Scientists have identified characteristics that may make people more inclined to claim that they “hear” the dead. A new study suggests that those who describe themselves as “clairaudients” – as opposed to clairvoyants (“see”) or clairvoyants (“feel” or “feel”) – have certain features in common, including susceptibility to auditory hallucinations and childhood experiences.
If you’re wondering why scientists are spending precious time investigating the supposed paranormal, the researchers say the study’s findings are of great value in understanding the sometimes traumatic auditory hallucinations that can accompany mental health problems. His study, appropriately, was published in Mental Health: Religion and Culture.
The claims of spiritualists, mediums and mediums have long fascinated scientists. They are met with skepticism due to the lack of evidence and genuine curiosity about why someone would claim that they can hear, contact or talk to those who no longer live. Fraud is often the simple answer, and the fact that these experiences are notoriously difficult to refute – although it should be noted that they are also notoriously difficult to prove. A recent study found that 12 self-proclaimed mediums willing to be put to the test actually performed worse than the control group in attempts to contact the dead.
Researchers led by Durham University, however, wanted to explore why some people with these hearing experiences are more likely to adopt spiritualistic beliefs and get involved in the so-called “listening” practice to the dead, while others who find the experience more distressing may receive a mental health diagnosis.
“Spiritists tend to report unusual hearing experiences that are positive, start early in life and are often able to control. Understanding how they develop is important because it can help us understand more about distressing or uncontrollable experiences of hearing voices, ”explained Dr. Peter Moseley of Northumbria University, co-author of the study, in a statement.
They recruited 65 members of the United Kingdom’s National Spiritist Union and 143 members of the public, who regularly do not claim to hear the voices of the dead, to carry out the greatest scientific investigation into the experience of clairaudient mediums. The researchers gathered detailed descriptions from the mediums about how they experience these “voices” and compared levels of absorption, propensity to hallucinations, aspects of their identity and belief in the paranormal.
They found that of the self-proclaimed spiritualists, 44.6 percent claimed to hear voices of spirits every day, and although those voices were heard mainly in their own heads (65.1 percent), 31.7 percent reported experiencing voices of spirits coming from inside and outside the head.
In comparison with the control group, the results showed that spiritualists were more likely to report a belief in the paranormal, and less likely to care what people thought of them. Most of them had the experience of hearing voices for the first time when they were young, with an average age of 21.7 years. They also reported a higher level of absorption, a term used to describe total immersion in mental tasks and how effective one is in disconnecting from the “outside” world. They also reported that they were more likely to “unusual auditory experiences, similar to hallucinations”.
For the general population, greater absorption was associated with belief in the paranormal, but there was no link between that belief and the tendency to hallucinations.
What these results suggest, the researchers say, is that claiming that you can hear the voices of dead spirits is unlikely to be suggestible due to belief in the paranormal. Instead, people who embrace spiritualism are more likely to be predisposed to absorption and to have unusual hearing experiences when young, and spiritualism beliefs align with their experience.
“Our findings say a lot about ‘learning and longing’. For our participants, the principles of Spiritualism seem to make sense of both the extraordinary experiences of childhood and the frequent auditory phenomena they experience as practicing mediums, “said principal researcher, Dr. Adam Powell, of the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University.
“But all of these experiences can result more from having certain initial tendencies or skills than simply believing in the possibility of contacting the dead if we try hard enough.”