Why have so many of us seen ghosts?

0:00Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Up from payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 months plan required, $15 per month equivalent to taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes when network is busy, see terms. All right, class settle down. Today's lesson is on the ARCO Rewards app. Try to stay with me. The fundamentals are simple. Earn at least five cents a gallon in rewards, then redeem them later for up to $1 off every gallon. Now here's where it gets complicated. Oh, wait, it doesn't. It's as simple as downloading the ARCO Rewards app to get started. Class dismissed. The savings of up to $1 for the gallon redeemable at $20 rewards dollars in your law of the account at participating locations, terms, and conditions apply.

1:01Leading insurers know that fragmented operations don't cut it anymore. Policyholders expect more, and modern insurers meet those expectations with Adian. From effortless premium collections to instant claims payouts, Adian's single platform automates the entire policy lifecycle. One platform to manage how money moves, control claims fraud, and automate operations. Adian, FinTech built for your next move. Hey, it's Willis, a producer here at OnPoint. One of my favorite parts about being a producer here is hearing from you, our listeners, about the show. What you like, what you thought of our guests, what you thought of what they had to say, and what topics you hope will cover. And what I love about the new OnPoint Club is that we're going to have more opportunities to share what's behind the scenes and how we put the show together for you. If you're not a member of the OnPoint Club yet, click on the link in the episode description to sign up. For $7 a month, you'll get first access to the Jackpot

2:03each week, other exclusive content, and you'll be the first to know about special live events. Now stick around for today's show. WVR Podcast. Boston. This is OnPoint. I'm Megna Chacrabardi. This thing tormented me every, every night. It was feeling of fear, just such intense fear, the most intense fear panic, actually, that you can imagine. That thing wasn't exactly a ghost. It was a looming, powerful entity, which felt very present, very real, to Shannon Gleik when she was a child. I was the youngest one in the family, and I had to go to bed first. And even as late as 11 years old,

3:05my mother would have to practically drag me upstairs. She just didn't understand why I was afraid, and it was so hard for me to explain because there was nothing I could see exactly that she would understand. And I loved it when I could go to someone else's house, anyone else's house to stay the night because I wouldn't feel that heavy weight of overwhelming dread and horror that I knew was waiting for me. People said it was just a stage and then I would outgrow it. Well, I never outgrew the fear of that thing. I just got better at hiding it. Let's fast forward to when my mother was living alone in the house, everyone else had left, and she was the only one living in that house. And one morning, it was broad daylight, bright sunshine coming in through the window.

4:05She was up, she was dressed, she was cleaning her bedroom, and she said she turned around, and she saw a figure that was all black. And I said, oh my goodness, I said, would you mean like a shadow? And she said darker than that. She said it was in the shape of a man, but it was entirely black. And I said, oh my goodness, I said, were you scared? And she said, yes, I was. I said, what did you do? And she said, I said the Lord's Prayer, and it disappeared. That's Shannon Glake of Yankton, South Dakota. And by the way, not long after that encounter, her mother sold the house. But Shannon and her mother are not alone. In fact, three-quarters of Americans say they believe in some form of paranormal activity. So today we're going to investigate whether the paranormal truly exists. Is there evidence to prove it? Or if we're going to be rigorous about our science,

5:07is there evidence to disprove it? Maybe our brains are tricking us into believing that we're seeing things that simply aren't there. Well, that's exactly what psychology professor Melissa Muffeo is trying to explore in her new book, The Science of the Supernatural, Critical Thinking for the Mind and Brain. And she's a psychology professor at Wake Forest University and she joins us from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Professor Muffeo, welcome to On Point. Hi, Magna, thanks for having me on. So I would like to know what inspired you to write this book. Have you had paranormal experiences yourself? I have never had an experience that I personally have interpreted as paranormal, but I grew up on a study diet of the ex-files and Stephen King novels. And it's always been a fascination of mine. Oh, okay. You have no idea how much that makes my heart sing because I was a passionate fan of the ex-files. Every Friday night, every Friday night,

6:08would sit in front of the TV with my popcorn and allow myself to get scared out of my socks. But we're actually, I'm going to reference back to the ex-files several times of this conversation because I actually think it's a really useful tool in understanding the cultural touch points that the paranormal has. So actually, let me get back to the 75% of Americans that say they believe in some form of paranormal activity. How does that number land with you? It's very high. If 75% of people believe in ghosts or some aspect of the paranormal and all of those people are right and there is some kind of paranormal anything out there, we should absolutely study it because right now we don't have any concrete evidence of it but it would teach us quite a lot about our world. But also, if there is no paranormal activity and the 75% of people are wrong, then it's interesting to question psychology and say, why is it that so many people have this similar belief that explains their world in a way that works for them?

7:11So we should study that as well. Okay, I would actually like to jump to a specific example that you use in the book because it's really demonstrative of how the brain operates when the body is actually physically experiencing something but we can't explain what it is. And that's sleep paralysis. And this one really grabbed me, Professor Mfeo, because I actually, when I was a teenager and into my mid-20s, I experienced sleep paralysis regularly. And it was really scary. I mean, fortunately, I'm living in a time where I understood what it was. But the sensation of being awake but not being able to move your body or open your eyes and I was having difficulty breathing. When I looked back in history over several centuries ago there are drawings or depictions. I think they said it was a demon sitting on their chests. There's lore in almost every culture in the world, but yes. Yeah, so this is something that was real. It was actually happening to people. But the cognitive tools that we had for several centuries were limited to very sort of new scientific methods

8:15and religion. So we used the tools we had to understand what was happening. So sleep paralysis is something that occurs during the REM stage of sleep. And if you were to look at the electrical signature of the brain that is in REM sleep, it would actually look like an awake brain whereas in non-REM sleep, the brain waves are very slow in synchronous. During that time, we are paralyzed because that is also when we do our most vivid dreaming and we have evolved this mechanism to paralyze our muscles so that we don't inadvertently act out our dreams and hurt ourselves. So all of us are paralyzed during REM sleep. Some people, I think it's roughly 20% of the population, experience what we call sleep paralysis where they wake up during REM sleep but yet their body is still paralyzed. So their brain is sending the signal to their muscles that they need to move their body but their body is not responding and that is a very scary feeling. Some people experience exactly what you described inability to breathe, pressure on the chest.

9:17Some people experience like weird sounds or buzzing lights or even might even see a figure or an apparition. And you're right, if you have access to the internet and you Google those symptoms, it'll probably come up with sleep paralysis but you're going to interpret that based on the resources that you have at your disposal and that might end up being a supernatural explanation. And you're just waiting for science to sort of to disambiguate and these other paranormal experiences? Well, I mean, yes, but that's a little bit complicated too because I'm not interested in telling people that they haven't seen a ghost or that they haven't experienced something because they did experience something. I'm interested in the scientific explanation of what they experienced. And I think a lot of people who experience an episode or several episodes of sleep paralysis can learn about the scientific nature of sleep paralysis and say, oh, yes, that is what was happening to me. Turns out it wasn't supernatural at all. But a lot of people might not agree with that explanation

10:17and say, well, I know what I saw and I know what I experienced and I don't accept the explanation of supernatural. And that kind of leads us into interpretation of our own experiences, priming, suggestibility, other cognitive biases that we have. So it's never really just one thing. It's an experience that we have that our brain interprets in one way or another. Yeah. But the sleep paralysis example, I think, really brings to the fore what is a central issue in our belief in the paranormal. And it has to do with how we process reality. That reality actually is a fungible thing depending on how our brains are interpreting the signals that are coming into it. I mean, there's science out there that says when a body is close to death, the brain is actually hyperactive in certain ways. So the person experiencing a near death experience is actually seeing, feeling, experiencing, whatever it is that they're seeing

11:18because their brains are doing that. So it may not be quote unquote paranormal, but it is something that's real to them because it actually is real in their brains. Absolutely. Your experience is not what is objectively happening around you. It's your perception is constructed based on your opinion of the situation. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash switch. Up from payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 months plan required, $15 per month equivalent to taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes in the slow and network is busy. See terms. All right, class settled down.

12:19Today's lesson is on the ARCO Rewards app. Try to stay with me. The fundamentals are simple. Earn at least five cents a gallon in rewards, then redeem them later for up to $1 off every gallon. Now, here's where it gets complicated. Oh, wait, it doesn't. It's as simple as downloading the ARCO Rewards app to get started. Class dismissed. Say these about $1 for the gallon redeemable at $20 rewards dollars in your law of the account at participating locations, terms, and conditions apply. Insurance is entering a new era. Policy holders expect a fast and flexible experience from the insurers they trust. That's why modern insurers run on Adian. From effortless premium collections to instant claims payouts, Adian's single platform automates your entire policy life cycle. A single platform to reduce churn and claims fraud, drive revenue, stay in control of how your money moves. Adian, FinTech built for your next move. I want to give a very huge measure of thanks

13:19to all of you on Point listeners who sent us your stories of the experience of the supernatural. We're going to play as many of them as we can across the course of this conversation. There were so many. So here's another one. And before we play it, I just want to offer a quick warning because the story that you're about to hear from an on Point listener involves a story about suicide. So if you or anyone you know is struggling, please do call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 988 and it's free and it's a confidential service available 24-7. Okay, so Greg Tachek told us that he has had several paranormal experiences throughout his lifetime. He lives in Wayne, Nebraska, and where he runs a small brewery. And in 2020, Greg bought the building next to his business and that building used to be Wayne City's Hall. Excuse me, Wayne's City Hall and the building was 114 years old.

14:21And I went down in the basement for the first time and was just checking it out after we bought it, making sure that things were not out of the ordinary. And right in the middle of the room, underneath the beam was a metal folding chair. Just out in the middle of the room to trip on. And so it's kind of weird that there's a folding chair just in the middle of the room. That was really the only thing that was down there. And so a couple weeks later, just talking to the original owner and joked around with him and said, hey, thanks for leaving that folding chair in the middle of the room for me to trip on. And he's like, that's really weird. Like, I didn't leave a folding chair down there. And he's like, I don't know why I would have left a folding chair and definitely wouldn't have left it in the middle of the room. And then he kind of got this weird look on his face and he's like, that's really weird because the fireman used to go down in the basement and play cards. And there was a fireman who had a really hard time in life and decided to hang himself from a beam in the middle of the room. And so the next time I went into the building,

15:22I went down in the basement to check it out. And there is no metal folding chair. And I'm the only one with keys to the building. I'm the only one that definitely would have been down in the basement. And so then I looked around and there's no metal folding chair like that anywhere in the entire building. So that's Greg Tachek in Wayne, Nebraska. Okay, Professor Muffet, I was about to call you Scully. All right, Scully, explain that one. You do. Okay, so as Dana Scully would frequently say on the ex files, the simplest explanation is most often the correct one. I think she was paraphrasing Arthur Cohen in Toilet and Sherlock Holmes. I mean, is that kind of what you found as you explored what science is known about a variety of supernatural experiences and people want to attach a narrative to things that are actually otherwise quite maybe easily explained? We don't always know everything that happened in our external worlds. We don't know who might have moved furniture

16:24or who might have had keys and not to debunk anything. I don't intend to do that at all. I certainly don't know what happened in this particular instance. However, I think that there are a lot of times that we feel like we have all of the information and we don't necessarily have it. Or even if we do have it, we don't really have it consciously available to us. Every single person falls victim to a bias that we call confirmation bias, where we're more likely to pay attention to information that supports our belief and we're more likely to ignore information that does not support our belief. The problem is that you don't consciously have an awareness of what information you are paying attention to and what information you're ignoring. So it could be that there is a perfectly rational explanation for why a thing happened. And maybe you even have been exposed to that explanation, but your brain isn't internalizing it. Like I said, the ex files references just come so easily. Do you remember in Mulder's office? I think that in season one,

17:24there's a poster on the wall of a UFO. I think it says, I want to believe. That is exactly what it says because I have the same poster in my office. Oh my gosh. No, and the reason why that comes to mind is because I also am not poo-pooing our human need to create narratives around what we experience that doesn't always make sense. Because I think it's an evolutionarily powerful tool since making in our chaotic environment, right? I mean, you're the psychology professor. Can you tell me like, are there psychological advantages? To being able to do that? Absolutely. If we can construct an narrative about sensory information that we're taking in, we're more likely to remember it. And that memory will aid us in future situations that maybe are similar, that our survival might depend on. And I completely agree with you. Yes, I'm a skeptic. I do want to believe. I think skepticism is not the same as disbelief.

18:27Skepticism is what sort of information or evidence do I need to have to actually believe this? And I personally have not had any of that evidence. Okay, so let's go back to our listeners because we got a whole raft of really moving experiences. They were quite beautiful and tender that had to do with people who had experiences with ghosts of loved ones. First, let's start with Barbara Collins from Frederick, Maryland. She says she had a paranormal experience four years after her beloved husband died. The rest of the family gathered in my son's backyard for a picnic. And he said, this is so great. The family all gathered. The only thing that would make it perfect would be if my old man was here. I looked over and standing a few feet away from us as a clear day with my husband. And I said, don't worry, he's here. And when everybody turned to look, he was gone. But I saw it very clearly. And that's a true story. Well, here's Diana Woods from Buddha, Texas.

19:29She's 69 and says there have been three times in her life when she's felt a strong, paranormal, normal presence, including this one. After my father passed away when I was in my 20s, I was alone in my apartment at night and I was washing dishes, doing just something mundane. And I felt his presence very strongly behind me and I had a sense that he had called out my name. And the moment lasted for two or three minutes. And then he was gone. Well, here's one more. This is Paul Stino from Columbia, Missouri. And Paul's story really actually stopped me in my tracks. Because on November 10, 2002, Paul's 20-year-old son, Benjamin Bishop Stino, was killed instantly in a car crash. That night I had a paranormal experience where my son's soul and mine merged. And I heard him say, or rather I felt him say,

20:29sorry, dad. Now, that is an experience that is a gnostic one. In other words, it's an experiential thing. I cannot describe it to you. It's something you have to experience in order to comprehend. It's bizarre as tasting color. Feeling words is like something that I've never had any other experience compare. Professor Muffet, what do you think about those stories? And how do you explain them? Do we have a science yet that's able to explain them? Well, we don't have anything that's definitive. I would say for many experiences like these, when someone experiences loss, we naturally are searching for closure. We're naturally searching for peace. We don't understand loss. We don't understand death. So I think our brains grasp out for any kind of search for meaning. I do really appreciate that one of the people who called in talked about his experience as saying, it's like tasting color,

21:30which is something that many people cannot imagine. But there is a real neurological explanation for it. And it's called a condition of synesthesia where the parts of their brains that are important for perceptions of different senses sort of crosstalk. So you might have color perception and then you might have your perception of taste, but those neurons essentially are cross-wired. So you kind of cross your perceptions of those sensations. And so you might end up tasting color, which is something that is unimaginable to those of us who can't. You write about a psychologist named Chris French who had something called the Haunt project. What was that? He is one of my favorite anomalistic psychologists. So he is a professor at Goldsmiths College in London and his lab group published this very ingenious experiment several years ago. There has been a claim that has been around for really hundreds of years

22:32that magnetic or electrical activity might relate to the presence of ghosts. If you watch any of the ghost hunters shows they're usually attempting to measure paranormal activity with a device that measures electromagnetic fields. So we maybe have a correlation between electromagnetic field and paranormal experiences, but as an experimental psychologist, Chris French wanted to see if there might be a causal link between those things. So in his lab at Goldsmiths College, he and his lab group built what they call a haunted room and they controlled different variables. So they had some participants exposed to electromagnetic frequencies and some were not exposed. Some also were exposed to something called infrasound which are sound waves that are just slightly too low for humans to be able to detect it. So we can't consciously detect it. But there's evidence that might also be related to the experience of the paranormal. So the participants were either E.M.F. present or absent,

23:35infrasound, present or absent, a combination of the two and neither. And they had several participants walk through this lab with a little notebook and just write down any experience that they had. Supernatural or not supernatural, just anything they noticed at all. And when the lab group analyzed the results, they saw that there were actually quite a few anomalous stick or possibly supernatural experiences. I believe that one person was even so afraid that they had to leave the study because their experience was so profound. But then they looked a little bit closer at the data and saw that there was no actual relationship between the presence or absence of infrasound and E.M.F. and the experience of the paranormal. Really? Oh, that's so interesting. Tell me more. Not with anyone expected with that data set. So we don't have a great explanation for it. All we can do is interpret the data. What Dr. French interprets as the most the simplest explanation, the most personnious explanation is that

24:38every participant signs an informed consent form. And in that informed consent, the participants were informed that they might experience something anomalous, I believe, was what they said. And that little piece of information might have been enough to suggest to the believers, they might experience something paranormal and then they therefore expected to experience something paranormal. Because the significant finding that the researchers saw wasn't a relationship between E.M.F. and infrasound and experience. It was a relationship between belief and experience. Uh-huh. Okay. So then, are we, is that, does this go back to priming? That people who are sort of more likely to have a belief in the existence of these paranormal experiences reported them more frequently in the study? Absolutely. And we've seen that in many, many studies. There are a couple of famous studies that were done a couple of decades ago by Richard Weissman's group where they set up fake seances. They would have objects move like there was a,

25:40a candelabra on the table that was rigged up to a string that no one could see, but they would kind of pull across the table. And sometimes Dr Weissman would suggest to the participants that the table that they were sitting at was actually levitating. And then in some conditions, he did not make that suggestion. And what they saw after the fact when they surveyed the participants was that a very high number of them remembered the table as levitating when it had been suggested to them, but it had never actually levitated. You actually do include several examples in the books that would fall into the category of people just being hoodwinked, I would say, right? Like you talk about that. That happens too. Yuri Gellerin is spoon-bending phenomenon, performers and entertainers who, I mean, it's still a very, very powerful form of entertainment today, right? Why did you choose to include those in the book? Because to me, it seems like, you know, just everyday entertainment based shakane array. It's not the same as the experiences people report

26:42when there's no one around to try to, you know, manipulate their blind spots. I chose it first. I love magic. I love watching magic shows. That's one of my favorite things to do. And I think I love it so much because the best magicians don't claim to be supernatural at all. They say everything they're doing is perfectly natural. It's just a skill that I have practiced. But yet, my brain is fooled every single time I see it, even when I know exactly what's happening. So to me, magic, sleight of hand, those types of things are evidence that our brain really is not always accurate when it's interpreting the world. And here is proof of that because I have this magician in front of me that is, you know, tricking me to think that something is in his hand and it's really not in his hand or whatever. And it shows me where my mind is likely to look for proof. And that's usually the wrong place.

27:49Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun. If we made $15 bills, but it turns out, that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at MintMobile.com slash Switch. Up from payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 month plan required, $15 per month equivalent to taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes me slow when network is busy, see terms. All right, class settled down. Today's lesson is on the ARCO Rewards app. Try to stay with me. The fundamentals are simple. Earn at least five cents a gallon in rewards, then redeem them later for up to $1 off every gallon. Now, here's where it gets complicated. Oh, wait, it doesn't. It's as simple as downloading the ARCO Rewards app to get started. Class dismissed.

28:50Leading insurers know that fragmented operations don't cut it anymore. Policyholders expect more, and modern insurers meet those expectations with Adian. From effortless premium collections to instant claims payouts, Adian's single platform automates the entire policy lifecycle. One platform to manage how money moves, control claims fraud, and automate operations. Adian, FinTech built for your next move. Let's listen to another one of the fantastic stories that was sent to us by an on-point listener. This is Tracy Lockwood. And a while back, Tracy moved into an older home in Christian's Burg, Virginia. She moved there with her then husband. Now, this house actually was really old. It was specifically built in 1888. For three nights, we were woken up by the sound of footsteps in the hallway immediately outside our bedroom door.

29:52They were so physical and loud that we actually got out of bed, expecting that there was someone there. I saw a small woman dressed in a black Victorian-era dress. On the third night, I spoke to her silently and explained that we had moved into the house and were trying to make it beautiful and take care of it. And then I asked if she would please not wake us up while we were sleeping. It never happened again. That's listener Tracy Lockwood. She now lives in Farmville, Virginia. There's another area of paranormal experience that you talk about in the book, and that's premonition. And we have an example of here. This is Rex Grove of Bettendorf, Iowa. Rex has had several paranormal experiences, and here's one. The experience of one person that was going to be dying,

30:54somebody that was close to me, I had a spirit-like thing wake me up at night, and tell me this was going to happen in three days, and in three days it did. His wife called me. I said, how to say, I'm known for three days. Professor Muffet, what's going on there? Because premonition is something that people report frequently. I even have my own little premonition story, and I'm going to talk to you later. I'm going to talk to you later, and then I'll start with you. Here's your explanation first. Okay, I definitely want to hear yours. Again, there are many. They can relate to some of the cognitive biases that we've already talked about. Another one is to share coincidence. Humans are notoriously bad at understanding the probability of things occurring together. So if someone had a premonition where they are told, or they know that something is going to happen in a certain amount of time, then that someone is going to call us or text us, and then they do. And it seems very meaningful. But a lot of times it probably is just simply a coincidence

31:54because there are probably many times you've thought about that person and they didn't text you at that moment. But we don't notice that. We don't notice those. Okay, so we assign special significance to the times that we notice. Again, it's that pattern-seeking desire, I think, of the human brain. It's so powerful. Okay, so here's my story. Help me pick this apart. Okay, so this happened when I was in college, and I was a mentor for my former high school's astronomy club, because I used to be in it when I was in high school. And my brother was in the club at the time. And every year we used to go on this field trip to Central Oregon in the high desert there, because there's a really big telescope. Okay, so my friend and I who were some of the mentors, we actually had to leave early from the field trip. And it was during the daytime when the high school kids were going on this hike in a canyon. So we're driving along the road and leaving the bend Oregon area. And we see this DeShoot's County mountain rescue van on the side of the road. And it was near the area where we knew the kids and the mentors who had stayed behind were hiking.

32:59So I tell my friend, I'm like, I think we need to pull over and see what's going on. That's sensible enough, right? Because we were also mentors of this group. Get out of the car and we start walking down into the canyon. And Professor Muffet, I still tell you to this day about 50 yards into the canyon. I turned to my friend and I was like, it's my brother. He's been injured. And I knew it with a kind of certainty that, you know, I know when I'm looking at my watch and tell the time. Like I absolutely knew it was him. And I start tearing down into the canyon, running down the path, jumping over a couple of boulders and low and behold, look up to my left and on the side of this like shallow canyon. My brother is strapped to it basically one of those portable body boards and he's being hauled up out of the rim of the canyon. I mean, fortunately, it wasn't a significant entry, but he was the one who was injured psychologically. I mean, how do you explain that? Yeah. So first, I don't want to at all discount your experience or say that that didn't happen the way you described it.

34:02I am going to play a little bit of devil's advocate here and try to pick it apart with psychology and neuroscience. So the first thing, you see the paramedic van and you automatically jump to the worst fear that it's your brother that's there as opposed to maybe someone in the group that you're less close with. If it had been a false alarm or someone besides your brother or someone that wasn't even in your group, you probably wouldn't have thought of that premonition again, I think, but it became your brother and it was your brother. And of course, you're flood with emotions when you see your brother on that stretcher. You're scared, you're confused, your sympathetic nervous system is going into the spider flight mode. You don't know what to do. And what happens is that there are many hormones in our body that can retroactively impact our emotions and also our perceptions of the experiences. So a lot of time, the way we experience something is actually we experience the events and then we have a physiological response to the event and then we go back in our mind and reinterpret the memory.

35:15So I don't want to ever say no, you did not know with certainty that it was your brother, but it's your memory that you know a certain. Certainty you can't go back to that moment and interrogate yourself at that moment. You can only interrogate your memory of that moment and our memories are reconstructive. They're never a recording of what transpired at that event. So that's my take. But I love it. I do not feel broken apart at all. I think what you're what it's coming down to is you're telling me that I am not the coldly rational person. I'd like to think that I am. All right, so let's let's go to hand it back to a couple more listener stories. This is Sue Tendi, Sue bought a house in Crown Point, New York back in 2011. And she says anyone who knows about this house says it's haunted about two years ago. My husband and I were in the house and it was raining and I have to say it's an old dairy farm.

36:16And then we have an old barn. So we were inside the house and it was raining. We were standing in the kitchen and we clearly heard a cow moving up in the second floor bedroom. Unmusticable sound period. Now we have no cows. There are no cows on our farm anymore. Okay, thank you for that Sue. Here's Jane Narlie of Glen Burnie, Maryland. I grew up in Central New York in a revolutionary war era city. And when I was 11, I woke up in the middle of the night to a young woman dressed in period clothing, standing at the foot of my bed, staring directly into the mirror of the bedroom. I was petrified through the covers over my head. Within this lifetime, some people are given the choice to believe or not and others are not. And I've been a believer ever since. And one more, this is Natalie Meyer-Sick, who used to work at the historic Driscoll Hotel in Austin, Texas,

37:18which was built in 1886. We would regularly have interactions with ghosts. I never saw like a person, but in my office, you regularly smell cigar smoke when there is absolutely no smoking in the building or anywhere around that area. You hear typing at night. There were so many people on the staff who had experiences and many of them were very serious, very sober people. So yeah, there was always some energy floating around. I don't really believe in ghosts as like disembodied spirits. But I definitely think when a place has been around a long time and had a lot of different experiences contained within it, that just leaves a mark on the energy there. So once again, thank you to all of you on Pointless and to sent us your stories. Okay, Professor Muffet, in the last couple of minutes that we have together, here comes my scientific defense of the possibility of the paranormal. Because actually, I thought about this when you wrote about things like psychedelics. Because again, it gets back to the fact that there's a difference between what people say reality is, like this table is hard,

38:24versus the reality that's being constructed in my brain. And when I think about how much that reality that's been constructed in my brain is influenced by, as you've been telling us about, cognitive biases, for the sake of scientific rigor, could you as a researcher who's prone to not believe in the existence of the paranormal, have a cognitive bias such that you are seeking out the studies or naturally attracted to the pattern of information that confirms your bias that there's no such thing as the paranormal? Absolutely. I have had times where I have maybe heard a voice. I've gone with paranormal investigators to haunted houses and have been in situations where they were believing that we were having an experience, and I was not believing that we were having an experience. So absolutely, my brain constructs reality the same way everyone else's does. My brain as a skeptic and truly as a non-believer tells me that there's a rational explanation, just it's my inner scully.

39:31And so that's the evidence that I'm going to be looking for. Well, okay, so speaking of that, one of my other favorites, favorite quotes from the ex files comes from Fox Mulder, where he says that something may be highly unlikely, but not outside the realm of extreme possibility. And the reason why I asked that is science itself. There are edges of science, I'm thinking of theoretical physics and astrophysics, where string theory or people who study black holes and say, well, the math tells us that on the other side of a black hole, there are white holes. There's no way to actually test, prove or disprove any of these things, but science accepts it as a possibility. I'm wondering if the same thing may be true of the paranormal that eventually one day we may find an explanation of the ghosts that people are seeing are, they are an actual phenomena.

40:31We're interpreting as ghosts, but it's an actual physical phenomena. We just don't have the tools to explain them just yet. Absolutely. I completely agree that that is a possibility. We experience only a small, small fraction of the physical stimuli that are out in the world. For example, we can only hear a small range of frequencies. We can only see a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. There are so many different physical stimuli out there that humans do not have the physiology to detect. So is it possible that there is similarly in the world that because we can't detect it, we haven't developed a technique to measure it? And I think, yes, that is a possibility. I don't know what it is, and I don't totally think that that's true, but there is a fraction of a chance. Well, I want to end with this phrase that you often tell your students about trust. What is that phrase? Trust yourself, but don't trust yourself. With that, we're going to wrap up today. Melissa Mfeo, Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University, and author of Science of the Supernatural,

41:35Critical thinking for the mind and brain. What a pleasure it's been to speak with you, Professor Mfeo. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. The pleasure is mine. I'm Megna Chakrabardi. This is on point. There's pushback against phones in schools, while now the revolt is spreading to all screens, including laptops that are familiar sites in kindergarten classrooms. If you look at the data once, countries adopt digital technology widely in schools, performance goes down significantly. Screens, schools, and how young brains really learn. That's on the next on point. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial.

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