Reality, nightmares, and the paranormal

I was giving some thought this morning to why I've turned into such a diehard doubter of paranormal occurrences.  And I think one of the main reasons is because I know enough neuroscience to have very little faith in my own brain and sensory organs.

I'm not an expert on the topic, mind you.  I'm a raving generalist, what some people describe as "interested in everything" and more critical sorts label as a shallow dilettante.  But I know enough about the nervous system to have taught a semester-long elective in introductory neuroscience for years, and that plus my native curiosity has always kept me reading about new developments.

This is what prompted a friend of mine to hand me the late Oliver Sacks's book Hallucinations.  I love Sacks's writing -- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia are tours de force -- but this one I hadn't heard of.

And let me tell you, if you are the type who is prone to say, "I know it happened, I saw it with my own eyes!", you might want to give this book a read.

The whole book is a devastating blow to our confidence that what we see, hear, and remember is reality.  But the especially damning part began with his description of hypnopompic hallucinations -- visions that occur immediately upon waking.  Unlike the more common hypnagogic experiences, which are dreamlike states in light sleep, hypnopompic experiences have the additional characteristic that when you are in one, you are (1) convinced that you are completely awake, and (2) certain that what you're seeing is real.

Sacks describes one of his own patients who suffered from frequent hypnopompic hallucinations. Amongst the things the man saw were:

• a huge figure of an angel
• a rotting corpse lying next to him in bed
• a dead child on the floor, covered in blood
• hideous faces laughing at him
• giant spiders
• a huge hand suspended over his face
• an image of himself as an older man, standing by the foot of the bed
• an ugly-looking primitive man lying on the floor, with tufted orange hair

Fortunately for him, Sacks's patient was a rational man and knew that what he was experiencing was hallucination, i.e., not real.  But you can see how if you were even slightly inclined to believe in the paranormal, this would put you over the edge (possibly in more than one way).

But it gets worse.  There's cataplexy, which is a sudden and total loss of muscular strength, resulting in the sufferer falling to the ground while remaining completely conscious.  Victims of cataplexy often also experience sleep paralysis, which is another phenomenon that occurs upon waking, and in which the system that is supposed to re-sync the voluntary muscles with the conscious mental faculties fails to occur, resulting in a terrifying inability to move.  As if this weren't bad enough, cataplexy and sleep paralysis are often accompanied by hallucinations -- one woman Sacks worked with experienced an episode of sleep paralysis in which she saw "an abnormally tall man in a black suit...  He was greenish-pale, sick-looking, with a shock-ridden look in the eyes.  I tried to scream, but was unable to move my lips or make any sounds at all.  He kept staring at me with his eyes almost popping out when all of a sudden he started shouting out random numbers, like FIVE-ELEVEN-EIGHT-ONE-THREE-TWO-FOUR-NINE-TWENTY, then laughed hysterically."

After this the paralysis resolved, and the image of the man "became more and more blurry until he was gone."

Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Nightmare (1790) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Then there are grief-induced hallucinations, an apparently well-documented phenomenon which I had never heard of before.  A doctor in Wales, W. D. Rees, interviewed three hundred people who had recently lost loved ones, and found that nearly half of them had at least fleeting hallucinations of seeing the deceased.  Some of these hallucinations persisted for months or years.

Given all this, is it any wonder that every culture on Earth has legends of ghosts, demons, and spirits?

Of course, the True Believers in the studio audience (hey, there have to be some, right?) are probably saying, "Sacks only calls them hallucinations because that's what he already believed to be true -- he's as guilty of confirmation bias as the people who believe in ghosts."  But the problem with this is, Sacks also tells us that there are certain medications which make such hallucinations dramatically worse, and others that make them diminish or go away entirely.  Hard to explain why, if the ghosts, spirits, et al. have an external reality, taking a drug can make them go away.

But the psychics probably will just respond by saying that the medication is making people "less attuned to the frequencies of the spirit world," or some such.  You can't win.

Nota bene: I'm not saying ghosts, or spirits, or the afterlife, don't exist or, even more, can't exist.  Just that there's an alternate plausible explanation for these experiences that relies on nothing but known science.  As skeptic Robert Carroll put it, "Before you accept a paranormal or supernatural account of the world, you had better make sure that you've ruled out all the normal and natural ones first."

In any case, I highly recommend Sacks's book.  (The link to the Amazon page is posted above, if you'd like to buy a copy.)  It will, however, have the effect of making you doubt everything you're looking at.  Not that that's necessarily a bad thing; a little less certainty, and a little more acknowledgement of doubt, would certainly make my job a hell of a lot easier.

****************************************

The shadow knows

One of the most terrifying sleep-related phenomena is sleep paralysis.

I say this only from hearing about the experiences of others; I have never had it happen to me.  But the people I've talked to who have had episodes of sleep paralysis relate being wide awake and conscious, but unable to move -- often along with some odd sensory experiences -- such as feelings of being watched or having someone in the room; hissing, humming, or sizzling noises; a tingling in the extremities that feels like a mild electric shock; a feeling of being suffocated; and (understandably) the emotions of fear and panic.

The reason all of this comes up is an article that appeared over at the site Mysterious Universe about "Shadow People."  The piece was by Nick Redfern, whose name should be familiar to anyone who is an aficionado of cryptozoology; Redfern has been involved in a number of investigations of the paranormal, and is the author of books such as The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, Shapeshifters: Morphing Monsters and Changing Cryptids, The Real Men in Black, The New World Order Book, and a variety of other titles I encourage you to peruse.

So Redfern has a pretty obvious bias, here, which is why I was already primed to view his piece on the Shadow People with a bit of a jaundiced eye.  Let me let him speak for himself, though.  Redfern tells us that there are these entities that we should all be on the lookout for, and then tells us the following:

Jason Offutt is an expert on the Shadow People, and the author of a 2009 book on the subject titled Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us.  He says there are eight different kinds of Shadow People – at least, they are the ones we know about.  He labels them as Benign Shadows, Shadows of Terror, Red-Eyed Shadows, Noisy Shadows, Angry Hooded Shadows, Shadows that Attack, Shadow Cats, and the Hat Man.

Shadow Cats?  Why only cats?  Cats, in my experience, are already conceited enough that they don't need another feather in their caps.  Of course, the positive side is that Shadow Cats wouldn't be very threatening. The cats I've owned specialized in two behaviors: Sitting Around Looking Bored, and Moving Closer To Where We Are So We'll Appreciate How Bored They Are.  If their Shadow versions are no more motivated, it's hard to see why you'd even care they were around, since Shadow Cats presumably don't eat, drink, or use a litter box.  They'd kind of be a low-impact paranormal home décor item.

On the other hand, I'm just as glad there are no Shadow Dogs, because then we'd have yet another source of the really obnoxious noise that dogs make when they are conducting intimate personal hygiene, a sound my wife calls "glopping."  Our three dogs glop enough, there's no need for additional glopping from the spirit world.

But then there's "Hat Man."  On first glance, that seemed fairly non-threatening, but Redfern tells us that Hat Man is the scariest one on the list:

I sat and listened at my table [at a conference, speaking to an attendee] as he told me how, back in July of this year, he had three experiences with the Hat Man – and which were pretty much all identical – and which were very familiar to me.  He woke up in the early hours of the morning to a horrific vision: the outside wall of his bedroom was displaying a terrifying image of a large city on fire, with significant portions of it in ruins.  It was none other than Chicago.  The sky was dark and millions were dead.  Circling high above what was left of the city was a large, human-like entity with huge wings.  And stood [sic] next to the guy, as he watched this apocalyptic scenario unravel from his bed, was the Hat Man, his old-style fedora hat positioned firmly on his head.  The doomsday-like picture lasted for a minute or two, making it clear to the witness that a Third World War had begun.  On two more occasions in the same month, a near-identical situation played out.  It’s hardly surprising that the man was still concerned by all this when we chatted at the weekend.

So he talked to some other people, and more than one person mentioned seeing Hat Man, and always associated with images of doom and destruction.  Toward the end, he mentions the fact that one of the people who'd seen Hat Man suffered from sleep paralysis... which kind of made me go, "Aha."

In a paper by Walther and Schulz back in 2004 entitled, "Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis: Polysomnographic and Clinical Findings," it was found that people who suffered from sleep paralysis showed abnormal patterns of REM and non-REM sleep, and (most interestingly) fragmentation of REM.  REM, you probably know, is associated with dreaming; suppressing or disturbing REM causes a whole host of problems, up to and including hallucination.  Another paper -- Cheyne, Rueffer, and Newby-Clark, in 1999, "Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations during Sleep Paralysis: Neurological and Cultural Construction of the Night-Mare" -- has another interesting clue, which is that during sleep paralysis, cholinergic neurons (the neural bundles that promote wakefulness and REM) are hyperactive, whereas the serotonergic neurons (ones that initiate relaxation and a sense of well-being) are inhibited.  This implies that the mind becomes wakeful, but emotionally uneasy, before the brain-body connection comes back online.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The problem here is that if you're in sleep paralysis, or the related phenomenon of hypnagogic experiences (dreams in light sleep), what you are perceiving is not reflective of reality.  So as creepy as Shadow People are -- not to mention "Hat Man" -- I'm pretty certain that what we've got here is a visual hallucination experienced during a dream state.

Not sure about the Shadow Cats, though.  I still don't see how that'd work.  Given my luck at trying to get cats comply with simple rules such as "Stay The Hell Off The Kitchen Counter," my guess is that even feline hallucinations wouldn't want to cooperate.  If you expected them to show up and scare some poor dude who was just trying to get a good night's sleep, they'd probably balk because it wasn't their idea.  Shadow Dogs, on the other hand, would be happy to climb on the sleeping dude's bed and glop right next to his ear.  They're just helpful that way.

****************************************

Reality, nightmares, and the paranormal

I was giving some thought this morning to why I've turned into such a diehard doubter of paranormal occurrences.  And I think one of the main reasons is because I know enough neuroscience to have very little faith in my own brain and sensory organs.

I'm not an expert on the topic, mind you.  I'm a raving generalist, what some people describe as "interested in everything" and more critical sorts label as a dilettante.  But I know enough about the nervous system to have taught a semester-long elective in introductory neuroscience for years, and that plus my native curiosity has always kept me reading about new developments.

This is what prompted a friend of mine to hand me the late Oliver Sacks's book Hallucinations.  I love Sacks's writing -- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia are tours de force -- but this one I hadn't heard of.

And let me tell you, if you are the type who is prone to say, "I know it happened, I saw it with my own eyes!", you might want to give this book a read.

The whole book is a devastating blow to our confidence that what we see, hear, and remember is reality.  But the especially damning part began with his description of hypnopompic hallucinations -- visions that occur immediately upon waking.  Unlike the more common hypnagogic experiences, which are dreamlike states in light sleep, hypnopompic experiences have the additional characteristic that when you are in one, you are (1) convinced that you are completely awake, and (2) certain that what you're seeing is real.

Sacks describes one of his own patients who suffered from frequent hypnopompic hallucinations.  Amongst the things the man saw were:

• a huge figure of an angel
• a rotting corpse lying next to him in bed
• a dead child on the floor, covered in blood
• hideous faces laughing at him
• giant spiders
• a huge hand suspended over his face
• an image of himself as an older man, standing by the foot of the bed
• an ugly-looking primitive man lying on the floor, with tufted orange hair

Fortunately for him, Sacks's patient was a rational man and knew that what he was experiencing was hallucination, i.e., not real.  But you can see how if you were even slightly inclined to believe in the paranormal, this would put you over the edge (possibly in more than one way).

But it gets worse.  There's cataplexy, which is a sudden and total loss of muscular strength, resulting in the sufferer falling to the ground while remaining completely conscious.  Victims of cataplexy often also experience sleep paralysis, which is another phenomenon that occurs upon waking, and in which the system that is supposed to re-sync the voluntary muscles with the conscious mental faculties fails to occur, resulting in a terrifying inability to move.  As if this weren't bad enough, cataplexy and sleep paralysis are often accompanied by hallucinations -- one woman Sacks worked with experienced an episode of sleep paralysis in which she saw "an abnormally tall man in a black suit...  He was greenish-pale, sick looking, with a shock-ridden look in the eyes.  I tried to scream, but was unable to move my lips or make any sounds at all.  He kept staring at me with his eyes almost popping out when all of a sudden he started shouting out random numbers, like FIVE-ELEVEN-EIGHT-ONE-THREE-TWO-FOUR-NINE-TWENTY, then laughed hysterically."

After this the paralysis resolved, and the image of the man "became more and more blurry until he was gone."

Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Nightmare (1790) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Then there are grief-induced hallucinations, an apparently well-documented phenomenon which I had never heard of before.  A doctor in Wales, W. D. Rees, interviewed three hundred people who had recently lost loved ones, and found that nearly half of them had at least fleeting hallucinations of seeing the deceased.  Some of these hallucinations persisted for months or years.

Given all this, is it any wonder that every culture on Earth has legends of ghosts, demons, and spirits?

Of course, the True Believers in the studio audience (hey, there have to be some, right?) are probably saying, "Sacks only calls them hallucinations because that's what he already believed to be true -- he's as guilty of confirmation bias as the people who believe in ghosts."  But the problem with this is, Sacks also tells us that there are certain medications which make such hallucinations dramatically worse, and others that make them diminish or go away entirely.  Hard to explain why, if the ghosts, spirits, et al. have an external reality, taking a drug can make them go away.

But the psychics probably will just respond by saying that the medication is making people "less attuned to the frequencies of the spirit world," or some such.  You can't win.

In any case, I highly recommend Sacks's book.  (The link to the Amazon page is posted above, if you'd like to buy a copy.)  It will, however, have the effect of making you doubt everything you're looking at.  Not that that's necessarily a bad thing; a little less certainty, and a little more acknowledgement of doubt, would certainly make my job a hell of a lot easier.

*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about one of the deepest mysteries in science: the origin of time.

Most physical processes are time-reversible.  If you looked at a video of a ball bouncing off a wall, then looked at the same video clip in reverse, it would be really difficult to tell which was the forward one and which the backwards one.  Down to the subatomic level, physical processes tend to make no distinction based upon the "arrow of time."

And yet our experience of time is very, very different.  We remember the past and don't know anything about the future.  Cause and effect proceed in that order, always.  Time only flows one direction, and most reputable physicists believe that real time travel is fundamentally impossible.  You can alter the rate at which time flows -- differences in duration in different reference frames are a hallmark of the theory of relativity -- but its direction seems to be unchanging and eternal.

Why?  This doesn't arise naturally from any known theory.  Truly, it is still a mystery, although today we're finally beginning to pry open the door a little, and peek at what is going on in this oddest of physical processes.

In The Order of Time, by physicist Carlo Rovelli (author of the wonderful Seven Brief Lectures in Physics), we learn what's at the cutting edge of theory and research into this unexplained, but everyday and ubiquitous, experience.  It is a fascinating read -- well worth the time it will take you to ponder the questions it raises.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The shadow knows

One of the most terrifying sleep-related phenomena is sleep paralysis.

I say this only from hearing about the experiences of others; I have never had it happen to me.  But the people I've talked to who have had episodes of sleep paralysis relate being wide awake and conscious, but unable to move -- often along with some odd sensory experiences -- such as feelings of being watched or having someone in the room; hissing, humming, or sizzling noises; a tingling in the extremities that feels like a mild electric shock; a feeling of being suffocated; and (understandably) the emotions of fear and panic.

The reason all of this comes up is an article that appeared over at the site Mysterious Universe last week about "shadow people."  The piece was by Nick Redfern, whose name should be familiar to anyone who is an aficionado of cryptozoology; Redfern has been involved in a number of investigations of the paranormal, and is the author of books such as The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, Shapeshifters: Morphing Monsters and Changing Cryptids, The Real Men in Black, The New World Order Book, and a variety of other titles I encourage you to peruse.

So Redfern has a pretty obvious bias, here, which is why I was already primed to view his piece on the Shadow People with a bit of a jaundiced eye.  Let me let him speak for himself, though.  Redfern tells us that there are these entities that we should all be on the lookout for, and then tells us the following:

Jason Offutt is an expert on the Shadow People, and the author of a 2009 book on the subject titled Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us.  He says there are eight different kinds of Shadow People – at least, they are the ones we know about.  He labels them as Benign Shadows, Shadows of Terror, Red-Eyed Shadows, Noisy Shadows, Angry Hooded Shadows, Shadows that Attack, Shadow Cats, and the Hat Man.

Shadow Cats?  Why only cats?  Cats, in my experience, are already conceited enough that they don't need another feather in their caps.  Of course, the positive side is that Shadow Cats wouldn't be very threatening.  My cats specialized in two behaviors: Sitting Around Looking Bored, and Moving Closer To Where We Are So We'll Appreciate How Bored They Are.  If their Shadow versions are no more motivated, it's hard to see why you'd even care they were around, since Shadow Cats presumably don't eat, drink, or use a litter box.  They'd kind of be a low-impact paranormal home décor item.

On the other hand, I'm just as glad there are no Shadow Dogs, because then we'd have yet another source of the really obnoxious noise that dogs make when they are conducting intimate personal hygiene, a sound my wife calls "glopping."  Our two dogs glop enough, there's no need for additional glopping from the spirit world.

But then there's "Hat Man."  On first glance, that seemed fairly non-threatening, but Redfern tells us that Hat Man is the scariest one on the list:

I sat and listened at my table [at a conference, speaking to an attendee] as he told me how, back in July of this year, he had three experiences with the Hat Man – and which were pretty much all identical – and which were very familiar to me.  He woke up in the early hours of the morning to a horrific vision: the outside wall of his bedroom was displaying a terrifying image of a large city on fire, with significant portions of it in ruins. It was none other than Chicago.  The sky was dark and millions were dead.  Circling high above what was left of the city was a large, human-like entity with huge wings.  And stood [sic] next to the guy, as he watched this apocalyptic scenario unravel from his bed, was the Hat Man, his old-style fedora hat positioned firmly on his head.  The doomsday-like picture lasted for a minute or two, making it clear to the witness that a Third World War had begun.  On two more occasions in the same month, a near-identical situation played out.  It’s hardly surprising that the man was still concerned by all this when we chatted at the weekend.

So he talked to some other people, and more than one person mentioned seeing Hat Man, and always associated with images of doom and destruction.  Toward the end, he mentions the fact that one of the people who'd seen Hat Man suffered from sleep paralysis... which kind of made me go, "Aha."

In a paper by Walther and Schulz back in 2004 entitled, "Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis: Polysomnographic and Clinical Findings," it was found that people who suffered from sleep paralysis showed abnormal patterns of REM and non-REM sleep, and (most interestingly) fragmentation of REM.  REM, you probably know, is associated with dreaming; suppressing or disturbing REM causes a whole host of problems, up to and including hallucination.  Another paper -- Cheyne, Rueffer, and Newby-Clark, in 1999, "Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations during Sleep Paralysis: Neurological and Cultural Construction of the Night-Mare" -- has another interesting clue, which is that during sleep paralysis, cholinergic neurons (the neural bundles that promote wakefulness and REM) are hyperactive, whereas the serotonergic neurons (ones that initiate relaxation and a sense of well-being) are inhibited.  This implies that the mind becomes wakeful, but emotionally uneasy, before the brain-body connection comes back online.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem here is that if you're in sleep paralysis, or the related phenomenon of hypnagogic experiences (dreams in light sleep), what you are perceiving is not reflective of reality.  So as creepy as Shadow People are -- not to mention "Hat Man" -- I'm pretty certain that what we've got here is a visual hallucination experienced during a dream state.

Not sure about the Shadow Cats, though.  I still don't see how that'd work.  Given my luck at trying to get my cats comply with rules such as "Stay The Hell Off The Kitchen Counter," my guess is that even feline hallucinations wouldn't want to cooperate.  If you expected them to show up and scare some poor dude who was just trying to get a good night's sleep, they'd probably balk because it wasn't their idea.  Shadow Dogs, on the other hand, would be happy to climb on the sleeping dude's bed and glop right next to his ear.  They're just helpful that way.