Paranormal research blog ghost blog anomaly blog ASSAP

Welcome to the ASSAP paranormal blog! Though this blog is aimed at anyone interested in the paranormal, it will be of particular interest to the paranormal research community. Updated frequently, but not regularly (don't expect something new every day!), it covers any paranormal topic, as well as highlighting recent changes to the ASSAP website. You may not notice it but this site changes on an almost daily basis.

Whenever new information becomes available on a subject ASSAP covers, it is added to the relevant pages of the website straight away. So, just because you've read a page, don't assume it will still be exactly the same when you next look. That way the ASSAP website remains an up to date research resource.

The photo (above right, pic by Val Hope) is the ASSAP blogger himself, out looking for anomalies wherever they are to be found, so that you can read about them here.

Important note: If anything in this blog does not make sense, try following the links in text! If it still doesn't make sense, that's probably my fault ...

Previous blog pages ... (including ghosts, UFOs, poltergeists, flying rods, miracles, orbs, hypnotic regression, big cats, vampires, near sleep experiences, premonitions, shadow ghosts, paranormal photos, auras, river monsters and dozens of other subjects)

ASSAP @ 30: A series of posts summarising what we have learned through thirty years of ASSAP, whose anniversary was 10 June. See here!

2 February: OBEs and motion sickness

The mountainous waves of the North Sea were curiously ineffective. I tend to fall victim to sea sickness in heavy seas and these were the worst I'd ever sailed in. And yet, I lay in my bunk on the overnight crossing feeling fine. It seems that, in my case at least, lying down made me immune from sea sickness. Others have had similar experiences, though I've no idea how widespread this effect is among the general population.

So, why should lying down stop sea sickness? Motion sickness is thought to be caused by a conflict between the sensory input from your eyes and vestibular system ('inner ear') about where you are physically in space. If you are inside a pitching boat, the cabin walls appear to be motionless. However, your vestibular system is aware that actually you are changing angle, relative to gravity, all the time.

While the vestibular system detects when we are standing up or lying down, it appears work differently according to which of those positions a person is in. When lying down it appears to be more tolerant of unexplained motions. This may be an unconsciously learned thing. After all, when standing, your precise position is crucial to maintaining balance. But when you're lying down, with your body fully supported, there is no need to maintain balance. Effectively, the brain appears to take less notice of the vestibular system when you're lying down. Thus, conflicts between the vestibular system and visual information are less likely to induce motion sickness. Or that's my theory, anyway.

And what has this to do with the paranormal? OBEs, in an acronym! Most OBEs happen to people who are lying down, many on the verge of sleep. We know that OBEs happen when the brain loses its sense of where the body is in physical space. This information is supplied to the brain by a combination of vision, touch and input from the vestibular system. If one of these inputs is reduced, it may trigger an OBE. So when someone is lying down, the input from their vestibular system may be reduced.

Of course, not everyone has an OBE whenever they lie down. There will be other factors involved as well. In particular, some people are more liable to have OBEs. Darkness probably helps as well, as it removes another visual cue as to where a person's body is in space. But, if there is a likely place for a person to have an OBE, it's going to be when lying down!

OBEs can arise when there are conflicts between the visual, touch and vestibular cues about where a person's body is in space. These things can also cause motion sickness. So, are people with sea sickness actually having a type of OBE? Probably not! But if anyone's ever felt 'out of their body' during a bout of motion sickness, please let me know!

PS: Big cat ruled out by DNA tests.Trivia snippet: ASSAP once held a training course at Woodchester.

1 February: Will technology ever solve the mystery of ghosts?

If a machine could see what you're thinking, would it see a ghost when you did? Such questions may soon be answered, given recent scientific developments. Today it was reported that scientists can now tell what words patients are thinking, through a machine. And it may soon be possible to view on a screen what people are seeing.

So what would we see on the screen if a subject was watching a ghost? Firstly, we need to remember that what a person sees does not necessarily correspond to what is actually physically present. Misperception means that there will be differences. Since we know that many ghost sightings are caused by misperception, many ghosts are likely to be visible in a brain scan while being absent from a simultaneous video of the same scene. The same applies to hallucinations, responsible for many ghost sightings. It will, however, be fascinating to actually see how someone's perception can turn a poorly-seen tree into a human figure!

We already know that many ghost sightings are subjective and brain scans will doubtless confirm this. But this will not answer the question of whether some ghosts might be paranormal. Such sightings might be subjective too. Some people theorize that paranormal ghosts may appear directly in someone's thoughts, through something like telepathy, without being physically visible outside that person's brain. Such a hypothetical ghost would not be ruled out by brain scan technology.

The same is true of other technology applied to ghosts. If someone gets 'unusual' readings from an instrument, like an EMF meter, at a haunted location, what does it mean? There are many possible natural causes of 'unusual' readings. Even if you compared readings from a haunted location with a similar non-haunted one and only got weird ones at the former, it would only mean there was something special about that place, not that it is anything to do with its being haunted.

So, I don't think technology can definitely solve the mystery of ghosts, unless we get lucky! If there just happens to some distinctive 'signature' to instrument readings from paranormal events, it might produce a way to detect them. But if there is nothing distinctive about such readings, it will always be impossible to differentiate them from readings with natural causes. So, while it is well worth pursuing the use of technology in ghost research, we must be prepared for the possibility that it may, in the end, simply not help.

For a review of paranormal research in the noughties, see here.

Last month's (January) website figures are an average of 11587 hits per day. This is considerably up on the previous month's 7731 daily average which were affected by the holidays. But it was also considerably up on Jan 2011's average of 8373!

ASSAP

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