People have all kinds of weird beliefs. Some of these come about because of experiences the person has had. A person who experiences God and believes in demons has an explanation for the occurrence of night terrors, when people feel a 'force' holding them down terrifyingly on to the bed, making it hard for them to believe. But those who believe in UFOs have a completely different explanation, and say that the 'God' of the theists is merely the effects of advanced civilisation (aliens) on early Humanity. Both explanations are foiled however by neuroscientists who understanding that the cause of these experiences is biochemical in nature. Weird beliefs and experiences can be caused by neurological and physiological problems, like tiny seizures in the brains causing visions. Cultural expectations play a large part in the interpretation of personal events. We all find rational arguments to explain away those who experience things that contradict our own interpretation of reality. The Christian Pentecostals have a saying, "the man with an experience is never at the mercy of the man with a doctrine"1, meaning that rationality subverts itself to experience. In total, we cannot entirely trust our experiences nor those of others.
- Conflicting Experiences
- How Cultural Beliefs Lead to Experiences
- The Cognitive Causes of Strange Experiences
- Abstract Man
- The Physiological Causes of Strange Experiences
- Concluding: Errors in Thinking, and Preventative Steps
1. Conflicting Experiences
- God in many forms.
- Resurrection and previous life experiences.
- UFOs and abduction experiences.
- Ghosts.
- Magic and curses.
- Conspiracy theorists.
All of these 'unlikely' phenomenon have extreme believers who have experienced personal and real events that confirm or caused their belief. It is not possible to tell them, most the time, that these things are not true because no matter how much logic or argument you give, you cannot negate the experiences they have had. Some of the believers are clearly psychotic and are dealt with by psychiatrists in due course however the majority of believers and experiencers of the above items are normal people. And it feels like psychosis to deny what you know is real: Therefore the experiencers of these events cannot dis-believe them unless they see a clear mechanism by which their minds have been tricked2. R. D. Laing, a psychologist, produced influential and genre-setting work with such books as "Self and Others".
Depending on what you believe, you will make different conclusions about the nature of what other people believe. Those who experiences Gods, Spirits and Demons will say that UFOs are demons. Those that experience UFOs however, will say that Gods are intelligent aliens who have appeared like Gods to us through their power. "Any science, sufficiently advanced, seems like magic"3.
What the contradictory believers are saying to each other is: We believe that we have a better understanding of your experience than you do. Or rather, like all people: We are not capable of not believing in our own experiences, and since your experiences are different we think your experiences are not true ones! We think we are interpreting the things you've seen more objectively than you...
Clearly the range of Human experience gives rise to many contradictions. Not all experiences can be entirely true. We know that the evident facts are sometimes not quite so factual. We have all experienced things that actually did not happen. We have dreamt, tripped, imagined and forgotten things leading us to conclusions and sternly felt beliefs in things that are not real.
We experienced the world as flat... so sure everyone was of this, that those who thought otherwise were at first declared insane. How sure we were of such a belief that we could declare other people insane for disbelieving... yet how wrong everyone was! Proof by consensus is no proof at all, a non-working proof. We do not have any consistent or absolute way of approaching what we consider true, however we are capable of telling with certainty when something is false. The Earth is not flat, the Northern Lights are not spiritual in basis, neither are rainbows, the stars or the sun and the moon. Earthquakes are not gods moving underneath the Earth, nor can volcanoes or the weather (probably) be influenced by spirit or totem worship. We are not sure if science has "disproved" souls or God, but it certainly seem less likely that they exist than they used to.
Many Christians very much doubt peoples' experiences of reincarnation. The previous lives that are felt and experienced are similar to the modes of experience of the Christian God: it is something that they can be completely sure about due to personal experience. Claims are made that as the belief has occurred for thousands of years so it must be a true and valid experience. But any grounds that the Christian gives for discounting the experience of continual reincarnation is also grounds for dismissing the experience of God. Indeed, any grounds for dismissing the experience of alien abduction (which can sometimes have a profound effect on a persons' life) is also grounds for dismissing the experience of God. In short, we are saying: Your experience is fake. Social psychologists, anthropologists, skeptical rationalists and scientists may well disbelieve all of them, pointing to psychology as the true cause.
It is not doubted that people do have fake experiences. Insane asylums are full of people who experience a different reality to us. We judge them as insane because we know that what they say they experience is not true. We understand that some people's stern and life-altering belief in conspiracy theories are actually based on error.
2. How Cultural Beliefs Lead to Experiences
Anthropologists find that the particular phenomenon experienced by people change over time and from culture to culture. With UFOology, different decades and countries have sighted completely different UFOs. A period of time in the UK saw that UFO reportings were generally furry/fuzzy aliens. Modern UFO reports are "grays", thin child-like bodies with enlarged eyes and heads. Different countries report different types of aliens, due to culture. As culture changes, so does the phenomenon. What does that say about the phenomenon? The underlying cause of the phenomenon is something that is being interpreted.
“Religious experiences tend to conform closely to cultural and religious expectations. Village girls in Portugal have visions of the Virgin Mary - not of the Indian goddess Kali. Native Americans on their vision quest see visions of North American animals not of African ones. Thus it would seem that religious experiences, no matter how intense and all-consuming, are subject to constraint by the cultural and religious norms of the person to whom they occur. Another way of looking at this is to say that there can be no such thing as a pure experience. An experience always happens to a person, and that person already has an interpretive framework through which he or she views the world. Thus, experience and interpretation always combine and interpenetrate.”
"The Phenomenon of Religion" by Momen (1999)4. [Book Review]
Such important differences in interpretation casts doubt on the basis of the experiences themselves, and has been presented (especially in the case of UFOs) as evidence that the phenomenon is self-generated, not real. The experiences are a function of a the aspirations and expectations of the experiencer. To the experiencer, all such arguments are meaningless as they have experienced it and it feels "insane" to them to doubt their own experiences. However, doubt them we do, because with so many contradictions between different world-views based on these experiences, we know that many, if not most, of them cannot all be true.
How has the experience of God changed over time? Originally, Gods were more like "spirits", low-scale pre-philosophy beings that inhabited rocks, stones, places, the stars above and the seasons. Scholars call this form of religion animism. These emotional projections were our only method of understanding how these complex things worked. When they behaved strangely, we found that we experienced them as living things! Not surprisingly we found them to have human emotions... at some point psychologists realized that we were just projecting our own inner states on to the world when we claim that beings that are not ourselves share the same emotions. The empathy of an unscientific mind leads to this misunderstanding of the nature of things. A culture steeped in science like modern Western culture, arrives at completely different understandings of spiritual-seeming experience than did primitive Human cultures.
3. The Cognitive Causes of Strange Experiences
3.1. Our Expectations Influence our Experiences
Expectations change over time... and we find that as they change so do the experiences. These experiences are like memes. A culture's esoteric memes influence even those who logically don't believe in the meme, so that subconsciously they have the forms in their mind of what aliens look like, so if one day there is something they can't explain it is these forms that present themselves.
3.2. Nervousness and Danger: Human Instincts
Our Human brains are pattern-recognition machines. We learnt to look for danger-signs above all else, and things that are important to us such as other Humans. So, we feel we are being looked at in the dark, we continuously mistake ordinary objects for Human beings or animals looking at us. We have to look at these things to double check what they are! We look around the room with a feeling that we are being watched... because these are instincts that kept us alive in the jungle. Slight sounds and movements are instinctively felt to be important, significant, and need investigation... especially in our own homes. And this is how it is in nature. Fear of spiders and snakes come from the same source: A heightened alertness to potential danger.
How much more jumpy are some of us after watching a good horror movie? After a killer-suspense film? How much more concerned are we about a slightly open doorway after we've been sat with dangerous thoughts on our minds, on the edge of our seats! The more stressed we are, the more we have on our minds, the more our minds create things to be afraid of. The horror of our own minds, tormenting us with ancient instinct in the modern world!
3.3. Expectations and Mass hysteria
Suggestion and paranoia alone can cause apparent epidemics, especially amongst school children and amongst populaces where stress factors are high. For example, in a school in Shelkovsk, Chechnya. "Symptoms included convulsions, nausea and breathing difficulties. The illness spread to neighbouring schools. Local doctors suspected mass poisoning, but when a delegation of medics arrived from Moscow, they attributed it to mass hysteria"5. Symptoms are real and fall in line with what the patients expect to suffer from. "Mass hysteria, or medically unexplained epidemic illness, has been documented since medieval times. Simon Wessely, a director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research at King's College London, says such outbreaks tend to reflect a society's beliefs". Importantly, Dr Wessely states that the most effective way to stop the epidemic and stop the symptoms is to explain that rumour and suggestion are causing them. It is easy to imagine an anti-rumour spreading and curing the epidemic. Once this has happened, "symptoms vanish within days"5.
Expectations not only inform the way in which we interpret our experiences, but they can also causes experiences, even ones as real as the symptoms of disease.
3.4. Looking for Evidence
Those who believe that people are out to get them look hard for signs that this is true! Then, they find them. Children will sometimes go out to look for fairies, and sometimes they find fairies! They are sure of it. That something they caught a glimpse of must have been a fairy. When they turn to it to look at it and it disappears this is even more evidence for them that it was indeed a fairy. Their expectations self-verify, their experience of fairies is a self-generated, but wrong, interpretation of what they thought they saw. Through their want to find what they believe exists, they actually experience what they believe exists. Projection of inner states into the outside world ('solipsism') also explains the culture-dependent nature of supernatural and UFO experiences.
4. Abstract Man
“Abstract thought allows us to take things to extremes. We can feel love for people who we have never seen based on their personality and communication alone. The communication medium is irrelevant. Due to our increasing capacity for empathy, we feel that others love us in return and feel we are in touch with their emotions. This is based on the feelings we have towards them, based on our own abstract thought and these are all in turn all based on our assumptions on the relationship between what is real and what is abstract.It is possible to create an abstract personality, based on abstract thought processes, like politics and religion, but based around a concept or idea. Frequently, the conclusion we feel when we do this is that we are looking at God himself.
Our need for unconditional love, our abstract philosophical minds and the way our very emotions and world view are led by our abstract representations of what we think is real can conspire to create in our minds an abstract source of love. Something we want and need since youth, and something that can frequently be lacking. The all-loving abstract god, the all-knowing and all-powerful being that we create in our minds matches all of those abstract ideas we attribute with our parents while young.”
Such want and expectation, especially combined with the popular cultural memes of God-belief do lead to experiences of 'God'. That this occurs is not a valid argument against the possible existence of God, but surely places much of the belief in God on the same plane as belief in conspiracy theories, and even the experience of God, an emotional well, as the same as the emotional psychosis of the experiencer of conspiracy theories.
“It is not only the ideas of pure Reason as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the same kind of implacable appeal. [...] The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for [a transcendentalist], but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space and the ether soak through all things so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant and just. [...]
I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings of reality, and I must dwell a moment longer on that point. They are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever are. [...] Probability is that you cannot help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a kind of reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in words, can expel from your belief.”
"The Varieties of Religious Experience"
William James (1902)6. [Book Review]
It is very much clear to some psychologists that the meaning and emotional abstractions that we make, due to our biochemical makeups and history (culminating as our phenotype), diffuse the world with meaning that is just as real as the cold concrete data our mere senses provide us with. Our assumptions and humanity make us experience meaningfulness and presences where reality itself doesn't.
Importantly, and this is something that I will definitely testify to, William James notes that mere logic is often much less convincing to people who have had wild experiences without knowing what causes them. Logical argument will not work because their experience is real to them - if logic says it isn't real, there is probably something wrong with the logic. In my understanding, revealing the potential valid causes of the experience and explaining the biochemistry or psychology of it can have two affects:
- Patronize them (unfortunately)
- Make them realize their experience has ordinary causes
It's a fine line trying to balance between the two, but when people have experienced irreconcilably different versions of reality it can put a strain on their social relations!
5. The Physiological Causes of Strange Experiences
If our biochemical brains and physiology sometimes go haywire, as indeed they do and we know they do, but we are not aware of a dysfunction, we are apt to misinterpret the events. So, our expectations, culture and abstract thinking all conspire to present to us a false experience. Some medical conditions can cause these to be recurring and frequent occurrences. Through studying these science has come to understand such experiences as out of body experiences, possession, night time terrors, and through more simple biological knowledge have understood the Inkubus and Sukkubus, and many other superstitious beliefs. Physical problems with the eyes can cause wild effects such as seeing blood run up walls, dust storms, clouds, and haloes that are not really there7. Isolated fits and seizures can cause bizarre effects such as lights, feelings, smells, auras and déjá vu that can be mild and subtle8.
Sleep Paralysis
“Sleep paralysis, or more properly, sleep paralysis with hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations have been singled out as a particularly likely source of beliefs concerning not only alien abductions, but all manner of beliefs in alternative realities and otherworldly creatures. Sleep paralysis is a condition in which someone, most often lying in a supine position, about to drop of to sleep, or just upon waking from sleep realizes that s/he is unable to move, or speak, or cry out. This may last a few seconds or several moments, occasionally longer. People frequently report feeling a "presence" that is often described as malevolent, threatening, or evil. An intense sense of dread and terror is very common. The presence is likely to be vaguely felt or sensed just out of sight but thought to be watching or monitoring, often with intense interest, sometimes standing by, or sitting on, the bed. On some occasions the presence may attack, strangling and exerting crushing pressure on the chest. People also report auditory, visual, proprioceptive, and tactile hallucinations, as well as floating sensations and out-of-body experiences (Hufford, 1982). These various sensory experiences have been referred to collectively as hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences (HHEs). People frequently try, unsuccessfully, to cry out. After seconds or minutes one feels suddenly released from the paralysis, but may be left with a lingering anxiety. Extreme effort to move may even produce phantom movements in which there is proprioceptive feedback of movement that conflicts with visual disconfirmation of any movement of the limb. People may also report severe pain in the limbs when trying to move them. [...] A few people may have very elaborate experiences almost nightly (or many times in a night) for years. Aside from many of the very disturbing features of the experience itself (described in succeeding sections) the phenomenon is quite benign.”"Sleep Paralysis and associated hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences"
Waking up, unable to move, panicked, feeling like you are being "pushed" on to the bed, feeling scared... this event is interpreted by us according to our expectations as we have no other way of explaining them without understanding the biological cause. UFO abductees think they have been marked out for an experiment, spiritualists think something is trying to possess them, God-believers think a Demon is tormenting them, witch-conspiracy believers think they are being attacked by a witch and those who believe in simple ghosts have even reported that they thought a ghost was trying to rape them.
The experience of a normal medical event can become very extreme and radical, according to our fears and the memes that society provides us with, and then the expectation has self-generated an experience to back itself up! To give itself evidence! When the only evidence is that the person is letting on, to us, what memes they have been influenced by.
Sleep apnea and other medically-understood phenomenon are misunderstood by us in light of our expectations about life. There are many other physiological causes of strange experiences of course, and recent experiments and investigations have allowed exciting results to shed light on the inner working of the Human brain. In particular, a series of experiments have resulted in a deeper understanding of why people experience the idea of god, and these I have put on a separate page: "The Experience of God" by Vexen Crabtree (2002).
6. Concluding: Errors in Thinking, and Preventative Steps
My conclusion on thinking errors suffices as the conclusion to this page:
“We all suffer from systematic cognitive dysfunctions; they infuse the very way we notice and analyse data, and distort our forming of conclusions. Emotional and societal factors influence our thinking much more than we like to admit. Our expectations and recent experiences change the way we recall memories. Even our very perceptions are effected by pre-conscious cognitive factors; what we see, feel, taste and hear are all subject to interpretation before we are even aware of them. Our brains were never meant to be the cool, rational, mathematical-logical computers that we like to sometimes pretend them to be.
- People easily misperceive random events as evidence that backs up their beliefs.
- We attribute causes to events based on our beliefs even when we don't know we're doing it.
- Physiological causes can lay behind even profound supernatural experiences.
- Our perception of reality is distorted by our expectations and beliefs.
- Our experiences are not objective, but are informed by our mindset and culture.
We can take preventative steps. Learning to think skeptically and carefully and to recognize that our very experiences and perceptions can be coloured by societal and subconscious factors should help us to maintain our cool. Beliefs should not be taken lightly, and evidence should be cross-checked. This especially applies to "common-sense" facts that we learn from others by word of mouth and traditional knowledge. Above all, however, our most important tool is knowing what types of cognitive errors we, as a species, are prone to making.”
"Errors in Thinking: Cognitive Errors, Wishful Thinking and Sacred Truths" by Vexen Crabtree (2008)
