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Hearing ghost voices relies on pseudoscience and fallibility of human perception

Nontrivial numbers of Americans believe in the paranormal.

Part of the attraction of the audio recorder for paranormal researchers is its apparent objectivity. How could a skeptic refute the authenticity of a spirit captured by an unbiased technical instrument? To the believers, EVP seem like incontrovertible evidence of communications from beyond.

People can discern faces in meaningless clouds

There's a name for this uncanny ability to see faces everywhere: pareidolia (roughly, from the Greek for "wrong shape").

Human brains are exquisitely attuned to perceiving faces—in fact, there's an entire region of the brain called the fusiform gyrus that is dedicated to it. Its functions are evident even from early childhood: Studies have shown that shortly after birth, babies display more interest in cartoon faces with properly placed features than in similar images where the features are scrambled.

Dr. Bem is far from typical. He is widely respected for his clear, original thinking in social psychology, and some people familiar with the case say his reputation may have played a role in the paper’s acceptance.

Peer review is usually an anonymous process, with authors and reviewers unknown to one another. But all four reviewers of this paper were social psychologists, and all would have known whose work they were checking and would have been responsive to the way it was reasoned.

Perhaps more important, none were topflight statisticians. “The problem was that this paper was treated like any other,” said an editor at the journal, Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri. “And it wasn’t.” Many statisticians say that conventional social-science techniques for analyzing data make an assumption that is disingenuous and ultimately self-deceiving: that researchers know nothing about the probability of the so-called null hypothesis. In this case, the null hypothesis would be that ESP does not exist. Refusing to give that hypothesis weight makes no sense, these experts say; if ESP exists, why aren’t people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games? Instead, these statisticians prefer a technique called Bayesian analysis, which seeks to determine whether the outcome of a particular experiment “changes the odds that a hypothesis is true,”

If ignorance is bliss, does a high IQ equal misery? Popular opinion would have it so. We tend to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness. Think of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson – lone stars, isolated even as they burn their brightest. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

Combing California’s schools for the creme de la creme, he selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more – 80 of whom had IQs above 170. Together, they became known as the “Termites”, and the highs and lows of their lives are still being studied to this day.

Termites’ average salary was twice that of the average white-collar job. But not all the group met Terman’s expectations – there were many who pursued more “humble” professions such as police officers, seafarers, and typists. For this reason, Terman concluded that “intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated”. Nor did their smarts endow personal happiness. Over the course of their lives, levels of divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average.

those of us who remain Christian — and yes, this is a Christmas column, U.F.O.s and all — can be agnostic about all these strange stories, not reflexively dismissive, since Christianity does not require that all paranormal experiences be either divinely sent or demonic or imaginary.

the Christian idea is that whatever capricious powers may exist, when the true God enters his creation, he does so honestly, straightforwardly, in a vulnerable and fully human form — and exposes himself publicly, whether in a crowded stable or on an execution hill. So the glamour of U.F.O.s, like the glamour of faerie, is an understandable object of curiosity but a dangerous object for any kind of faith. The only kind of God worth trusting is the kind who does not play tricks.

In science, being skeptical does not mean doubting the validity of everything, nor does it mean being cynical. Rather, to be skeptical is to judge the validity of a claim based on objective empirical evidence.

. Even extraordinary claims can be true, but the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence required.

Skepticism is a critical feature of a scientific repertoire. Indeed, many of the most prominent skeptics are and have been some of the world's most prominent scientists, including Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and Carl Sagan. Even B. F. Skinner was among the signers of the 1976 letter announcing the formation of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal, an organization dedicated to the promotion of scientific skepticism and publication of the Skeptical Inquirer (Kurtz, 1996).2

Pareidolia can be considered a subcategory of apophenia. Pareidolia is a word that’s used for seeing patterns in random objects which includes, hearing, seeing and experiencing something that actually doesn’t exist in the sense your mind has perceived it.

Auditory pareidolia makes us vulnerable to suggestion.

for example: faces in an old abandoned property through the dusty broken windows looks like 20 faces staring at you, trees resembling the devil, the virgin Mary’s face on toast, etc.