Do you believe in ghosts? Fortune-tellers? How one expert explains what ‘paranormal’ is

A professor’s focus on anomalistic psychology tries to understand belief in phenomena not supported by science, such as the use of Ouija boards (pictured) to communicate with the dead.

Do you believe in ghosts or paranormal activity? Professor Chris French is keen to know why. His research focus is on “anomalistic psychology” – to understand why people believe in events which are not supported by scientific evidence.

Anomalistic psychology – he coined the term – differs from parapsychology.

“Parapsychologists typically focus most of their efforts on attempting to find evidence in support of paranormal phenomena; that is, phenomena such as ESP, psychokinesis, and life after death, which cannot be explained in terms of currently accepted scientific concepts,” French told the Post.

Anomalistic psychology attempts to explain reports of ostensibly paranormal experiences in terms of non-paranormal, typically psychological, factors, he says.

These factors include hallucinations, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony – when people think they remember seeing things they have not – and a host of mental biases which lead people to explain an otherwise worldly event in supernatural terms.

French, a professor emeritus at Goldsmiths College at the University of London in the UK, explores examples of “supernatural activity” in his research, and in his book The Science of Weird S**t: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal.

“Sleep paralysis is a temporary period of paralysis that occurs between sleep and wakefulness,” he says. “It can, however, be associated with a range of additional symptoms that can make it absolutely terrifying.

“These include a strong sense of an evil presence, and hallucinations such as hearing voices or footsteps, and seeing demons and old hags. Other symptoms include experiencing difficulty in breathing, feeling pressure on the chest, and intense fear.”

During a normal night’s sleep, people go through several different stages, one of which is REM, or rapid eye movement, sleep – the phase that is associated with vivid dreams.

“The muscles of the body are actually paralysed during this phase, presumably to stop the sleeper acting out the actions of the dream,” French says.

“It’s a glitch in the normal sleep cycle. It’s as though the brain wakes up but the body doesn’t – and all of that imagery spills over into waking consciousness,” says French. Many artistic representations of ghosts and demons from the past probably stem from sleep paralysis, he says.

He explains fortune-tellers’ “skills” too. Even sceptics can be taken aback by the seeming accuracy of a reading – but that is because the fortune-teller is actually more skilled at reading the client than they are the cards, French says.

A “cold reading” technique enables the fortune-teller to take cues from the subject’s appearance, mood, mannerisms and all the chat that takes place during the reading.

“It can be used by deliberate con artists to fool others that they have psychic abilities,” the professor says. “But I suspect that individuals who sincerely believe that they have a psychic gift may be unintentionally using some of the same techniques.”

Many “personal insights” are actually pretty universal.

“One aspect of cold reading is the use of so-called Barnum statements,” French says. “These are statements which appear to be saying something perceptive about your … innermost personality but which in fact apply to pretty much everyone.”

How does he explain Ouija boards, a way to supposedly communicate with the dead by asking questions and having a form of marker move across a board of letters and numbers to spell out answers, seemingly on its own?

“When people experience the planchette, or alternatively, an upturned wine glass, moving around during a Ouija board session, the illusion that some external force is causing the movement is very strong.

“In fact, those taking part are causing the movement themselves via unconscious muscular movements. This is known as the ideomotor effect.”

In Victorian times, when tables would move across a room during seances, the same was true.

Sometimes ghost stories are simply hoaxes con men perpetuate to make a buck. While hoaxers do exist, our desire to believe is the bigger culprit.

“The single most powerful cognitive bias that we all suffer from is confirmation bias,” says French. “We pay more attention to evidence that is consistent with what we already believe, or what we would like to be true, and either ignore evidence that is inconsistent, or make up reasons why it can be dismissed.”

If you believe in ghosts, it is more likely that you will think you see one, he says.

French used to believe in ghosts himself, and as a child, says he was impressed by Uri Geller, the famous 1970s psychic who claimed he could bend spoons just by thinking about them – an illusion which, French says, his conjuror friends have since told him is actually simple to perform.

After reading James Alcock’s book Parapsychology: Science or Magic? while studying for his PhD, French became a sceptic.

Finding scientific evidence to support the existence of the paranormal – in which case it would no longer be “paranormal”, but normal – would, of course, change his mind.

“Scepticism is at the heart of science. For me, proper scepticism means always being open to the possibility that you might be wrong in your own beliefs,” French says.

“So, even though I feel it is extremely unlikely that ghosts and other paranormal phenomena will ever be proven to be real, I do leave the door open to that small possibility.”