Ben Alderson-Day (Manchester University Press)
THE idea that we experience ghostly presences through sensory phenomena is as old as time. But for some time now, we have accepted that many people hear voices, see unexplained phenomena and experience presences for which there is no rational account.
So how do we explain them? What do they tell us about how the human brain is wired – or what we mean by the concept of “self”? These questions have preoccupied , a psychology researcher at Durham University in the UK, for most of his career. In his first book, Presence: The strange science and true stories of the unseen other, he sets out to provide a comprehensive account of what we know so far.
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Early on, we meet two young men who hear voices. Those voices differ in many ways, but both report feeling a presence that is hard to describe. To Alderson-Day, it sounded almost like a “haunting”, a feeling of someone looking over their shoulder.
The pair, Alex and Daniel, are struggling with their mental health. But this experience of a presence affects many other people in different circumstances: for example, during explorer Ernest Shackleton’s efforts to save his crew after a failed attempt to cross Antarctica in 1914.
After many misadventures, including leaving most of his crew on Elephant Island off Antarctica. Shackleton and five others set off by boat to find help at whaling stations on South Georgia, an island in the south Atlantic Ocean. Landing on the wrong side of the island, Shackleton decided to trek north to the stations with the only two men who were fit enough to go.
The three would later describe a fourth person who was with them on the final, perilous leg of the ultimately successful rescue. One of them, Frank Worsley, wrote: “Of course, there were only three, but it is strange that in mentally reviewing the crossing we should always think of a fourth… then correct ourselves.”
Alderson-Day doesn’t pretend to know what the trio saw on their journey, but he uses this example to thread together the strange phenomena experienced by all sorts of people in extreme situations.
What happened to Luke Robertson, the youngest Briton to ski to the South Pole alone, sounds like a rerun of Shackleton. But this time there were two “presences”, with voices, who – together and in very different ways – pushed and pulled the young skier to his goal.
Driving the brain and body to the brink, whether in extreme temperatures, via physical exertion or through a dangerous lack of sleep, appears to be a common thread. Robertson and many of the other people in Presence describe strange visions – some are rooted in their memories, while others seem completely unrelated to their lives.
Hearing voices is widespread, points out Alderson-Day: 5 to 15 per cent of adults hear voices at some point in their lives. For those experiencing distress from the presences they experience, he describes new treatments. Virtual reality is now being used to make voices less disturbing. AVATAR therapy, developed at King’s College London, lets the voice-hearer and a therapist co-create a computer-based avatar of the distressing voice. So far, the results seem promising.
Throughout his book, Alderson-Day tries to find a unifying theory, but he knows there is a good chance that no such idea exists – or not yet. Instead, he does a valiant job of rescuing the phenomena from simple relegation to brain malfunction.
Presence is a fascinating read. The writing is lively and the stories are compelling. Thanks to Alderson-Day, the mysterious world of visions, voices and ghostly presences is just that bit more understandable.
