Sensing ghosts and other dangerous beings: uncertainty, sensory deprivation, and the feeling of presence

ABSTRACT

When alone in the darkness, humans often fear various “unseen others” like ghosts, monsters, burglars, or animals. In a laboratory study, we aimed to induce the feeling of presence (FoP) via uncertainty by setting participants into a sensory deprivation context and experimentally priming them with the information that another person may enter the room. Grounded in the predictive processing framework, we hypothesized that FoP would occur and increase with participants’ uncertainty (due to insufficient exteroceptive data input) and with experimental manipulation of prior expectations connected to the presence of other agents. We sampled 126 participants and recorded their experiences during a 30-minute-long sensory deprivation period using questionnaires, physiological signals, and semi-structured interviews. We observed that while uncertainty was positively associated with FoP, experimental priming showed no clear associations, and the associations with psychological dispositions were mixed.

KEYWORDS:

• Feeling of presence
• sensory deprivation
• agency detection
• predictive processing
• uncertainty

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for all the advice and patience with my writing provided by Jakub Cigán, Martin Lang, and all my other colleagues from LEVYNA Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion. I also thank Davide Ermacora for providing culturally specific examples of spooky anthropomorphic agents.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 No pleasant FoPs occurred in this study.

2 Smell and taste were not included for an expected low probability of their connection with FoP experience.

3 Explicitly asking participants to click when they experience FoP would reveal the rationale of our study. Thus, we instructed them to click while feeling “uncertainty, something unusual, unpleasant or just weird” (see Chap. 2.2.2.), which was apparently too vague; still, it could have slightly prime participants to expect such kind of feelings.

4 This is the approximate half of the FoP cases captured via questionnaire, which might be caused a) by the fact that participants actually heard slight noises (see Discussion); b) some feelings might have been so subtle that participants did not feel them as worth mentioning.

5 Besides FoP related sensations, participants reported various “unusual” experiences—strange feelings in the body, feeling like their body is moving, seeing colorful dots and shapes or even fuller pictures, e.g., faces (but without the feeling of presence). Sometimes, participants were on the borderline between dreaming and a wake state, and they could—still consciously—wander through imaginative landscapes or situations, talking with people there, etc. Interestingly, 11 participants saw a light in the room, often like shining from above the sleeping mask on their face. However, we excluded these feelings from the analysis, focusing specifically on FoPs.

6 28 participants spontaneously mentioned that their sense of touch or smell intensified during the trial; similarly, 13 participants noticed strange feelings in their body (pressure, tingle …) and many mentioned simply listening to their bodies’ sounds.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was supported by the Internal Grant Agency of Masaryk University (IGA). This work was supported by the research infrastructure HUME Lab Experimental Humanities Laboratory, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University.