New AI-based theory explains your weird dreams

Dreams are weird. According to a new theory, that's what makes them useful.

Lots of animals dream, but nobody is quite sure why. Researchers are divided over if dreaming is a mere side effect of other brain functions or if it serves its own purpose.

A number of theories attempting to explain dreaming exist. These include the ideas that dreams are needed to regulate our emotional health (the grandchild of Freudian theory) and that they help us psychologically practice for encountering real-world phenomena. The leading contemporary theory is that dreams are involved with or even caused by memory processing and storage.

A newpaper published in the journal Patterns proposes a new hypothesis: dreaming is the brain’s attempt to generalize our experiences, much like how randomness must be used to teach computers how to recognize real world-data. The paper also proposes ways to test it.

Perchance to dream?

The author, Erik Hoel, calls his idea the “overfitted brain hypothesis.” It is based in part on the learning process of artificial neural networks, which are computer algorithms that seek to find patterns in large data sets. These systems are often given training data that is similar, but not identical, to the data that they will analyze later. Practice data is often purposefully contaminated with extra noise and chaos. This is done in order to prevent “overfitting” — in other words, to prevent the neural network from becoming too “narrow minded” and hence unable to identify the bigger picture.

Dr. Hoel’s new hypothesis argues that your brain does something similar through dreaming. The “hallucinogenic, category-breaking, and fabulist quality of dreams” allow our brains to introduce “warped or ‘corrupted'” sensory input for consideration.

In this way, the strangeness of our dreams is a feature rather than a bug.

By presenting us with occasionally bizarre takes on the world, our brains keep us from getting too fixed on the specifics of a task and make us better able to generalize. Dr. Hoel summarizes this rather poetically by saying, “Dreams are there to keep you from becoming too fitted to the model of the world.”

Can Hoel’s dream hypothesis be tested?

Dr. Hoel suggests that evidence for this already exists. It has been shown that repeatedly performing a novel task while awake is a good way to assure that you’ll dream about it that night. He proposes that actions like this trigger the brain’s defense against overfitting, and the weird dreams are the result.

Dr. Hoel’s idea does not necessarily exclude other hypotheses about sleep or dreaming that currently have a fair amount of empirical support. Importantly, he also proposes a few ways to test the predictions made by his hypothesis.

If it is correct, then the effects of sleep deprivation on the ability to memorize would be different from its effects on the ability to generalize. Dr. Hoel suggests that a well designed test examining if sleep or dream deprivation impacts the ability of mice to generalize fears could provide evidence for his hypothesis. Tracking synaptic changes in response to dreams could also be an avenue worth exploring.

Additionally, Dr. Hoel proposes that dream-like stimuli, such as virtual reality or video, could provide similar benefits as dreaming if the over-fitting theory is correct. He explains that this could also serve as the foundation of an experiment to test the hypothesis as well as a possible application of it:

“For example, it may be that a pilot who has been flying for a long period of time is beginning to overfit to their task, and a quick but intense exposure to an entirely different sort of visual stimulus (like a dream-like nature scene in VR) could stave off some of the effects of sleep deprivation. The impact of substitutions can be examined both behaviorally but also at the neurophysiological level of REM rebound.”

If the hypothesis catches on, we may expect to see future studies that seek to confirm or deny the predictions it makes. Until then, we can only speculate on the idea’s possible merits and failings within the framework of what we already know to be true.

Though, I suppose we can also sleep on it.

(Source: Big Think)

The forgotten medieval habit of 'two sleeps'

 For millennia, people slept in two shifts – once in the evening, and once in the morning. But why? And how did the habit disappear?

It was around 23:00 on 13 April 1699, in a small village in the north of England. Nine-year-old Jane Rowth blinked her eyes open and squinted out into the moody evening shadows. She and her mother had just awoken from a short sleep.

Mrs Rowth got up and went over to the fireside of their modest home, where she began smoking a pipe. Just then, two men appeared by the window. They called out and instructed her to get ready to go with them.

As Jane later explained to a courtroom, her mother had evidently been expecting the visitors. She went with them freely – but first whispered to her daughter to "lye still, and shee would come againe in the morning". Perhaps Mrs Rowth had some nocturnal task to complete. Or maybe she was in trouble, and knew that leaving the house was a risk. 

Either way, Jane's mother didn't get to keep her promise – she never returned home. That night, Mrs Rowth was brutally murdered, and her body was discovered in the following days. The crime was never solved.

Nearly 300 years later, in the early 1990s, the historian Roger Ekirch walked through the arched entranceway to the Public Record Office in London – an imposing gothic building that housed the UK's National Archives from 1838 until 2003. There, among the endless rows of ancient vellum papers and manuscripts, he found Jane's testimony. And something about it struck him as odd. 

Like many Romans, the historian Livy may have been a practitioner of biphasic sleep – he alludes to the method in his magnum opus, The History of Rome (Credit: Alamy)

Originally, Ekirch had been researching a book about the history of night-time, and at the time he had been looking through records that spanned the era between the early Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution. He was dreading writing the chapter on sleep, thinking that it was not only a universal necessity – but a biological constant. He was sceptical that he'd find anything new.  

So far, he had found court depositions particularly illuminating. "They're a wonderful source for social historians," says Ekirch, a professor at Virginia Tech, US. "They comment upon activity that's oftentimes unrelated to the crime itself."

But as he read through Jane's criminal deposition, two words seemed to carry an echo of a particularly tantalising detail of life in the 17th Century, which he had never encountered before – "first sleep".

"I can cite the original document almost verbatim," says Ekirch, whose exhilaration at his discovery is palpable even decades later.

In her testimony, Jane describes how just before the men arrived at their home, she and her mother had arisen from their first sleep of the evening. There was no further explanation – the interrupted sleep was just stated matter-of-factly, as if it were entirely unremarkable. "She referred to it as though it was utterly normal," says Ekirch.

A first sleep implies a second sleep – a night divided into two halves. Was this just a familial quirk, or something more?

An omnipresence

Over the coming months, Ekirch scoured the archives and found many more references to this mysterious phenomenon of double sleeping, or "biphasic sleep" as he later called it.

Some were fairly banal, such as the mention by the weaver Jon Cokburne, who simply dropped it into his testimony incidentally. But others were darker, such as that of Luke Atkinson of the East Riding of Yorkshire. He managed to squeeze in an early morning murder between his sleeps one night – and according to his wife, often used the time to frequent other people's houses for sinister deeds.

When Ekirch expanded his search to include online databases of other written records, it soon became clear the phenomenon was more widespread and normalised than he had ever imagined.

For a start, first sleeps are mentioned in one of the most famous works of medieval literature, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (written between 1387 and 1400), which is presented as a storytelling contest between a group of pilgrims. They're also included in the poet William Baldwin's Beware the Cat (1561) – a satirical book considered by some to be the first ever novel, which centres around a man who learns to understand the language of a group of terrifying supernatural cats, one of whom, Mouse-slayer, is on trial for promiscuity.

But that's just the beginning. Ekirch found casual references to the system of twice-sleeping in every conceivable form, with hundreds in letters, diaries, medical textbooks, philosophical writings, newspaper articles and plays.

The practice even made it into ballads, such as "Old Robin of Portingale. "…And at the wakening of your first sleepe, You shall have a hot drink made, And at the wakening of your next sleepe, Your sorrows will have a slake…"

Biphasic sleep was not unique to England, either – it was widely practised throughout the preindustrial world. In France, the initial sleep was the "premier somme"; in Italy, it was "primo sonno". In fact, Eckirch found evidence of the habit in locations as distant as Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Australia, South America and the Middle East.

One colonial account from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1555 described how the Tupinambá people would eat dinner after their first sleep, while another – from 19th Century Muscat, Oman – explained that the local people would retire for their first sleep before 22:00.

And far from being a peculiarity of the Middle Ages, Ekirch began to suspect that the method had been the dominant way of sleeping for millennia – an ancient default that we inherited from our prehistoric ancestors. The first record Ekirch found was from the 8th Century BC, in the 12,109-line Greek epic The Odyssey, while the last hints of its existence dated to the early 20th Century, before it somehow slipped into oblivion.

How did it work? Why did people do it? And how could something that was once so completely normal, have been forgotten so completely?

A spare moment

In the 17th Century, a night of sleep went something like this.

From as early as 21:00 to 23:00, those fortunate enough to afford them would begin flopping onto mattresses stuffed with straw or rags – alternatively it might have contained feathers, if they were wealthy – ready to sleep for a couple of hours. (At the bottom of the social ladder, people would have to make do with nestling down on a scattering of heather or, worse, a bare earth floor – possibly even without a blanket.)

At the time, most people slept communally, and often found themselves snuggled up with a cosy assortment of bedbugs, fleas, lice, family members, friends, servants and – if they were travelling – total strangers.

To minimise any awkwardness, sleep involved a number of strict social conventions, such as avoiding physical contact or too much fidgeting, and there were designated sleeping positions. For example, female children would typically lie at one side of the bed, with the oldest nearest the wall, followed by the mother and father, then male children – again arranged by age – then non-family members.

A couple of hours later, people would begin rousing from this initial slumber. The night-time wakefulness usually lasted from around 23:00 to about 01:00, depending on what time they went to bed. It was not generally caused by noise or other disturbances in the night – and neither was it initiated by any kind of alarm (these were only invented in 1787, by an American man who – somewhat ironically – needed to wake up on time to sell clocks). Instead, the waking happened entirely naturally, just as it does in the morning.

The period of wakefulness that followed was known as "the watch" – and it was a surprisingly useful window in which to get things done. "[The records] describe how people did just about anything and everything after they awakened from their first sleep," says Ekirch.

Under the weak glow of the Moon, stars, and oil lamps or "rush lights" – a kind of candle for ordinary households, made from the waxed stems of rushes – people would tend to ordinary tasks, such as adding wood to the fire, taking remedies, or going to urinate (often into the fire itself).

For peasants, waking up meant getting back down to more serious work – whether this involved venturing out to check on farm animals or carrying out household chores, such as patching cloth, combing wool or peeling the rushes to be burned. One servant Ekirch came across even brewed a batch of beer for her Westmorland employer one night, between midnight and 02:00. Naturally, criminals took the opportunity to skulk around and make trouble – like the murderer in Yorkshire.

But the watch was also a time for religion.  

For Christians, there were elaborate prayers to be completed, with specific ones prescribed for this exact parcel of time. One father called it the most "profitable" hour, when – after digesting your dinner and casting off the labours of the world – "no one will look for you except for God”.

Those of a philosophical disposition, meanwhile, might use the watch as a peaceful moment to ruminate on life and ponder new ideas. In the late 18th Century, a London tradesman even invented a special device for remembering all your most searing nightly insights – a "nocturnal remembrancer", which consisted of an enclosed pad of parchment with a horizontal opening that could be used as a writing guide.  

But most of all, the watch was useful for socialising – and for sex.

As Ekirch explains in his book, At Day's Close: A History of Nighttime, people would often just stay in bed and chat. And during those strange twilight hours, bedfellows could share a level of informality and casual conversation that was hard to achieve during the day.

For husbands and wives who managed to navigate the logistics of sharing a bed with others, it was also a convenient interval for physical intimacy – if they'd had a long day of manual labour, the first sleep took the edge off their exhaustion and the period afterwards was thought to be an excellent time to conceive copious numbers of children.

Once people had been awake for a couple of hours, they'd usually head back to bed. This next step was considered a "morning" sleep and might last until dawn, or later. Just as today, when people finally woke up for good depended on what time they went to bed.

Communal sleeping meant that people usually had someone to chat with when they woke up for "the watch" (Credit: Getty Images)

An ancient adaptation

According to Ekirch, there are references to the system of sleeping twice peppered throughout the classical era, suggesting that it was already common then. It's casually dropped into works by such illustrious figures as the Greek biographer Plutarch (from the First Century AD), the Greek traveller Pausanias (from the Second Century AD), the Roman historian Livy and the Roman poet Virgil.

Later, the practise was embraced by Christians, who immediately saw the watch's potential as an opportunity for the recital of psalms and confessions. In the Sixth Century AD, Saint Benedict required that monks rise at midnight for these activities, and the idea eventually spread throughout Europe – gradually filtering through to the masses.  

      

But humans aren't the only animals to discover the benefits of dividing up sleep – it's widespread in the natural world, with many species resting in two or even several separate stretches. This helps them to remain active at the most beneficial times of day, such as when they're most likely to find food while avoiding ending up as a snack themselves. 

One example is the ring-tailed lemur. These iconic Madagascan primates, with their spooky red eyes and upright black-and-white tails, have remarkably similar sleeping patterns to preindustrial humans – they're "cathemeral", meaning they're up at night and during the day.

"There are broad swaths of variability among primates, in terms of how they distribute their activity throughout the 24-hour period," says David Samson, director of the sleep and human evolution laboratory at the University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada. And if double-sleeping is natural for some lemurs, he wondered: might it be the way we evolved to sleep too? 

Ekirch had long been harbouring the same hunch. But for decades, there was nothing concrete to prove this – or to illuminate why it might have vanished.

Then back 1995, Ekirch was doing some online reading late one night when he found an article in the New York Times about a sleep experiment from a few years before.

The research was conducted by Thomas Wehr, a sleep scientist from the National Institute of Mental Health, and involved 15 men. After an initial week of observing their normal sleeping patterns, they were deprived of artificial illumination at night to shorten their hours of "daylight" – whether naturally or electrically generated – from the usual 16 hours to just 10. The rest of the time, they were confined to a bedroom with no lights or windows, and fully enveloped in its velvety blackness. They weren't allowed to play music or exercise – and were nudged towards resting and sleeping instead.

At the start of the experiment, the men all had normal nocturnal habits – they slept in one continuous shift that lasted from the late evening until the morning. Then something incredible happened.

After four weeks of the 10-hour days, their sleeping patterns had been transformed – they no longer slept in one stretch, but in two halves roughly the same length. These were punctuated by a one-to-three-hour period in which they were awake. Measurements of the sleep hormone melatonin showed that their circadian rhythms had adjusted too, so their sleep was altered at a biological level.

Wehr had reinvented biphasic sleep. "It [reading about the experiment] was, apart from my wedding and the birth of my children, probably the most exciting moment in my life," says Ekirch. When he emailed Wehr to explain the extraordinary match between his own historical research, and the scientific study, "I think I can tell you that he was every bit as exhilarated as I was," he says.

Ekirch wonders if today people might remember fewer dreams than our ancestors did, because it's less common to wake up in the middle of the night (Credit: Alamy)

More recently, Samson's own research has backed up these findings – with an exciting twist.

Back in 2015, together with collaborators from a number of other universities, Samson recruited local volunteers from the remote community of Manadena in northeastern Madagascar for a study. The location is a large village that backs on to a national park – and there is no infrastructure for electricity, so nights are almost as dark as they would have been for millennia.

The participants, who were mostly farmers, were asked to wear an "actimeter" – a sophisticated activity-sensing device that can be used to track sleep cycles – for 10 days, to track their sleep patterns.

"What we found was that [in those without artificial light], there was a period of activity right after midnight until about 01:00-01:30 in the morning," says Samson, "and then it would drop back to sleep and to inactivity until they woke up at 06:00, usually coinciding with the rising of the Sun."

As it turns out, biphasic sleep never vanished entirely – it lives on in pockets of the world today.

A new social pressure 

Collectively, this research has also given Ekirch the explanation he had been craving for why much of humanity abandoned the two-sleep system, starting from the early 19th Century. As with other recent shifts in our behaviour, such as a move towards depending on clock-time, the answer was the Industrial Revolution.

In the 17th Century, wealthy elites usually slept in four-poster wooden beds with curtains, to keep the occupant warmer and exclude the prying eyes of visitors (Credit: Alamy)

"Artificial illumination became more prevalent, and more powerful – first there was gas [lighting], which was introduced for the first time ever in London," says Ekirch, "and then, of course, electric lighting toward the end of the century. And in addition to altering people's circadian rhythms. artificial illumination also naturally allowed people to stay up later."

However, though people weren't going to bed at 21:00 anymore, they still had to wake up at the same time in the morning – so their rest was truncated. Ekirch believes that this made their sleep deeper, because it was compressed.

As well as altering the population's circadian rhythms, the artificial lighting lengthened the first sleep, and shortened the second. "And I was able to trace [this], almost decade by decade, over the course of the 19th Century," says Ekirch.

(Intriguingly, Samson's study in Madagascar involved a second part – in which half the participants were given artificial lights for a week, to see if they made any difference. And this case, the researchers found that it had no impact on their segmented sleep patterns. However, the researchers point out that a week may not be long enough for artificial lights to lead to major changes. So the mystery continues…)

Even if artificial lighting was not fully to blame, by the end of the 20th Century, the division between the two sleeps had completely disappeared – the Industrial Revolution hadn't just changed our technology, but our biology, too.

A new anxiety

One major side-effect of much of humanity's shift in sleeping habits has been a change in attitudes. For one thing, we quickly began shaming those who oversleep, and developed a preoccupation with the link between waking up early and being productive.

"But for me, the most gratifying aspect of all this," says Ekert, "relates to those who suffer from middle-of-the-night insomnia." He explains that our sleeping patterns are now so altered, any wakefulness in the middle of the night can lead us to panic. "I don't mean to make light of that – indeed, I suffer from sleep disorders myself, actually. And I take medication for it… " But when people learn that this may have been entirely normal for millennia, he finds that it lessens their anxiety somewhat.  

However, before Ekirch's research spawns a spin off of the Paleo diet, and people start throwing away their lamps – or worse, artificially splitting their sleep in two with alarm clocks – he's keen to stress that the abandonment of the two-sleep system does not mean the quality of our slumber today is worse.

Despite near-constant headlines about the prevalence of sleep problems, Ekirch has previously argued that, in some ways, the 21st Century is a golden age for sleep – a time when most of us no longer have to worry about being murdered in our beds, freezing to death, or flicking off lice, when we can slumber without pain, the threat of fire, or having strangers snuggled up next to us.

In short, single periods of slumber might not be "natural". And yet, neither are fancy ergonomic mattresses or modern hygiene. "More seriously, there's no going back because conditions have changed," says Ekirch. 

So, we may be missing out on confidential midnight chats in bed, psychedelic dreams, and night-time philosophical revelations – but at least we won't wake up covered in angry red bites.

(Source: BBC)

I knew that was going to happen… The truth about premonitions

 Uncanny and creepy, premonitions that turn out to be authentic can feel profound. But is there science to explain them?

Around seven years ago, Garrett, was in a local Pizza Hut with his friends, having a day so ordinary that it is cumbersome to describe. He was 16 – or thereabouts – and had been told by teachers to go around nearby businesses and ask for gift vouchers that the school could use as prizes in a raffle. There were five other teenagers with Garrett, and they’d just finished speaking to the restaurant manager when suddenly, out of nowhere, Garrett’s his body was flooded with shock. He felt cold and clammy and had an “overwhelming sense that something had happened”. He desperately tried to stop himself crying in front of his peers.

“It was like I’d just been told something terrible,” the now 23-year-old from the southwest of England says (his name has been changed on his request). “I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was, but I just knew something had happened.” Garrett returned home and tried to distract himself from a feeling he describes as grief. The phone rang. His mum answered it. A few hours earlier – around the time Garrett was in the restaurant – his grandfather had died from a sudden heart attack while on a cruise.

Although there’s no way of knowing how many people worldwide feel that they “sensed” a loved one’s death before being told, it’s a phenomenon that’s been explored in everything from Star Wars to Downtown Abbey to Kung Fu Panda 2. Perhaps one of your own relatives has a story similar to Garrett’s – perhaps you dismissed it, perhaps you treat it as family lore. Is there any evidence to suggest this phenomenon is real – that humans can sense one another’s passing from a distance, that Garrett’s emotional afternoon was anything more than a coincidence? In a word, no. Meanwhile, it is well documented that the human mind is a bundle of bias: false memories, grief hallucinations and confirmation bias can easily explain these experiences. Besides which, for every person who feels a shiver when their loved one dies, there are hundreds more who were quietly eating pizza or happily riding a rollercoaster or bored doing maths homework completely unaware of their loss.

Ripple effects: ‘There are many accounts of crisis telepathy.’ Illustration: Eva Bee/The Observer

But are these dismissals too quick? Too easy? Some scientists claim that the complex world of quantum physics could be used to explain the paranormal (other scientists say they’re unbelievably wrong.) What can stories like Garrett’s tell us about what we do and don’t know? What we are and aren’t willing to believe? About the disconnect between what some claim to experience and others claim is impossible?

Brian Josephson is your prototypical professor. With tufts of white hair atop his head, a knitted vest and a glasses chain keeping his specs safe, he says via Zoom that, “The academic community is a kind of club. You’re supposed to believe certain things and you run into problems you disagree with.” In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on superconductivity. Later, during his time as a professor at the University of Cambridge, he began using quantum mechanics to explore consciousness and the paranormal.

Quantum entanglement – nicknamed “spooky action at a distance” by Albert Einstein – describes the (proven) phenomenon of two spatially separated particles influencing each other, even over large distances. While the phenomenon is subatomic, academics such as Josephson have theorised that quantum entanglement could explain phenomena like telepathy and psychokinesis.

“There are many accounts of crisis telepathy,” says Dean Radin, a parapsychologist and author of Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality. “Does entanglement explain these effects? No, in the sense that entanglement as observed today in the physics lab, between pairs of photons, is extremely fragile and typically lasts only minuscule fractions of a second. But also, yes, in that we are at the earliest stages of understanding entanglement.”

Radin says studies in quantum biology show that entanglement-type effects are present in living systems (academics from Oxford have successfully entangled bacteria) and he believes the human brain could in turn have quantum properties. “If that is subsequently demonstrated – I think it’s just a matter of time – then that would go a long way towards providing a physical mechanism for telepathy,” he says.

Put down your pen, scrunch up your letter to the editor. You only need an explanation for telepathy if you believe in telepathy in the first place, and experiments purporting its existence have been widely debunked. Josephson and Radin are regularly criticised by peers. In 2001, when Royal Mail released a set of stamps to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize, there was outrage when Josephson wrote in an accompanying booklet that quantum physics may lead to an explanation for telepathy. In this very newspaper, academics branded the claim “utter rubbish” and “complete nonsense”.

When reviewing Entangled Minds for The Skeptic’s Dictionary, philosophy professor and professional sceptic Robert Carroll wrote that Radin’s book was “aimed at non-scientists who are likely to be impressed by references to quantum physics”.

Garrett has no idea what happened to him on the day his grandad died, but he is certain that it happened. He believes in some kind of “interconnectedness” between people. “I think if it’s happened to you, then there’s an underlying accepting of it,” he says.

This is a sentiment shared by the self-described “naturally sceptical” Cassius Griesbach, a 24-year-old from Wisconsin who lost his grandfather in 2012. Griesbach says that he “shot awake” on the night his grandad passed and began to sob uncontrollably. “It felt like something just rocked me, physically,” he says. When his dad called moments later to say his grandad had died, a teenaged Griesbach replied: “I know.”

Griesbach doesn’t blame anyone for being sceptical of his story. “The further you get away from it, the more I would like to write it off as a coincidence,” he says, “But every time I sit down and think about it, it feels like it’s something else.” Griesbach is “not super religious” and doesn’t believe in ghosts. “ If it is something to do with actual science, I would think that would be science that we are nowhere near yet, you know?”

Many would disagree, arguing that the answer lies in the social sciences. In 2014, Michael Shermer married Jennifer, who had moved from Köln to California and brought with her a 1978 radio belonging to her late grandfather. Shermer tried in vain to fix it before tossing it in a drawer, where it lay silent until the couple said their wedding vows at home months later. Just as Jennifer was keenly feeling the absence of her grandfather, the radio began to play a romantic song. It continued all night before it stopped working for good the next day.

“It’s just one of those anomalous experiences,” says Shermer, a science historian, professional sceptic and author of The Believing Brain: from Spiritual Faiths to Political Convictions. How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. “Randomness and chance play a big role in life and in the world, and our brains are designed to see patterns not randomness.” Shermer argues that experiences like Garrett’s and Griesbach’s are statistically more likely than we think.

“You have billions of people worldwide having dozens of dreams [each] at night,” he says. “The odds are pretty good that on any given night, somebody’s going to have a dream about somebody dying who actually dies. That’s inevitable.” At the same time, he argues, we ignore all the times we suddenly sob or shudder and it turns out that no one’s died – or the times when someone does die and we don’t feel anything at all.

There are other prosaic explanations. While Garrett’s grandfather’s death was sudden and unexpected, Griesbach’s grandfather was hospitalised the week before he died, when he shot awake in the middle of the night, Griesbach’s first thought was, “It happened” – he knew his grandfather had passed. But is that surprising when he’d spent a week by his bedside?

John Bedard, a 36-year-old in Los Angeles, woke suddenly on the night his parents died. He was 10 and sleeping at a friend’s house when he awoke, “just knowing something was wrong”. He called his brother, sobbing. When his brother picked him up, he told Bedard their parents had died in a motorcycle accident.

And yet, there were clues that “something was wrong” much earlier. The sleepover wasn’t planned – Bedard had gone to friends to play when “it started getting later and later” and nobody came to pick him up. It was a Sunday night – an unusual night to have a sleepover. Bedard was uneasy when he went to bed.

Despite these answers, explanations continue to be toyed with. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and parapsychologist who conceived of “morphic resonance”, the idea that interconnections exist between organisms. He believes the human mind has fields that stretch beyond the brain, much like electromagnetic fields. This, he says, explains why we can seemingly tell when someone behind us is staring at us, or why we sometimes think of someone right before they call. (Sheldrake’s work has been called “heresy” in the journal Nature.)

“I’m not talking about the supernatural; I think these things are totally natural. I think they’re normal, not paranormal,” he says. When it comes to experiences like Garrett’s, he says empirical studies are impossible. “You can’t ask somebody to die at a randomly selected time to see if their nearest and dearest respond… So unfortunately, the evidence for cases to do with death has to be circumstantial.”

Shermer is not a Sheldrake fan. “The idea that a biologist like Rupert Sheldrake is going to uncover some new force of nature that somehow Einstein and everybody else has missed… is just so unlikely to have happened, that almost any explanation like the ones I’ve been giving you are way more likely.” Josephson’s rebuke of such criticisms: “People say that [science is] always subject to revision and yet they’re secretly convinced that certain things can’t happen.”

What can and can’t happen doesn’t change what many feel has happened – Garrett, Griesbach and Bedard all believe something strange and unexplainable occurred when they lost their loved ones. At the very least, these stories undeniably offer comfort.

“As far as looking into it, I don’t even know what there is to look into,” Griesbach says – after all, the phenomenon doesn’t even have a name. “I think the best thing that we could do for people is validate how they feel and let them grieve. Because whenever people have that happen, they’re also grieving. That is one of the most important times to just be a kind human to somebody.”

(Source: The Guardian)

Psychics who hear voices could be on to something

The ways some “healthy voice hearers” cope might be able to help people with psychotic disorders.

Jessica dorner was lying in bed at her cousin’s house when her grandmother, a “pushy lady” in an apron who had been dead for several years, appeared in front of her. “I know you can see me,” Jessica heard her say, “and you need to do something about it.”

It was a lonely time in Jessica’s life. She was living away from home for the first time, and she thinks her grandmother was drawn by some sense of that. She eventually told her parents what happened, and according to her they were concerned, but not overly panicked. “My parents are probably the least judgmental people I know,” she said.

As Jessica tells it, over the next two years, spirits visited her every now and again. Her brother-in-law’s deceased father began forming before her, ghostlike, just as her grandmother did. And while the experiences were intense and at times made her feel “crazy,” she said, they were infrequent, and insists that they were never a real source of suffering.

Jessica later moved back home and got a job as a pharmacy technician, all the while figuring out how to cope with what was happening to her. At a co-worker’s suggestion, she went to the Healing in Harmony center in Connecticut. In 2013, she says, she enrolled in classes there that taught her to use her “gift.” A self-described psychic medium, Jessica tells me she hears voices that other people do not (in addition to sometimes seeing people others do not see), at varying intensity, and mostly through her right ear.

Meeting others like her at the center gave Jessica a sense of relief. “Just being around people who are going through similar things—that helps a lot, because I could talk to anybody about those things and not feel like I was crazy,” she said.

It was through a friend from the center that Jessica ended up in the lab of Philip Corlett and Albert Powers, a psychologist and a psychiatrist at Yale. In a study published last fall in Schizophrenia Bulletin, Powers and Corlett compared self-described psychics with people diagnosed with a psychotic disorder who experience auditory hallucinations.

“A lot of the time, if someone says they hear voices, you immediately jump to psychotic illness, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia,” Corlett said. But research suggests hearing voices is not all that uncommon. A survey from 1991—the largest of its kind since—found that 10 to 15 percent of people in the U.S. experienced sensory hallucinations of some sort within their lifetime. And other research, as well as growing advocacy movements, suggest hearing voices isn’t always a sign of psychological distress.

The researchers at Yale were looking for a group of people who hear voices at least once a day, and had never before interacted with the mental-health-care system. They wanted to understand, as Corlett put it, those who do not suffer when “the mind deviates from consensual reality.”

What corlett calls consensual reality—the “normative shared experience we all agree on”—is probably not something you spend too much time thinking about. But you know when it’s being violated. The sky is blue, the sun is hot, and as Corlett points out, most would generally agree that people don’t receive extrasensory messages from one another.

Jessica was quite frank with me about the way some people may view her. “We know these experiences are weird and they’re seen as weird,” she said. “You just can’t go into a room and say ‘Hey, I’m a psychic medium’ and people are gonna accept you.”

Finer points of what counts as reality can change over time, and vary based on geography or culture. For centuries people walked the earth believing the sun orbited around them, which today would be considered unreasonable. Who decides that consensus, and where along its boundaries voice hearers fall, depends on a wide range of circumstances.

The anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, who has studied voice hearing in psychiatric and religious contexts, has written that “historical and cultural conditions … affect significantly the way mental anguish is internally experienced and socially expressed.” Noting that there is no question psychiatric distress and schizophrenia are “real” phenomena that call for treatment, Luhrmann adds that “the way a culture interprets symptoms may affect an ill person’s prognosis.” Every psychiatrist I spoke to shared the belief that unusual behavior should only enter into the realm of diagnosis when it causes suffering.

Sarah Jung

On the other hand, Luhrmann tells me “it’s a terribly romantic idea” to overinterpret the effects of culture. To say, for instance, that “anybody who would be identified with schizophrenia in our culture would be a shaman in Ecuador” is, in her mind, a clear mistake: “Flagrant psychosis” exists in some form in every culture where anthropologists have looked.

“Goodness knows what psychosis actually is.”

In the past decade, researchers have taken a greater interest in the experience of hearing voices outside the context of psychological distress. In his book The Voices Within, the psychologist Charles Fernyhough traces the way thoughts and external voices have been understood by science and society throughout time.

Reflecting on Fernyhough’s book, Jerome Groopman notes that in the early parts of the Bible, the voice of God gave direct commands to Adam, Abraham, and Noah. It spoke to Moses through the Burning Bush, going by the Book of Esther, making itself known again to the apostle Paul in the New Testament. Socrates, who wrote nothing down, heard a “sign” from childhood. The voices of three saints guided Joan of Arc as she rebelled against the English. Groopman cites Martin Luther King, Jr.’s autobiography, in which he describes “the quiet assurance of an inner voice” telling him to “stand up for righteousness.”

The social context in which these people lived can impact how they’re seen. It’s impossible to say how the prophet Ezekiel was understood within his cultural moment. But in most places today, if a person claimed—as Ezekiel does—that he ate a scroll because the Lord commanded him to do so, some eyebrows might be raised. In a community where a personal, verbal relationship with God is normal, the reception may be different.

Powers and Corlett’s work orbits the idea that schizophrenia is, as Powers put it, an “outmoded” label that describes a cluster of different symptoms rather than a single unified condition, he says.

“Goodness knows what psychosis actually is,” Luhrmann said. “There are clearly different kinds of events in the domain we call psychosis,” and when it comes to the relationship between voice hearing and psychosis, she says, “there’s so much we don’t understand.”

Many now antiquated psychiatric diagnoses reified fear, misunderstanding, or prejudice toward people at society’s margins. At the time of the women’s suffrage movement in London, hysteria was leveled as a charge against women who broke social codes. A Mississippi psychiatrist in the 19th century proposed that slaves who attempted escape suffered from “drapetomania.” And until 1973, homosexuality was considered a disease of the mind rather than an accepted way of being in the United States—and was only fully removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1987.

In his book Hallucinations, the late Oliver Sacks details a controversial experiment in which eight participants showed up at hospitals throughout the U.S. in the early ’70s and complained only of “hearing voices.” All of them were immediately diagnosed with a psychotic disorder and hospitalized for two months, despite reporting no other medical symptoms, family history, or signs of personal distress. The single symptom, Sacks writes, was seen as cause enough.

People with psychiatric disorders do hear auditory hallucinations in relatively high numbers. According to Ann Shinn, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital, 70 to 75 percent of people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and between one-third and one-tenth of people with bipolar disorder report hearing voices at some point in their life.

In the case of voice hearing, culture may also play a role in helping people cope.  One study conducted by Luhrmann, the anthropologist, found that compared to their American counterparts, voice-hearing people diagnosed with schizophrenia in more collectivist cultures were more likely to perceive their voices as helpful and friendly, sometimes even resembling members of their friends and family. She adds that people who meet criteria for schizophrenia in India have better outcomes than their U.S. counterparts. She suspects this is because of “the negative salience” a diagnosis of schizophrenia holds in the U.S., as well as the greater rates of homelessness among people with schizophrenia in America.

The influence of social context was part of what motivated Corlett and Powers: The two were interested in whether the support of a social group can help them understand where disorder and difference intersect. When they set out to design their study, they needed an otherwise healthy group of people who hear voices on a regular basis, and whose experiences are accepted in their social group.

Next, they needed to find some psychics. Corlett told me he got the idea to reach out to a Connecticut-based organization for psychics after noticing the ads for psychics and tarot-card readers on his daily bus route. When the two interviewed those participants, they noticed something striking: The psychics described hearing hearing voices of similar volumes, frequencies, and timbres as the patients. Powers and Corlett took this to mean that the psychics were actually hearing something. The two also vetted their participants with the same techniques that forensic psychiatrists use to determine whether a person is pretending to experience psychiatric symptoms, giving them more reason to believe what they were told.

Compared to their diagnosed counterparts, more of the psychics described the voices as a force that “positively affects safety.” And all of the psychics attributed the voices to a “god or other spiritual being.” The patients, meanwhile, were more likely to consider their voices a torment caused by a faulty process in their brain. Many of them described the voices as “bothersome,” and also claimed that the first time they told anyone what they were hearing, they received a negative response.

Just like Jessica, the psychics were more likely to say that they received a positive reaction the first time they spoke about their experience. Jessica’s mother, Lena, told me she maintained a supportive, nonjudgmental attitude toward her daughter’s accounts, just as she did when her other daughter converted to Scientology. She waited for Jessica to bring them up and discussed them with an open mind. She says she was happy Jessica found the center, adding that her only concern was that Jessica’s experiences did sometimes seem to be distressing her and leaving her “drained.”

When Jessica tells me about the people and things she hears, she describes a range of experiences rather than one consistent phenomenon. Her most meaningful episodes of voice hearing are those like the visits she had from her grandmother and her brother-in-law’s father. But she also describes things like hearing the number a friend is thinking, and the persistent and vivid presence of a childhood imaginary friend (her mother told me Jessica demanded the table be set for him at every meal). To Jessica, these experiences differ in degree rather than kind from the ghosts of the dead who appear in front of her with persistent messages for her and for others. Though these might not all fit into the popular conception of a psychic, she understands them to exist along that same continuum.

In his book, Fernyhough describes a series of experiments meant to provide evidence for the connection between inner speech and hearing voices. In one, participants were played recordings of other people’s speech alongside recordings of their own, disguised and distorted, and told to mark whether the voice was their own or someone else’s. Those who experienced hallucinations were more likely to misidentify their own altered voices. A much older experiment found a kind of unconscious ventriloquism among a group of people with schizophrenia: When participants began to hear voices, researchers noted “an increase in tiny movements in the muscles associated with vocalization.” The voices they heard came, in some sense, from their own throats.

(Sarah Jung)

These experiments suggest that auditory hallucinations are the result of the mind failing to brand its actions as its own. Watching what the brain does during these hallucinations may clarify how that works, and what differences in the brain create these experiences.

“When your brain signals to generate a movement,” Shinn, the psychiatrist at Harvard, told me, “there is a parallel signal [known as an efference copy] that basically says ‘this is mine, it’s not coming from outside.’” This helps creates the sense of where a person is in space, that their hand belongs to them and it is moving from point A to B. In this way, the body labels its motions, and a possible parallel may exist for speech and thought. When people hear voices, they may be hearing ‘unmarked’ thoughts they do not recognize as their own.

Beyond that, Shinn told me, what is understood about the experiences of people who hear voices is limited. She sees Corlett and Powers’s study as part of a growing interest in the lives of “healthy voice hearers”—an interest spurred, in part, by the Hearing Voices Movement. A network of advocacy groups, the Hearing Voices Movement presents an alternative to the medical approach based on the belief that the content of a person’s voices can reflect the hearer’s mental and emotional state. The groups encourage an approach in which, with the help of a facilitator or counselor, hearers listen to, speak back to, and negotiate with the messages they hear in hopes of learning to cope.

“I’m not gonna talk right now. ... I still have to live this human life.”
The hearing-voices advocate Eleanor Longden has said she considers her voices “a source of insight into solvable emotional problems” rooted in trauma rather than “an aberrant symptom of schizophrenia.” As Longden tells it, that’s how her own experiences with voices were understood when she first sought treatment for anxiety. Her psychiatrist told her how limited her life would be by her voices, she says, and the voices grew more adversarial.

Many mental-health-care providers—Shinn, Corlett, and Powers included—seem receptive to the Hearing Voices Movement’s critiques, including an overemphasis on medication and an imperative for patient-focused treatment. Shinn credits the network with encouraging an approach that treats voice hearing as more than a checklist item adding up to a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and helping to reduce the stigma attached the experience of voice hearing.

But “there are certainly a lot of people for whom that will not be enough,” she says. For some patients, voices can be impossible to reason with, and the burden of other symptoms of psychosis—disordered thought, delusions, the inability to feel pleasure—can be too great. And Powers and Corlett expressed concerns that the Hearing Voices Network may promote a false divide: the idea that the voices’ perceived roots in trauma—rather than some accident of biology—means hearers should avoid medication. Biology and experience, they say, can’t be so neatly separated. (Longden has written that “many people find medication helpful,” and that the International Hearing Voice Network advocates for “informed choice.”)

While Powers and Corlett don’t believe the psychics and patients are experiencing the exact same thing, the two are cautiously hopeful that about a potential lesson in the greatest difference between those groups: the ability to control the voices they hear, which is something the psychics, including Jessica, showed in greater number than their counterparts. “When I’m in certain situations, I’m not open,” Jessica said. For instance, when she’s at work, the voices “can come in,” she says, they “can hang out, but I’m not gonna talk right now. ... I still have to live this human life.”

While learning control was a major part of Jessica’s experience, so was learning to summon the voices she heard. Before training as a medium, she heard voices sporadically, she says, and began to hear them every day only after intentionally practicing at the center. Powers and Corlett acknowledge this general trend in their study: The psychics they spoke tended to seek out and cultivate the voice-hearing experiences.

In her work, Luhrmann has come across groups of people who—unlike Jessica—hear voices only as a result of practice. She gives the example of tulpamancers: people who create tulpas, which are believed to be other beings or personalities that co-exist along inside a person’s mind along with their own. “Somebody in that community estimated to me that one-fifth of the community had frequent voice hearing experiences with their tulpas, that their tulpas talked in a way that was auditory or quasi auditory,” Luhrmann said, a practice that she was told takes two hours a day to develop.“That’s connected to work. Psychosis is not connected to effort. It happens to people.”

Longden, the Hearing Voices Network advocate, describes how she later learned to extract metaphorical meaning from the sometimes disturbing messages the voices had for her. Once when the voices warned her not to leave the house, she thanked them for making her aware that she was feeling unsafe, and firmly reassured the voices—and by extension, herself—that they had nothing to fear.

Though Jessica has a different understanding of her voices’ source, it’s hard not to hear echoes of Longden’s account when she speaks about the sense of control she’s developed. Longden talks to the voices as aspects of herself that call for a response, while Jessica addresses them as visitors who need to learn the rules.

Instead of tying these experiences to a discrete diagnosis, Powers and Corlett imagine a new kind of frame for voice hearing. Drawing a parallel with Autism Spectrum Disorder, the two are interested in the extent to which the psychics they saw “might occupy the extreme end of a continuum” of people who hear voices. “Much of what we perceive and believe about the world is based on our expectations and our beliefs,” Corlett said. “We can see hallucinations as an exaggeration of that process, and the psychics as a sort of way-station on that continuum, and slowly but surely we can creep towards a better understanding of the clinical case and therefore better treatment. We haven’t had new treatment mechanisms in schizophrenia for many years now.”

The two freely admit the gaps between their ambitions and what they know so far. The study is preliminary, qualitative work—a follow-up brain-imaging study is in the works—and they did only interview a small number of people. Psychics, they say, are not so easy to come by.

Luhrmann speculates that most of the psychics are experiencing something separate from psychosis: “I think it’s also true that there are people who have psychosis who manage it such that they don’t  fall ill and avoid this stigma and who really function effectively.” This difference aside, she says, “it may still be possible to learn from people who have more control over their voices. .... to think about how to teach people.”

At least as subtext, Powers and Corlett’s study might suggest a kind of chicken-or-egg question: Were the psychics insulated from suffering because they were socialized to accept and cope with their voices, and were the psychotic patients suffering because they weren’t? The better question is: to what extent were the two groups experiencing the same thing?

Shinn believes the fact that far fewer diagnosed participants were employed at the time of the study (25 percent, versus 83 percent of the psychics), and that the diagnosed participants experienced more symptoms of psychosis, suggests that they were suffering beyond the point of being useful comparisons. She thinks, rather, that a “constellation” of symptoms—not just auditory hallucinations or the stigma associated with auditory hallucinations—explain the difference in functionality. “The Powers study provides interesting results with potentially helpful clinical implications,” she added, “but they compare very different groups.”

Shinn, Powers, and Corlett are all adamant that people who hear voices and experience psychological distress shouldn’t turn away from conventional psychiatric treatment, and that a “symptom”—in this case, voice hearing—only calls for clinical attention if it is a cause of suffering. But for those who are distressed, the level of understanding of their experience and the treatments available to them are still lacking. As Powers notes, many of psychiatry’s more effective drug treatments were developed by accident. Shinn likens the current body of knowledge of schizophrenia to a group of people describing different parts of an elephant while looking through a high-power lens: There are robust bodies of work on the trunk, the tail, and the ear, but no clear picture of the entire animal.

Shinn’s all too aware of the ways in which the diagnosis can overshadow the patient. “There have been psychiatrists,” she says, “who will tell a patient: You have a diagnosis of schizophrenia and you need to modify or adjust your goals in life, forget grad school, forget that Wall Street career,” Shinn said. “And that absolutely can be compounding and impairing. I don’t disagree that that’s a problem.”

As Luhrmann put it: “Are those cultural judgments the cause of the illness? Absolutely not. Do those cultural judgments make it worse? Probably.”

Jessica doesn’t live near the center anymore. While she’d love to find fulltime work as a medium, she says, she’s focusing on her graduate studies to become a dietitian for now.

Still, she’s grateful for the community she found at the center, she says, and for the help they gave her. “I cannot imagine having no control over this,” she told me. “I don’t know, if I never went to the center, maybe I’d be diagnosed with schizophrenia.”

(Source: The Atlantic)

Ever had a dream of deceased loved ones?

Losing a loved one is never easy, and it can be quite a traumatizing experience. People often report seeing their lost loved ones in dreams and want to know more about their visions. Why do they appear to us? What is their purpose? Is it just a dream or more than a coincidence?

Even though they aren’t here on Earth with us anymore, many people believe that their souls will be forever connected with the dead. Some are even experiencing vivid and realistic dreams about them known as visitation dreams.

Psychology Today
According to the Psychology Today, visitation dreams often have many things in common:

– The loved ones have the same appearance as they did in real life, but they look younger and healthier.
– They communicate with the people telepathically rather than by speaking.
– The structure of the dream is normal and realistic rather than bizarre.
– These dreams are easily remembered by the dreamer when they wake up.
– The experience often changes the perception of the dreamer and follows with a resolution of grieving.
– The deceased ones often convey a reassurance message to the dreamer.

“My father and mother died over a decade ago and about one year apart. Approximately 6 months after each death, I had at least one vivid dream with one or both of them in it. In both cases, the dream did not feel like the typical run of the mill dream,” Dr. Patrick McNamara from Psychology Today elaborates.

Om Times
So, why do they show up? At Om Times, they believe that deceased people show up with a reason. Their purpose could be to:

– Offer your protection, guidance, or to warn you.
– Convey an important message.
– Seek forgiveness or resolution.
– Let you know that they’re doing fine and that you should stop worrying.
– To show you that life after death exists.

If ever you get a visit from a deceased one in your dreams, take it in a positive way. They are probably trying to reach out to you for a good reason. Have you ever had visitation dreams before?

(Source: Small Joys)