Speaker 1: I think we're alone now. It doesn't seem to be
Speaker 1: anyone around. I think we're all now. The beating of
Speaker 1: my okay, hello, I didn't hear you come in. Maybe not, huh,
Speaker 1: you stealthy listener have arrived nearly undetected at the underground
Speaker 1: headquarters of Deeply Human, the show about why you do
Speaker 1: what you do. I'm your host, Deessa, but I gotta
Speaker 1: say you have picked quite the moment to home in
Speaker 1: on our encrypted signal and tunnel into the office. We
Speaker 1: are in the midst of an investigation into some of
Speaker 1: the most mystical, disorienting experiences a person can have, and
Speaker 1: the brain science that's involved might help explain big important
Speaker 1: chunks of being human, stuff like religion and creativity. So
Speaker 1: you'll forgive me if I have to gently tape you
Speaker 1: to your chair until we're finished. Security in the podcast
Speaker 1: sector has gotten pretty intense. Okay, music is up. There
Speaker 1: we go, and we're off this time a Deeply Human.
Speaker 1: We're heading into the science of perception to discover why
Speaker 1: we're so eager to find signs of life in our surroundings,
Speaker 1: eager enough to see faces in the clouds or tweak
Speaker 1: out when the house creeks at night, even when you
Speaker 1: were alone, why might you sometimes feel like someone's with you?
Speaker 1: To find out, we begin with a story beneath the
Speaker 1: surface of the ocean. I was diving in a cave
Speaker 1: known beautifully as the Mermaids Layer. That's researchers Stephanie s Faba,
Speaker 1: who studies the rock and microbiology of underwater caves known
Speaker 1: in the Bahamas as blue holes. She took a life
Speaker 1: changing dive. I swam in and the water felt amazing.
Speaker 1: It was perfect temperature. When you go into these underwater caves,
Speaker 1: you have to lay down a guideline. If you don't
Speaker 1: have this guidelining back out to the entrance, then you
Speaker 1: may not find your way back out and you will
Speaker 1: die in the cave. Stephanie is a big deal, recognized
Speaker 1: around the world as a top diver, and her work
Speaker 1: is dangerous. Rob my late husband, had died a few
Speaker 1: months before in a diving accident, and he and I
Speaker 1: had always worked in that cave. Stephanie describes Rob as
Speaker 1: the love of her life, and her grief was still
Speaker 1: very fresh. This was her first dive since its death,
Speaker 1: and the whole time she's in the cave, she's sort
Speaker 1: of subconsciously expecting him to swim along and check in
Speaker 1: like he used to do when they dove together. And
Speaker 1: then I went with the mainline further into the cave,
Speaker 1: quite pleased with what I had found. And then I
Speaker 1: turned my head to look for my guideline and realized
Speaker 1: that I had lost contact with it and also visual
Speaker 1: with it, and it all came together at me suddenly
Speaker 1: at once that you know, Rob wasn't there to help me,
Speaker 1: and now I was in deep, deep trouble. I didn't
Speaker 1: know where it was, and I was trying very hard.
Speaker 1: You know, at that moment, you hear your heart beat
Speaker 1: in your ear. I mean it literally is thumping like crazy.
Speaker 1: And I looked at my air supply. I had probably
Speaker 1: maybe fifteen minutes left, and I think at that point
Speaker 1: I became angry, really angry at myself for being so stupid,
Speaker 1: and then I got really angry at Rob for not
Speaker 1: being there. And then I heard something in my head
Speaker 1: that Rob always said to me, and I kind of
Speaker 1: thought it was kind of a cool phrase, except there
Speaker 1: believe you can believe you can't either way, you're right.
Speaker 1: It was an interesting feeling because it was like he
Speaker 1: was there Stephanie is one of many adventurers who have
Speaker 1: reported experiences like this, a feeling of presence during a
Speaker 1: moment of crisis. Sailors, prisoners of war, astronauts and aviators,
Speaker 1: and distress have made similar reports. To understand why all
Speaker 1: these people suddenly perceive a mysterious presence and sometimes hear
Speaker 1: them too, we have to start with how we perceive
Speaker 1: our own bodies. So I right now I am someone
Speaker 1: or something that is embodied. I occupy a volume of
Speaker 1: space that is my body. I have a sense of
Speaker 1: ownership about my body, my arms and leg and indeed
Speaker 1: my entire body feels like my own. Batman in possession
Speaker 1: of his own arms and legs is a nil Anto Swami.
Speaker 1: He's a science journalist and a research fellow at M
Speaker 1: I T. And although I think I get it pretty
Speaker 1: chill during our conversation, I've been a fan for a minute.
Speaker 1: When we think about where ourselves are really located, you know,
Speaker 1: we don't even if it feels like our whole body
Speaker 1: is ours, Our sense of consciousness doesn't seem like it's
Speaker 1: headquartered in our knees or in our hips. Where does
Speaker 1: the self live within the body, That center of awareness.
Speaker 1: It really recites in our heads. We we have the
Speaker 1: sense that we are somewhere right behind our eyes actually,
Speaker 1: and that turns out is also something that the brain
Speaker 1: works really hard to position the center of awareness in
Speaker 1: that place. But our brains are not foolproof, and sometimes
Speaker 1: that center of awareness gets displaced, which can make for
Speaker 1: an out of body experience. People will say that, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm observing myself lying on the bed, but I am
Speaker 1: somewhere near the ceiling. It's very clear now from experiments
Speaker 1: done in labs and from just the study of the brain,
Speaker 1: that this is an illusion that nothing actually leaves the body.
Speaker 1: But it's certainly the case that people definitely have this experience.
Speaker 1: They reported as being a very strong experience, a very
Speaker 1: strong sensation beneath the water line of consciousness. Our brains
Speaker 1: work really hard to create a smooth, consistent perception of
Speaker 1: the world in our place within it. Let's say you
Speaker 1: go for a solo jog. Well, your brain has to
Speaker 1: compensate for the bouncing of your visual field so that
Speaker 1: you don't get motion sick, just piloting your own body
Speaker 1: through the park, and it's constantly integrating signals from the
Speaker 1: outside world. Birds song, a whiff of diesel exhaust with
Speaker 1: signals coming from inside your body. I have to be
Speaker 1: my right knee is doing that clicking thing again. But
Speaker 1: sometimes the signals get miscategorized, and signals from inside I
Speaker 1: perceived just coming from outside, and that can get really
Speaker 1: really spooky, like someone's knees clicking, And if it's not mine,
Speaker 1: then who's someone else's be here? You know, It's like
Speaker 1: I've accepted I'm in trouble, I've screwed up, I'm probably
Speaker 1: gonna die. So back to Stephanie. She's lost, she's running
Speaker 1: out of air, and suddenly she gets this sense that
Speaker 1: she has company, that her late husband Rob is with her.
Speaker 1: I mean, I could hear his voice so clearly. I
Speaker 1: didn't feel alarm. And when I kind of just settled
Speaker 1: down from that and it was almost accepting my situation,
Speaker 1: I looked up and I saw what I thought was
Speaker 1: a little piece of line, a white line that it
Speaker 1: almost looks like the cables that you have your earpieces on.
Speaker 1: And it turned out to be the guideline, the main line,
Speaker 1: and I got on it, went out and just remembered
Speaker 1: sitting there really so glad to see the yellow sunlight
Speaker 1: and saying, don't you ever do that again. Stephanie eventually
Speaker 1: launched a foundation in Rob's honor, and she actually still dives,
Speaker 1: which I think we can all agree makes her both dedicated,
Speaker 1: professional and tough as nails. Experiences like Stephanie's are rare.
Speaker 1: I've never heard the term feeling of presence before, and
Speaker 1: maybe you hadn't either, but you probably have heard of
Speaker 1: the phantom limb phenomenon, where someone who's had a body
Speaker 1: part amputated still reports sensation in that missing arm or foot.
Speaker 1: No a science journalist, he told me that a neuroscientist
Speaker 1: named Olaf Blanket explains the feeling of presence as the
Speaker 1: full body compliment off a phantom limb. So the way
Speaker 1: that you can and experience a limb that doesn't exist,
Speaker 1: you can literally experience a body that doesn't exist, and
Speaker 1: this is kind of a disruption and aberration off the
Speaker 1: mapping mechanisms in the brain. The brain maintains a map
Speaker 1: of the body, its components, and their positions in space,
Speaker 1: and in the case of phantom limb, this map hasn't
Speaker 1: been updated to reflect a new reality. In a case
Speaker 1: of feeling of presence, the map of the body is
Speaker 1: shifted outside of the body completely. Okay, now is the
Speaker 1: time to grab your special occasion clipboard because we are
Speaker 1: heading into the lab and my duct taped friend is
Speaker 1: gonna get weird. We're about to speak to a senior
Speaker 1: scientist from the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Swiss
Speaker 1: Institute of Technology, a guy named Julio Renu. An experiment
Speaker 1: conducted at Julio's lab was able to induce a feeling
Speaker 1: of presence by sending a little electrical current through a
Speaker 1: read of the brain that integrates sensory signals. If the
Speaker 1: patient was standing, the present was felt asked standing, and
Speaker 1: if the patient was seating, the president was felt as sitting.
Speaker 1: So this is actually led to the idea that what
Speaker 1: was going on is really the misattribution of one's own signals.
Speaker 1: So there was basically the patient was misattributing her own
Speaker 1: signals to the presence. So here's this idea again, that
Speaker 1: a feeling of presence can be caused by the brain
Speaker 1: miscategorizing internal bodily signals as external like if it's not
Speaker 1: my body that I'm feeling, there must be another body nearby.
Speaker 1: For research types like Julio, the big question is, Okay,
Speaker 1: how can you test that idea? You have to somehow
Speaker 1: confuse people into thinking that sensations coming from inside them
Speaker 1: were coming from outside, and then find out if any
Speaker 1: of them had a feeling of presence. But how do
Speaker 1: you confuse people about their own bodies in a lab?
Speaker 1: The answer here as if so often the case with
Speaker 1: life's hard questions. There's robots. Basically, we use a tour
Speaker 1: robotic system, one in front of you that you were
Speaker 1: asked to operate with your hands, and then one on
Speaker 1: the back that was replicating the movements that you were
Speaker 1: performing with your hands. So I'm in your lab, I'm
Speaker 1: manipulating something with my hands. Right, It's a joystick. It's
Speaker 1: a kind of a fancy joystick. What is happening is that,
Speaker 1: basically there is a robotic carm that is touching you
Speaker 1: according to the movement that you perform to the joystick
Speaker 1: that we just mentioned. Okay, so if I pushed the
Speaker 1: joystick forward like I'm getting poked in the back, is
Speaker 1: exactly that. It's real time. It's real time exactly, and
Speaker 1: you're got to be poking yourself and when there is
Speaker 1: perfect synchrony between the tooth, you feel like you're actually
Speaker 1: poking yourself, and that's normal. You know you're in control
Speaker 1: of what you're doing. Everything is fine. Whereas if we
Speaker 1: add a delay between what you do and what you
Speaker 1: receive on the back, this start feeling that he's actually
Speaker 1: somebody else doing this. On first listen, adding a delay
Speaker 1: into the system might seem like a small thing, like
Speaker 1: so what if I push forward on my joystick and
Speaker 1: there's a little lag before I get my poke in
Speaker 1: the back? Who's in a rush to get a poke
Speaker 1: in the back? But that lag is the detail on
Speaker 1: which the whole experiment hinges. Like imagine you're walking alone
Speaker 1: at night. You pass under a stream lamp and you
Speaker 1: can see your shadow walking beside you. But then she
Speaker 1: misses a step and now her footfalls land just to
Speaker 1: beat after yours. That little leg wouldn't feel negligible. It
Speaker 1: would be what yourself distressing. And similarly, in Julio's lab,
Speaker 1: you'd have the sensation that this robot arm behind you
Speaker 1: is controlled by you in real time. It's a simple
Speaker 1: reflection of your movements. Like a shadow. You are the
Speaker 1: only agent in command until that little leg, and then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden it feels like, maybe you're not
Speaker 1: entirely in control. So if not, you who About one
Speaker 1: third of Julio's research participants on prompted reported feeling a presence.
Speaker 1: What did they actually say? There was like fence. Somebody said, oh,
Speaker 1: I feel like there was somebody behind me touching me
Speaker 1: it was not me, or he felt creepy. Oh. A
Speaker 1: guy said, oh, I felt like that there was a
Speaker 1: monkey replicating my movements on my back. But typically it
Speaker 1: was reported like as if there was somebody watching them
Speaker 1: and then replicating what we're doing, and that it didn't
Speaker 1: feel like it was them doing it at all. Successfully
Speaker 1: inducing feeling of presence. In this way, I can help
Speaker 1: explain how the phenomenon occurs outside the lab. Two did
Speaker 1: anybody say ghosts? No, they didn't say ghosts. I think
Speaker 1: I don't know. I have not really big experiences with ghosts, honestly,
Speaker 1: But you get touched by ghosts, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: don't know. You know what, I don't know if you're
Speaker 1: supposed to get by ghosts, but is going absolutely not? Okay,
Speaker 1: yeah you see so that that would make sense? Then yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I'm you know what, I'm sorry you were like, does
Speaker 1: that's a breach of scientific protocol ghost don't type. Well,
Speaker 1: there you go, so don't say you didn't learn anything
Speaker 1: from this rigorous science based program. Someone who knows more
Speaker 1: than me about ghost dues and don't is Bruce Hood.
Speaker 1: He's the director of the Cognitive Development Center in the
Speaker 1: School of Psychological Science at Bristol University in the UK,
Speaker 1: and he wrote a book called super Sense that investigates
Speaker 1: white people believe in ghosts and stuff like past lives.
Speaker 1: In telepathy, Bruce explains that humans are designed to be
Speaker 1: sensitive to other social creatures, were always scanning our environments
Speaker 1: for other animals like us. So one of the really
Speaker 1: interesting phenomenon is that people see faces all over the place,
Speaker 1: and so we seem to have a face detecting system.
Speaker 1: It just looks for a couple of eyes and anything
Speaker 1: that looks like a mouth. So that leads to that
Speaker 1: really interesting phenomenon called paradilia, where people see faces in
Speaker 1: the most weird, wonderful things like slices of pizza or
Speaker 1: you know, a coffee stain or a water stain on
Speaker 1: the wall. What do you mean to Bruce's writing was
Speaker 1: this fascinating explanation of hyperactive agency detection, a term I've
Speaker 1: never heard before. What's hyperactive agency detection? Okay, So within
Speaker 1: the human brain, we have specialized systems for detecting other
Speaker 1: social animals, and we have, if you like, dedicated mechanisms
Speaker 1: for identifying others and their form and their shapes and
Speaker 1: their movements. And what's going on with a hypersensive agency
Speaker 1: detector is that you're attributing or anthropomorphizing things which aren't alive.
Speaker 1: So you're actually over interpreting things. Okay, Then, once we
Speaker 1: categorize something as a living thing, what kind of assumptions
Speaker 1: do we make about it? Well, we we see it
Speaker 1: as having gold directed movement or intentions. Agency detection isn't
Speaker 1: something we're learning from our parents. Bruce thinks it's probably
Speaker 1: an innate faculty we've developed to keep us safe from threats.
Speaker 1: We have a perceptual system which is hyper sensitive to
Speaker 1: the possibility of there being another being out there, hiding
Speaker 1: in the trees or amongst the woods. And we think
Speaker 1: it's probably that sensitive because that's the way it evolved,
Speaker 1: because it is better to assume that there's a possible
Speaker 1: another agent hiding out there rather than just to ignore it.
Speaker 1: So your systems was biased to see these patterns and structures.
Speaker 1: Let's say you're a cave person sitting in the firelight
Speaker 1: beside your special someone on a romantic evening. You're interrupted
Speaker 1: by a nearby rustling of the high grass, and you
Speaker 1: don't know for sure if it's a lion or if
Speaker 1: it's just a breeze. Well, people who presume it's a
Speaker 1: lion grab a spear and then find out it's just
Speaker 1: the wind are gonna look dumb in front of their dates.
Speaker 1: But people who presume it's just the wind continue making
Speaker 1: out and then find out it's a lion are going
Speaker 1: to be eaten in front of their dates. So the
Speaker 1: idea here is that evolution would favor the folks with
Speaker 1: the hair trigger, who readily perceived the presence of another agent.
Speaker 1: But again, our brains aren't foolproof. We're prone to false positives,
Speaker 1: to thinking someone's there even when we're alone. Our brains
Speaker 1: are always looking for patterns in the chaos. We see
Speaker 1: human faces in the knotted bark of a tree, we
Speaker 1: presume it must have been a footfall that snapped a twig.
Speaker 1: And that's partly because we can't really perceive randomness. Our
Speaker 1: brain always imposes a degree of structure or we can't know,
Speaker 1: you can't. It's really tough. I mean in talking to friends,
Speaker 1: I don't you know the kind of talk that you
Speaker 1: do after like two cocktails, when you're solving none of
Speaker 1: the world's problems. But it was just like pattern junkies, like,
Speaker 1: we just gotta have it, you know, and we see
Speaker 1: it where there are patterns, and we see it where
Speaker 1: there are no noise. If you're having a couple of cocktails,
Speaker 1: you'll see more patterns because of course, what happens there
Speaker 1: is you're deactivating the frontal lobe systems. So these are
Speaker 1: the areas in the front of the brain, and that's
Speaker 1: how alcohol works as a depressed and it turns this
Speaker 1: off and then suddenly you see connections and you become
Speaker 1: more creative. And I'm writing off every bar tab on
Speaker 1: my taxes this year. Um, you've done a lot of
Speaker 1: work that investigates how hyperactive agency detection, among other things,
Speaker 1: might relate to our superstitions. Yeah. I wrote a book
Speaker 1: trying to give a scientific account for why people believe
Speaker 1: in the unbelievable, and at that time, there was a
Speaker 1: lot of talk about religion and how people are indoctrinated
Speaker 1: to believe in ghosts and spirits and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: And I was just trying to address the balance and say, well, actually,
Speaker 1: you don't have to be religious to sort of infer
Speaker 1: that there's all this agency in the world. I argued that, actually,
Speaker 1: you know, people who are secular or even atheists will
Speaker 1: have exactly the same sort of misconceptions and beliefs, which
Speaker 1: are tanned amount to supernatural thinking. I'm generally a secular
Speaker 1: kind of gal, but I still cross all the fingers
Speaker 1: on both hands when I'm waiting for good news, and
Speaker 1: I sometimes knock on wood in business meetings. I don't
Speaker 1: actually think those behaviors will change the outcome of events.
Speaker 1: I just feel better to do. Like, our habits of
Speaker 1: mind don't always neatly align with our carefully considered world views.
Speaker 1: So all I think religions have done is they've built
Speaker 1: upon our tendency to see structure and agency and essences
Speaker 1: and causality. All these things pre existed religion. Our cave divers.
Speaker 1: Stephanie seems to hold a pretty similar position. I don't
Speaker 1: believe in God, I don't believe and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: our ghosts or anything like that. But I do recognize
Speaker 1: that some of the things that we do experience, certainly.
Speaker 1: I mean, when we look at our ancestors so long
Speaker 1: ago that tried to explain light ng and thunder and
Speaker 1: things like that, you try to find a way to
Speaker 1: explain things, and that's perfectly normal. Bruce wages that if
Speaker 1: you could start a human society from scratch on an
Speaker 1: island somewhere far removed from our existing traditions, my bed
Speaker 1: is they would soon come up with their own demons,
Speaker 1: their own gods, and their own explanations of the world,
Speaker 1: which are equally the same sort of supernatural beliefs that
Speaker 1: we have in the case of conventional religion. So I
Speaker 1: think it's a natural consequence of the way that we
Speaker 1: have evolved systems to kind of respond to threats, to
Speaker 1: try and control the world around this to see the
Speaker 1: whole being grand and the sums that were all of
Speaker 1: these things I think are just part and parcel of
Speaker 1: the way we interpret the world. When I was tiny,
Speaker 1: my mom was on to put me to bed, and
Speaker 1: she used to freak me out by doing this puppety
Speaker 1: thing with her right hand. It was just a bare
Speaker 1: hand like rings and everything, but her long brown fingers,
Speaker 1: and her thumb would be pointed at me like a beak,
Speaker 1: and she'd slowly advance this little creature towards me, and
Speaker 1: every night I swore I wasn't gonna fall for it
Speaker 1: this time, but then she'd start doing the voice, which
Speaker 1: went he and I couldn't help it. Like all of
Speaker 1: my attention turned towards this hand because it was alive.
Speaker 1: It was getting closer to my face. And I can
Speaker 1: still remember the shape of her bunched finger tips, which
Speaker 1: seemed so clearly a snout, with her thumb as the
Speaker 1: working jaw. And even now when I look at my
Speaker 1: own hand in that position, the bedtime animal is resurrected
Speaker 1: at the end of my own wrist. We can be
Speaker 1: spooked by the features of our own design, even just
Speaker 1: sensing our own bodies. If something goes wrong and we
Speaker 1: can't differentiate what's happening inside from what's happening outside, the
Speaker 1: results aren't just distressing. They could feel paranormal. And even
Speaker 1: when our brains and bodies are humming along and working order,
Speaker 1: we look for signs of life so vigilantly that we
Speaker 1: perceived hidden agents in the rustling grass. We find faces
Speaker 1: in our snack foods. Even when we were alone. We
Speaker 1: see creatures everywhere, friends, foes, gods, or even just fingers
Speaker 1: and thumbs. I think, well, at our next team meeting,
Speaker 1: Deeply Human will be talking menopause. Why do both women
Speaker 1: and whales go through it? Deeply Human is a co
Speaker 1: production of the BBC World Service in American public media
Speaker 1: with I Heart Media, and it's hosted by me, Tessa. Okay, buddy,
Speaker 1: let's get you out of that chair. Huh h man
Speaker 1: running through your own neighborhood with a microphone and you
Speaker 1: freaks people out.