That’s because such a random occurrence doesn’t fit with our usual interpretation of ’cause and effect’ and so there must be an outside factor right? Now you might be tempted to think this would be a case of divine intervention, or of telepathy. He popped inside to answer and they were both amazed at the coincidence. She accidentally misdialled the number she was trying to call though and ended up calling a telephone box just as he was walking past. One real life story reports a woman trying to call her husband at work to tell him he forgot his tie for an important meeting. Then you turn around and see a coat in the window that your brain assumes is a human and suddenly you have a supernatural experience of being stalked by a cloaked figure. You feel anxious because you’re hungry but you assume you’re anxious because there’s some presence in the room with you. Likewise this is also why someone who experiences a set of unconnected and hard-to-explain events might explain them as being part of an overarching narrative.
This is actually probably where our dreams come from: our ‘pons’ fire in our brains as we cement our memories and our conscious mind picks this up as a load of random imagery and information which it naturally strings into a narrative. It likes cause and effect and it likes to create stories out of even random stimuli. Similarly our brain also likes narrative. This is why it’s relatively common to look at the Weetos in your cereal bowl and see them make the shape of a face – it is not because your Weetos are trying to communicate with you. Why did we all see a face? Simple: the human brain is trained to look for faces whenever it can simply because they are highly relevant to our survival. For a little while, a lot of people believed that this was proof of an ancient alien race, until higher resolution photographs of the area showed that it was nothing more than an optical illusion.
Most people by now have seen the image of the ‘face on Mars’ which when photographed from space appeared to portray a Martian face. Let’s have a look at what those psychological phenomenons really are and why seeing aliens actually tells us a lot more about the human psyche than it does about what’s out there… Faces At the same time there are certain psychological phenomena at work that make us likely to see things that aren’t there and come to conclusions that are fantastical rather than logical. Of course you don’t get thousands of very similar ghost stories and tales of aliens just because people ‘want’ to believe. But at the same time there is something fulfilling and rewarding about them too: not only because we are fascinated by what we can’t explain, but also because if there really are ghosts out there or demons, then it might suggest that we too are more than just a physical assembly of flesh and bones.īut there’s more to it than that. On the one hand these are horror stories, designed to scare and frighten and that makes them popular around campfires. But since the dawn of man we have been telling stories of something else, something ‘other’, which might take the form of ghosts, of demons, of aliens or of elves. All around us is the physical world and the reality of that world is something we deal with on a daily basis. For as long as man has existed, we have been fascinated with the idea of other worlds and other creatures that are somehow ‘supernatural’.
0 kommentar(er)
