Hood, Bruce: Supersense

Most of us have had these bizarre experiences. Have you ever run into a long-lost friend in the most unlikely place? How often have you thought of someone only to receive a phone call from that person out of the blue? Sometimes it seems as if thoughts are physical things that can leap from one mind to another. How often have two people puzzled and said, ‘I was just thinking the same thing!’ Many of us feel that there is something strange going on. Humans appear synchronized at times, as if they were joined together by invisible bonds. Some of us get a sense that there are mysterious forces operating in the world, acting to connect us together, that cannot be explained away. How do we make sense of all these common experiences?

Many people believe that such occurrences are proof of the supernatural. Beliefs may turn out to be true or false, but supernatural beliefs are special. To be true, they would violate the natural laws that govern our world. Hence, they are super natural. For example, I may believe that the British Secret Service murdered Princess Diana in a car crash in Paris. That belief may be true or false. Maybe they did and maybe they did not. It’s not impossible. To be true, my belief would have to not violate any natural laws. All that would have been required was a very elaborate plan and cover-up. So it is possible that the British Secret Service murdered Princess Diana – but unlikely. However, if I believe that someone can communicate with the dead princess, then that would be a supernatural belief because it violates our natural understanding of how communication between two people works. They usually both have to be alive. As Michael Shermer says, ‘We can all talk to the dead. It’s getting them to talk back that’s the hard part.’ 2

People can be fully aware that their beliefs are supernatural and yet they continue to believe. Why do people believe in things that go against natural laws? It cannot simply be ignorance.

The answer is evidence. The number-one reason given by people who believe in the supernatural is personal experience. 3In one survey, half the number of spouses of recently deceased partners reported feeling the presence of the dead. 4One third reported seeing their ghost. Even my late father-in-law, a brain surgeon of eminent status, saw the ghost of his recently deceased wife, my mother-in-law. Throughout his career he dealt with patients with brain damage and was very familiar with the peculiar experiences the mind can generate. He knew he was hallucinating at the time of his wife’s death but that did not stop him seeing her. People have ample opportunity and evidence to draw upon. Of course, other people influence what we think, but firsthand experience gives us a mighty powerful reason to believe. As they say, ‘Seeing is believing’ and, when it happens to you, it proves what you suspected all along.

For believers, examples of the supernatural are so plentiful and convincing that to simply ignore all the evidence is to bury our heads in the sand. But is there really such an abundance of examples of the supernatural? One major problem is that we are simply not good at estimating the likelihood of how often weird stuff happens. We tend to overestimate the likelihood of events that are very rare, such as being killed in a plane crash. At the same time, we underestimate the likelihood of events that are really quite common. For example, what is the likelihood of two strangers at a party sharing the same birthday? Let’s say you’re the sociable type and attend a party about once a week. Take a guess at how many people have to be at a party for two of them to share a birthday at half the parties you attend throughout the year. What sort of number do you think you would need? I imagine most of you have come up with quite a big number. But would you believe that statisticians tell us the minimum number is only twenty-three! If you go to a different party each week, with at least twenty-three new people at each, on average two people will have the same birthday half of the time. Or, to put it another way, among the thirty countries taking part in the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa, half of the twenty-three-member teams taking part will include two players with the same birthday. 5What could be more unlikely? Now think of how much more common it is for two people to share the same astrological sign when there are only twelve of those compared to 365 different birthdays in the year. People seem so surprised to meet someone with the same astrological sign and often consider this some sort of fateful coincidence. Our minds are simply not equipped to think about likelihood very accurately, and so we interpret these coincidences as if something supernatural were involved. When we hear of examples that seem bizarre, we treat them as auspicious. The thing about coincidences is that they are not the exception but the rule. As Martin Plimmer and Brian King have observed:

We frisk each other for links. We’re like synchronized swimmers in search of a routine. We relish connections, and we’re a highly connected species. If it were possible to map all human activity, drawing lines between friends and relatives, departures and arrivals, messages sent and received, desires and objects, you would soon have a planet-sized tangle of lines, growing ever denser, with trillions of connections. 6

Uncanny events punctuate our lives, but they seem unusual and beyond explanation. We treat them as significant and profound, leading many of us to believe that there must be supernatural powers at work. Most of us entertain these beliefs even though we may deny them. I am going to show how rational, educated adults as well as the more superstitious among us behave as if there were invisible supernatural forces and energies operating in the world. Over the course of the book, I am going to present a theory that explains why we believe and why some of us are more prone to belief than others. I am going to focus on the individual rather than culture because I think the answer can be found within each one of us.

SOMETHING MORE TO REALITY

The great American philosopher and early psychologist William James wrote more than one hundred years ago that ordinary people tend to believe not only in the reality of existence but in the presence of ‘something there’ – something intangible that we are bound to infer over and beyond what our normal senses detect:

But the whole array of our instances leads us to a conclusion something like this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there’, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. 7

James is telling us that it is natural to think that there is something more to reality. This something is unknown, unseen, and unmeasurable, and beyond natural explanations. It is supernatural. Moreover, this sense of something more is the basis of all the world’s religions, which

all agree that the ‘more’ really exists; though some of them hold it to exist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal structures of the world. They all agree, moreover, that it acts as well as exists, and that something is really effected for the better when you throw your life into its hands. 8

Why do people think like this? Why do we come to believe that there must be something more to nature than can be measured? Where do these ideas come from? From where do we get our supernatural beliefs? There are two schools of thought here: either these are ideas that we hear from other people or they are ideas that partly come from within us. Let’s examine both propositions. First, we may be born to believe anything and everything we are told by others. So beliefs are simply the stories we tell each other, and especially our children. Alternatively, we may be born to believe, and what we think might be possible is a reflection of our own way of seeing the world.