IT IS five minutes past midnight and I am alone in my house. I am working late, and the only illumination is the blue-white glow from my laptop computer. I live in a quiet London suburb, and at this time of night distractions are confined to the occasional eerie screeches and hisses from marauding urban foxes.
I pick up the phone to call Michael Thalbourne, a psychologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. I want to talk to him about his research on chance, coincidence and the paranormal. Although the interview time has not been prearranged, we have been in contact by email, so it is disconcerting to hear a long pause when I introduce myself. When Thalbourne eventually speaks he sounds taken aback. “I was right in the middle of typing out an email to you,” he says.
Thalbourne’s instinct is to suspect some paranormal explanation for our synchronicity. My gut reaction is to suggest a more mundane alternative. It looks as if he is what some psychologists would call a sheep, while I am a goat.
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The animal terminology stems from a passage in the Bible about a shepherd sorting through his flock to separate the sheep – representing the nations that believe in God – from the goats, or those that do not. Thalbourne and his ilk, however, are interested in belief in the paranormal and supernatural. And such beliefs turn out to be surprisingly common. For example, a 1998 survey of 1000 adults in the UK showed that one-third believed in fortune telling, half believed in telepathy, and a whopping two-thirds agreed with the statement that some people have powers that science cannot explain.
Decades of scientific research into parapsychology have produced no convincing demonstration of the paranormal that can be reliably reproduced – the acid test of scientific inquiry. So why should scientists be so interested in whether or not people believe in it? Research into the differences between sheep and goats has over the years produced some intriguing findings about how the brain works.
Until recently, sheep might have been forgiven for being cheesed off by all this research – most of the findings were less than complimentary about them. Study after study suggested that sheep saw paranormal events where there were none, simply because they were worse at judging probabilities and randomness, and even at using logical reasoning. But newer research might restore some sheepish pride. It turns out that the kind of thinking involved in belief in the paranormal helps us carry out a range of important cognitive tasks, from spotting predators to recognising familiar faces. Sheep also tend to be more imaginative and more creative. Some psychologists even think that people who believe they have paranormal powers such as telepathy, dreams that foretell the future, or other forms of extrasensory perception (ESP) might actually be accessing information stored in their subconscious without realising it.
Imagine, for example, that you are walking along the street with your old friend Bob, when you start thinking about a mutual college chum, Joe. “I wonder what Joe Smith is getting up to these days,” you say. “That’s amazing!” says Bob. “I was just thinking of Joe myself.” You believe it is simply a coincidence. Bob suspects some form of telepathy. But there is a third explanation: without being consciously aware of it, both you and Bob noticed something that reminded you of Joe. Maybe you passed someone who looked just a little bit like him, or maybe it was something in a shop window that reminded you of him.
“Access to subconscious information can give the appearance of psychic abilities”
It was Thalbourne who first suggested that people who regularly have subconscious information such as this surfacing in their conscious mind would often seem to require the paranormal to explain their experiences. He coined the term “transliminality” for this tendency for information to pass between our subconscious and our conscious mind. He has also designed a questionnaire to measure transliminality. It asks questions such as how good people are at using their imagination, whether they have a heightened awareness of sights and sound and whether they have ever felt they have received “special wisdom”. Thalbourne and others have shown in several studies that transliminality corresponds to where people fall on a sheep-goat scale. In other words, the better you are at tuning in to your subconscious, the more likely you are to believe in the paranormal.
This correlation alone suggests Thalbourne may be onto something. And in 2002, a group at Goldsmiths College in London reported an intriguing practical demonstration of transliminality (Perception, vol 31, p 887). They asked people to take part in an apparent test of ESP with Zener cards, which display one of five symbols: a circle, a cross, a square, a star or three wavy lines. The subjects sat in front of a computer monitor displaying the back of a card. They pressed a key to choose which symbol they thought it was. Then they got to see the card’s face.
Subliminal clues
What they did not know was that they were being given subliminal clues as to which symbol was about to appear. Before a card’s back was shown, they saw a flash of its face lasting for just 14.3 milliseconds, too fast for most people to register. Some participants, however, were able to subconsciously pick up on the clue, and as a result they scored better than chance at predicting which symbol would appear. “To those participants it would appear that they had ESP abilities,” says psychologist Chris French, who led the research. And people who were best at picking up the subliminal image also turned out to be the most transliminal as measured by Thalbourne’s questionnaire. It was a neat demonstration of how access to subconscious information can give the appearance of psychic abilities.
The talents of people who believe in the paranormal don’t end there. It seems that they are also better than non-believers at perceiving meaningful patterns in apparently random noise. The classic example of this trait, which is known as pareidolia, is when people claim to see images of the Virgin Mary, say, on the wall of a building or a tortilla. Pareidolia can be auditory as well as visual, as shown by the current craze for detecting electronic voice phenomena (EVP), supposed messages from the dead buried in the random noise of audio recordings.
Psychologists have traditionally viewed this quality as a shortcoming on the part of sheep. But Peter Brugger, a neuroscientist at the University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland, does not think it is a black-and-white issue. He explains that people commit what statisticians call a type 1 error when they perceive a pattern where none exists – when they are overly gullible, in other words. A type 2 error is when they fail to recognise a pattern that does exist – when they are too sceptical. Brugger points out that pattern recognition is an important aspect of human cognition, allowing us to recognise familiar faces or camouflaged predators. “From an evolutionary perspective, the price for protection against type 2 errors is a susceptibility to type 1 errors,” Brugger says. He theorises that it may be safest to err on the side of gullibility. “If you miss the tiger hidden in the grass, then you are dead. If you always see tigers, you are always running away but you’re not dead.”
What determines our tendency to spot patterns and form associations? It turns out that a key factor is the relative dominance of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. There has been much dubious pop psychology written about the differences between “right-brain people” and “left-brain people”. But most neuroscientists would accept that the left side of the brain is primarily responsible for language and logical analysis, while the right side is more involved in creativity and what might be called lateral thinking – making connections between disparate concepts.
Several recent studies using various techniques suggest that people who believe in the paranormal have greater right-brain dominance. In 2000 Brugger’s group showed, for example, that believers have greater electrical activity in the right hemisphere than non-believers as measured by electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings (Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, vol 100, p 139). In a different approach, in 2001 they asked people to carry out word-association tasks using different sides of their brain by looking at the words with just one eye at a time. When using their right brains, the sheep among them were faster than the goats at finding connections between distantly related words such as “lion” and “stripe” (the connection is “tiger”) (Psychopathology, vol 34, p 75). In some cases, says Brugger, “the disbelievers didn’t even note that there was a relationship”.
But when taken to extremes, there can be a less welcome side to right-brain thinking. Brugger and others have shown that there is also relatively more right-brain activity in people with schizophrenia, particularly in those whose symptoms involve delusional beliefs. Brugger says this aspect of his research has not gone down well with the paranormal community. “I’m a very disliked person,” he admits.
Of course neither Brugger nor anyone else is saying that people who believe in the paranormal are schizophrenic. But while an enhanced ability to spot real patterns and form connections is desirable, it could be argued that believers in the paranormal have taken this tendency too far. Then again, that depends on whether you are a sheep or a goat.
“Believers have greater electrical activity in the right hemisphere of their brains”
As a goat myself, I tend to opt for down-to-earth explanations. Here, for example, is how I account for the fact that Thalbourne was emailing me just as I phoned for that interview. Earlier that day, while it was already night-time in Adelaide, I had sent him an email asking if we could arrange a time to talk. Later I decided to chance a phone call anyway, and not wanting to stay up working any longer than necessary, I called at midnight my time, or 8.30 am in Adelaide, which I figured was probably the earliest he would arrive at his office. He had actually got to work shortly before, and started his day as many of us do by turning on his computer and was responding to the emails he received overnight – which happened to include one from me. QED.
Thalbourne, however, persists in viewing the event as one of life’s intriguing little coincidences. But then he does happily admit to being a sheep. “My life is full of many small and occasionally large coincidences that suggest some unusual form of cause and effect,” he says. “I believe that I can’t disbelieve in it.”
