almost looks like the cables that you have your earpieces on.

And it turned out to be the guideline, the main line, and I got on it, went out and just remembered sitting there really so glad to see the yellow sunlight and saying, don't you ever do that again. Stephanie eventually launched a foundation in Rob's honor, and she actually still dives, which I think we can all agree makes her both dedicated, professional and tough as nails. Experiences like Stephanie's are rare.

I've never heard the term feeling of presence before, and maybe you hadn't either, but you probably have heard of the phantom limb phenomenon, where someone who's had a body part amputated still reports sensation in that missing arm or foot. No a science journalist, he told me that a neuroscientist named Olaf Blanket explains the feeling of presence as the

full body compliment off a phantom limb. So the way that you can and experience a limb that doesn't exist, you can literally experience a body that doesn't exist, and this is kind of a disruption and aberration off the mapping mechanisms in the brain. The brain maintains a map of the body, its components, and their positions in space, and in the case of phantom limb, this map hasn't been updated to reflect a new reality. In a case of feeling of presence, the map of the body is

shifted outside of the body completely. Okay, now is the time to grab your special occasion clipboard because we are heading into the lab and my duct taped friend is gonna get weird. We're about to speak to a senior scientist from the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Swiss Institute of Technology, a guy named Julio Renu. An experiment conducted at Julio's lab was able to induce a feeling of presence by sending a little electrical current through a

read of the brain that integrates sensory signals. If the patient was standing, the present was felt asked standing, and if the patient was seating, the president was felt as sitting. So this is actually led to the idea that what was going on is really the misattribution of one's own signals. So there was basically the patient was misattributing her own

signals to the presence. So here's this idea again, that a feeling of presence can be caused by the brain miscategorizing internal bodily signals as external like if it's not my body that I'm feeling, there must be another body nearby. For research types like Julio, the big question is, Okay, how can you test that idea? You have to somehow confuse people into thinking that sensations coming from inside them were coming from outside, and then find out if any

of them had a feeling of presence. But how do you confuse people about their own bodies in a lab? The answer here as if so often the case with life's hard questions. There's robots. Basically, we use a tour robotic system, one in front of you that you were asked to operate with your hands, and then one on the back that was replicating the movements that you were performing with your hands. So I'm in your lab, I'm manipulating something with my hands. Right, It's a joystick. It's

a kind of a fancy joystick. What is happening is that, basically there is a robotic carm that is touching you according to the movement that you perform to the joystick that we just mentioned. Okay, so if I pushed the joystick forward like I'm getting poked in the back, is exactly that. It's real time. It's real time exactly, and you're got to be poking yourself and when there is perfect synchrony between the tooth, you feel like you're actually

poking yourself, and that's normal. You know you're in control of what you're doing. Everything is fine. Whereas if we add a delay between what you do and what you receive on the back, this start feeling that he's actually somebody else doing this. On first listen, adding a delay into the system might seem like a small thing, like so what if I push forward on my joystick and there's a little lag before I get my poke in the back? Who's in a rush to get a poke

in the back? But that lag is the detail on which the whole experiment hinges. Like imagine you're walking alone at night. You pass under a stream lamp and you can see your shadow walking beside you. But then she misses a step and now her footfalls land just to beat after yours. That little leg wouldn't feel negligible. It would be what yourself distressing. And similarly, in Julio's lab, you'd have the sensation that this robot arm behind you is controlled by you in real time. It's a simple

reflection of your movements. Like a shadow. You are the only agent in command until that little leg, and then all of a sudden it feels like, maybe you're not entirely in control. So if not, you who About one third of Julio's research participants on prompted reported feeling a presence. What did they actually say? There was like fence. Somebody said, oh, I feel like there was somebody behind me touching me it was not me, or he felt creepy. Oh. A guy said, oh, I felt like that there was a

monkey replicating my movements on my back. But typically it was reported like as if there was somebody watching them and then replicating what we're doing, and that it didn't feel like it was them doing it at all. Successfully inducing feeling of presence. In this way, I can help explain how the phenomenon occurs outside the lab. Two did anybody say ghosts? No, they didn't say ghosts. I think I don't know. I have not really big experiences with ghosts, honestly,

But you get touched by ghosts, I don't know. I don't know. You know what, I don't know if you're supposed to get by ghosts, but is going absolutely not? Okay, yeah you see so that that would make sense? Then yeah, okay, I'm you know what, I'm sorry you were like, does that's a breach of scientific protocol ghost don't type. Well, there you go, so don't say you didn't learn anything from this rigorous science based program. Someone who knows more than me about ghost dues and don't is Bruce Hood.

He's the director of the Cognitive Development Center in the School of Psychological Science at Bristol University in the UK, and he wrote a book called super Sense that investigates white people believe in ghosts and stuff like past lives. In telepathy, Bruce explains that humans are designed to be sensitive to other social creatures, were always scanning our environments

for other animals like us. So one of the really interesting phenomenon is that people see faces all over the place, and so we seem to have a face detecting system. It just looks for a couple of eyes and anything that looks like a mouth. So that leads to that really interesting phenomenon called paradilia, where people see faces in the most weird, wonderful things like slices of pizza or you know, a coffee stain or a water stain on

the wall. What do you mean to Bruce's writing was this fascinating explanation of hyperactive agency detection, a term I've never heard before. What's hyperactive agency detection? Okay, So within the human brain, we have specialized systems for detecting other social animals, and we have, if you like, dedicated mechanisms for identifying others and their form and their shapes and

their movements. And what's going on with a hypersensive agency detector is that you're attributing or anthropomorphizing things which aren't alive. So you're actually over interpreting things. Okay, Then, once we categorize something as a living thing, what kind of assumptions do we make about it? Well, we we see it as having gold directed movement or intentions. Agency detection isn't

something we're learning from our parents. Bruce thinks it's probably an innate faculty we've developed to keep us safe from threats. We have a perceptual system which is hyper sensitive to the possibility of there being another being out there, hiding in the trees or amongst the woods. And we think it's probably that sensitive because that's the way it evolved, because it is better to assume that there's a possible another agent hiding out there rather than just to ignore it.

So your systems was biased to see these patterns and structures. Let's say you're a cave person sitting in the firelight beside your special someone on a romantic evening. You're interrupted by a nearby rustling of the high grass, and you don't know for sure if it's a lion or if it's just a breeze. Well, people who presume it's a lion grab a spear and then find out it's just the wind are gonna look dumb in front of their dates.

But people who presume it's just the wind continue making out and then find out it's a lion are going to be eaten in front of their dates. So the idea here is that evolution would favor the folks with the hair trigger, who readily perceived the presence of another agent. But again, our brains aren't foolproof. We're prone to false positives, to thinking someone's there even when we're alone. Our brains

are always looking for patterns in the chaos. We see human faces in the knotted bark of a tree, we presume it must have been a footfall that snapped a twig. And that's partly because we can't really perceive randomness. Our brain always imposes a degree of structure or we can't know, you can't. It's really tough. I mean in talking to friends, I don't you know the kind of talk that you do after like two cocktails, when you're solving none of

the world's problems. But it was just like pattern junkies, like, we just gotta have it, you know, and we see it where there are patterns, and we see it where there are no noise. If you're having a couple of cocktails, you'll see more patterns because of course, what happens there is you're deactivating the frontal lobe systems. So these are the areas in the front of the brain, and that's how alcohol works as a depressed and it turns this off and then suddenly you see connections and you become

more creative. And I'm writing off every bar tab on my taxes this year. Um, you've done a lot of work that investigates how hyperactive agency detection, among other things,

might relate to our superstitions. Yeah. I wrote a book trying to give a scientific account for why people believe in the unbelievable, and at that time, there was a lot of talk about religion and how people are indoctrinated to believe in ghosts and spirits and stuff like that, And I was just trying to address the balance and say, well, actually, you don't have to be religious to sort of infer

that there's all this agency in the world. I argued that, actually, you know, people who are secular or even atheists will have exactly the same sort of misconceptions and beliefs, which are tanned amount to supernatural thinking. I'm generally a secular kind of gal, but I still cross all the fingers on both hands when I'm waiting for good news, and I sometimes knock on wood in business meetings. I don't actually think those behaviors will change the outcome of events.

I just feel better to do. Like, our habits of mind don't always neatly align with our carefully considered world views. So all I think religions have done is they've built upon our tendency to see structure and agency and essences and causality. All these things pre existed religion. Our cave divers. Stephanie seems to hold a pretty similar position. I don't believe in God, I don't believe and uh, you know,

our ghosts or anything like that. But I do recognize that some of the things that we do experience, certainly. I mean, when we look at our ancestors so long ago that tried to explain light ng and thunder and things like that, you try to find a way to

explain things, and that's perfectly normal. Bruce wages that if you could start a human society from scratch on an island somewhere far removed from our existing traditions, my bed is they would soon come up with their own demons, their own gods, and their own explanations of the world, which are equally the same sort of supernatural beliefs that

we have in the case of conventional religion. So I think it's a natural consequence of the way that we have evolved systems to kind of respond to threats, to try and control the world around this to see the whole being grand and the sums that were all of these things I think are just part and parcel of the way we interpret the world. When I was tiny, my mom was on to put me to bed, and she used to freak me out by doing this puppety

thing with her right hand. It was just a bare hand like rings and everything, but her long brown fingers, and her thumb would be pointed at me like a beak, and she'd slowly advance this little creature towards me, and every night I swore I wasn't gonna fall for it this time, but then she'd start doing the voice, which went he and I couldn't help it. Like all of my attention turned towards this hand because it was alive.

It was getting closer to my face. And I can still remember the shape of her bunched finger tips, which seemed so clearly a snout, with her thumb as the working jaw. And even now when I look at my own hand in that position, the bedtime animal is resurrected at the end of my own wrist. We can be spooked by the features of our own design, even just sensing our own bodies. If something goes wrong and we can't differentiate what's happening inside from what's happening outside, the

results aren't just distressing. They could feel paranormal. And even when our brains and bodies are humming along and working order, we look for signs of life so vigilantly that we perceived hidden agents in the rustling grass. We find faces in our snack foods. Even when we were alone. We see creatures everywhere, friends, foes, gods, or even just fingers and thumbs. I think, well, at our next team meeting, Deeply Human will be talking menopause. Why do both women

and whales go through it? Deeply Human is a co production of the BBC World Service in American public media with I Heart Media, and it's hosted by me, Tessa. Okay, buddy, let's get you out of that chair. Huh h man running through your own neighborhood with a microphone and you freaks people out.