Reprint: Is My Brain Wired to Never See a Ghost?

 

Is my brain wired to never see a ghost? A psychologist on three factors that make a paranormal experience more likely

When you experience something that can’t easily be explained, do you think of the supernatural? Zeferli/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Melissa Maffeo, Wake Forest University

Around 1 in 5 Americans say they’ve seen a ghost. I’m not one of them, and I probably never will be. I blame my brain.

Let me explain. No one can say definitively that ghosts exist, but many people believe they do. Roughly three-quarters of Americans believe in some form of paranormal activity – not only ghosts, but psychic abilities, precognitive dreams, mediums and anything else that conventional explanations can’t account for.

As a psychology professor, I often think about the subjectivity people use when interpreting experiences. I wonder, then, if there are perfectly ordinary explanations for seemingly extraordinary experiences. Maybe a perfect storm of everyday factors can converge and trigger the sensation of a paranormal experience.

In my new book, “Science of the Supernatural,” I explore the idea that the human brain might be creating an experience of the supernatural by misinterpreting the external world. Here are three factors that might trick your brain into creating a fake ghost:

Haunted factor #1: Environmental stimuli

Anyone who’s ever watched a ghost hunting show has seen the paranormal investigator mutter something like “The EMF’s going crazy” when there’s purported supernatural activity afoot. Electromagnetic fields, or EMFs, are invisible areas of energy created by electrically charged particles.

At present, there is no direct evidence that humans can consciously sense EMF the same way we can touch, see or hear things in our environment. But with a handheld device purchased at a local hardware store, you can measure them anywhere. An EMF detector picks up electrical or magnetic activity, whether human-made or otherworldly. But do EMF fluctuations relate to paranormal activity?

The scientific method might help answer this question. In one study, conducted in the South Street vaults underneath Edinburgh, Scotland, EMFs fluctuated more in areas with a history of ghostly happenings. Another study found greater variability of EMFs in the more “haunted” areas of Hampton Court Palace in England.

People might unknowingly be detecting changes in environmental stimuli, like electromagnetic fields. The question then becomes: Did the ghost cause the EMF, or did the EMF cause the ghost?

To date, only one research group has attempted to experimentally manipulate environmental factors, including complex EMF, and measure subsequent perceptions of the paranormal.

Participants did report many peculiarities, ranging from feeling dizzy to feeling like they were detached from their bodies and even sensing a presence – but these experiences didn’t correspond to how the researchers varied environmental conditions, like EMF intensity. Interestingly, the people who described anomalous experiences were the same people who believed more strongly in the paranormal.

Do environmental factors like EMF lead to perceptions of the paranormal? On the one hand, there is a correlation between reportedly haunted places and EMF variability. And there are some indications that humans can detect magnetism. On the other hand, experimental manipulation of EMF did not relate to weird perceptions in a lab setting.

I think we need to look into other haunted factors.

Haunted factor #2: Neurological mix-ups

Kindness, Fishtanks, and Getting Banned - June's Newsletter is Here!

Kindness, Fishtanks, and Getting Banned by Facebook!

I just sent out my newsletter for June 2026! Among other things, it's the story of how my cat, Freya, rescued me from being kicked off Facebook. It also features Freya in her very own action-adventure film as she stalks the Denizens of the Fishtank.

You can read the whole thing here:

Don't miss an issue! If you enjoyed Freya's adventures  (and my books) please subscribe here.

[ARCHIVES] Do Not Murder In My Name: The Rush to Federal Executions

This post first appeared in 2020. 

Now, in the waning days of 2020, the criminal in the White House has pushed through a string of murders. I realize I have used inflammatory language, but nothing less conveys the intensity of my outrage and revulsion. Simply put, someone who initiates and demands the ending of a human life is a criminal. The deliberate, calculated, cold-blooded taking of a human life is murder. 

From the BBC: 

As President Donald Trump's days in the White House wane, his administration is racing through a string of federal executions.

Five executions are scheduled before President-elect Joe Biden's 20 January inauguration - breaking with an 130-year-old precedent of pausing executions amid a presidential transition.

And if all five take place, Mr Trump will be the country's most prolific execution president in more than a century, overseeing the executions of 13 death row inmates since July of this year.

The five executions began this week, starting with convicted killer 40-year-old Brandon Bernard who was put to death at a penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. The execution of 56-year-old Alfred Bourgeois will take place on the evening of 11 December.

I am the family member of a murder victim, and I speak from personal experience of the impulse to revenge the taking of my mother's life. I also know that this is a natural expression of grief, and that with healing, it passes. To me it is essential that those left behind be given the support and time to process that loss and to re-engage with their lives. To focus on killing someone else freezes us in retaliation mode. 

Over the years, I have spoken out against the death penalty, telling my story to groups as diverse as city councils, law students, death penalty abolition activists, and state legislators. In 2012, I was invited to participate in an international conference put on by Murder Victim Families For Human Rights. Then I met others like me, who had lost a single family member to violence, those whose loved ones had been executed or were on death row, and those who experienced both. Every single person who had experienced both was Black. There is no escaping the racial injustice in the way the death penalty is applied (or the way crimes are investigated and prosecuted). Yet the most moving part of that weekend was listening with an open heart to mothers weeping for their executed sons -- and realizing their grief and loss was no less than mine. 

If you, who are reading this, take away nothing else, remember this: every person who is put to death is or has been loved by someone, and is grieved by someone, and missed like an aching hole in the heart by someone.

In 2019, I penned a blog for Death Penalty Focus, called "When we focus on revenge instead of healing, we never heal." You can read it below.

Book Review: A Haunting or a Hoax?

An Ordinary Sort of Evil (A Rip Through Time Novel), by Kelley Armstrong (St Martins)

I love time-travel stories, especially those with a hint (or more!) of mystery and romance. Kelley Armstrong’s “A Rip Through Time” series checks all the boxes. In addition, she has a gift for bringing the reader into the story without needing to read all the previous volumes. The setup takes Mallory Mitchell, a 21^st Century homicide detective, into Victorian Scotland. The catch is that she doesn’t travel in her own (fit, martial-arts trained) body, she gets stuffed into that of a buxom housemaid, an outrageous flirt with ties to the criminal underground. In the early episodes, Mallory reveals her identity and forms alliances with the housemaid’s employer, forensic-science pioneer/undertaker Dr. Duncan Gray and Detective Hugh McCreadie, with the three working murder cases together.

Now Duncan and Mallory are summoned urgently to the home of Lady Adler, where they find a séance instead of a death in the household. The spirit identifies herself as Lady Adler’s missing maid and pleads that Duncan find her killer. How much is a hoax, and has a real crime been committed? One plot twist leads to another, against the background of a simmering romance between Mallory and Duncan. Drenched in historical detail, well-portrayed characters, and nuanced relationships-across-centuries, the book kept me enthralled until the final revelation—and eager to read the next chapter in the love story.

 

Reprint: Strongmen Doomed to Fail!

 

The ‘warrior ethos’ promises victory — history says it leads to defeat

Hitler and Mussolini salute Nazi troops in 1937. Bettmann/Getty Images

John Broich, Case Western Reserve University

At Marine Corps Base Quantico in September 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised assembled generals “maximum lethality” and no “stupid rules of engagement.” Under his leadership, the newly rebranded Department of War would “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill.” Troops would be held to the “highest male standard,” he said. “Weak men won’t qualify.”

Hegseth also restricted anonymous whistleblower and discrimination complaints and limited how long past misconduct can be held against a service member, weakening internal rules and oversight processes the military had built over decades.

Months later, with the Iran war underway, he told reporters at a Pentagon briefing that the U.S. was “punching (Iran) while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” He has also said the U.S. will give “no quarter, no mercy” to its enemies, language legal experts say can constitute a war crime under international law.

Hegseth calls his military doctrine the “warrior ethos.”

Historians of fascism have catalogued similar rhetorical patterns — strongman posturing, contempt for constraint — for decades.

I’m a historian of race and nationalism and author of “Blood, Oil and the Axis,” a book about World War II and nationalism in Iraq and Syria. I’ve studied how fascist regimes fight. At its core, fascism is ultranationalism fused with a cult of masculine strength, racial hierarchy, paranoia about socialism and contempt for democracy. It also has a theory of war: Victory belongs to the ruthless and the ideologically pure. Rules are for the weak.

Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan all built their military strategies on some version of this ideology in the run-up to the Second World War. And in each case, the strategy failed, undone by its own contradictions.

The fascist theory of war

Democracies don’t necessarily fight clean wars. During World War II, the Allies firebombed cities, created internment camps and dropped atomic bombs.

What distinguishes fascist powers from democracies is their contempt for rules based on their sense of superiority. In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced that the Nazis would claim the absolute right to override democratic constraints. “This contemptible parliamentarianism … is gone,” he said.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini said it more bluntly in 1936: “We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.”

But rules of engagement function as a control system that ties tactical decisions to strategy, law and the risk of escalation. Discarding them tends to produce the atrocities and strategic blowback that lose wars.

Democratic procedure does similar work: Political scientists who studied 197 conflicts from 1816 to 1987 found that democracies won about 76% of their conflicts and non-democracies 46%, in large part because accountable leaders and public access to information force a government to notice when a plan isn’t working.

A fascist regime that treats democratic constraints as obstacles is likely to decide inconvenient information is an obstacle too. Because of this, in fascist governments, loyalists rank higher than experts. Fascist systems don’t remove people for being wrong; they remove them for insufficient loyalty. The man who tells the leader what he wants to hear rises. The man whose report contradicts the leader’s views endangers himself.

Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, King Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Elena watch a parade held in Hitler’s honor in 1938. Behind them, from left: Joachim von Ribbentrop, Galeazzo Ciano, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess. Bettmann/Getty Images