Many people swear they've encountered ghosts. According to the Pew Research Center, approximately 181,000,000 American adults claim to have encountered ghosts.<\/p>\n
Psychologist Dr. Melissa Maffeo offers a more balanced and calm explanation, linking such experiences to the brain deceiving itself. In her new book (\u00ab "The Science of the Supernatural: Critical Thinking for the Mind and Brain" \u2013<\/em> March 2026) She does not claim that ghosts do not exist, but identifies three specific factors that make some people much more likely to believe they have encountered a ghost.<\/p>\n Her findings are based on years of research by psychologists and neuroscientists studying how the brain generates seemingly supernatural sensations.<\/p>\n The first factor is the location. Ghost hunters swear by their EMF (electromagnetic field) meters, which do indeed register significant activity in places suspected of being haunted. Whether people can actually sense these changes is another question.<\/p>\n Strong electromagnetic fields can stimulate the temporal lobe and cause strange sensations, while infrasound, a low-frequency noise too deep to be heard, is associated with anxiety and a sharp increase in stress hormones. As Maffeo writes in Live Science<\/em> : "Did the ghost cause the EMF, or did the EMF cause the ghost?"\u00ab<\/p>\n Henry Fuseli's 1781 painting "The Nightmare" has long been interpreted as a visual depiction of sleep paralysis, a phenomenon that psychologist Melissa Maffeo identifies as a key factor in the perception of ghostly encounters. | \u00a9Image credit: Wikimedia Commons \/ Tulip Hysteria<\/p>\n This was tested in a laboratory experiment: a house was simulated as a haunted house, with electromagnetic fields and infrasound deliberately amplified. However, the eerie sensations reported by the volunteers did not match what was actually present. Goosebumps were experienced by those who had already believed in the event.<\/p>\n Then there's the internal structure of the brain, specifically the temporoparietal region, which determines where our body ends and the outside world begins. When this structure malfunctions, strange things begin to happen. The result is often an eerie sense of the presence of someone or something else.<\/p>\n Sleep paralysis is an obvious example. You wake up from sleep, but your body remains motionless, and the dream images continue to replay. Frozen with fear and numbness, your mind fills in the gaps and perceives the dream as reality. About a quarter to half of Americans have experienced this at least once.<\/p>\n The final piece of the puzzle is personality. Some people, prone to magical thinking and with a more vague sense of where they end and everyone else begins, tend to report far more such experiences. At this stage, belief usually precedes vision.<\/p>\n However, Maffeo notes that belief alone is not enough to cause a ghost to appear, but when combined with one of the other factors, the experience can feel very real.<\/p>\n Sources:<\/em> Pew Research ,<\/em> Cambridge University Press ,<\/em> Live Science ,<\/em> Wake Forest University, NYP, Science Direct, NIH.<\/p>\n Read the original article on GEEKSPIN. Affiliate links on GEEKSPIN may generate commissions for us and our partners.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many people swear they've encountered ghosts. According to the Pew Research Center, approximately 181,000 American adults claim to have encountered ghosts. Psychologist\u2026<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15890,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","hvn-theme-has-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15889"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159360,"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15889\/revisions\/159360"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} Psychology of chills <\/h3>\n