Jan 30 2009
Some End-Of-The-Week Stupidity
As far as I know the mortality rate due to ghosts is zero. There are no credibly documented cases of anyone being injured or killed by a ghost. Besides – they are supposed to be immaterial, so how could they harm you? They might make you a bit chilly, or give you a severe case of the willies, but that’s it. I suppose they could frighten a weak-hearted person to death, in which case all we have to fear is fear itself.
So why, then, are people so terrified of ghosts. I admit I have never seen one, so I cannot honestly brag about how I would react, but I think I would be more fascinated than anything else. My primary thought would probably be – where’s my camera?
Why, then, are staff at Derby’s new Royal Hospital so frightened? According to news reports:
There have been dozens of sightings over recent weeks and people are scared witless.
So scared, in fact, that the hospital administration is bringing in an exorcist to take care of the problem. Senior manager Debbie Butler said:
“I’m taking it seriously as the last thing I want is staff feeling uneasy at work.”
“I’ve spoken to the Trust’s chaplain and she is going to arrange for someone from the cathedral to exorcise the department.”
How about this as an alternative, Debbie – investigate the phenomenon scientifically. Consider the possibility that perhaps you are dealing with a psychological and not paranormal phenomenon. Chances are it is witless belief that is driving these sightings, not the sightings that are driving people witless. You can take your employees seriously, but address what is likely actually going on – a community scare.
Robert Bartholomew and others have described mass delusions and community hysteria. Belief and fear is contagious, and when the community is frightened we tend to feel anxious ourselves. This is like a herd running from a predator, even though only one or a few members actually saw it – it’s better to just run along with the herd to be on the safe side. So it is no surprise that we tend to respond to fear infecting our community.
So how about a bit of public counseling and reassurance. Despite the fact that this hospital is supposed to be the “most haunted place in the UK” I bet a small number of employees are making most of the sightings. I also bet that despite the numerous alleged opportunities to document the apparitions, there is in fact no compelling evidence. I couldn’t find any online, and none of the news reports I saw included one – just artists conceptions and pictures of Linda Blair from The Exorcist.
It is sad that a professional and scientific institution has the opportunity to deal with this situation as professionals and scientists or as gullible asses, and they have chosen the latter. Rather than calling in an exorcist and the local ghost-hunting boob, they should have called in a skeptic. Skeptics have actually thought about such phenomena from a reality-based perspective and have developed a relevant knowledge-base that can be useful.
41 Responses to “Some End-Of-The-Week Stupidity”
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Steven you are so close-minded and absolute. Just because you don’t understand something it doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Science doesn’t know everything. Science has been wrong before. Science does not apply in such cases. Science cannot explain or study the supernatural. Keep an open mind. Ghosts exist and exorcism is real and works -I have seen it plenty of times in the movies. Also, my cousin once saw Jimi Hendrix in his attic jamming.
Stavros – thanks. I know you are being facetious, but for others who may be reading this your response is actually no different than any standard true-believer response (maybe except for the Jimi Hendrix part).
I think it has a simple explanation, the people affected are confusing which is cause and which is effect and what is their temporal relationship.
Trying not to be too harsh, but the individuals are not “scared witless”; they are scared because they are witless. Being witless preceded being scared.
A fear or belief that did not originate through facts and logic is likely not amenable to change with facts and logic. Dealing with fears not based on facts or logic is not something I know how to do. Exorcism may be a necessary short term treatment even though it has the side effect of prolonging the belief in ghosts.
The economic crisis may play an important role in making everyone scared. In that state of hyperarousal, they latch onto any anomaly and use it to justify their quite rational fear of economic hardship. I expect that we will see more of these as the economy gets worse, as people (including reporters in the media) try to distract themselves from what is happening with the economy which is largely completely out of their control.
“…your response is actually no different than any standard true-believer response…” true -although I tried hard to include any possible related fallacy I could think of.
On a more serious note, I partly agree with daedalus in that (as someone I don’t remember now said) you cannot reason someone out of a position/belief they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place.
But I would never endorse exorcism even in such situations -although I understand the logic behind such a decision. We are talking about a hospital! It is supposed to have relatively sound foundations of science and rational though. Perhaps psychological support with strong doses of rationality would be better.
It all points to education I think (both public and at home). It is not enough to simply go through physics and chemistry and biology problems without a more broad consideration of simple scientific enquiry and logical thinking.
Sometimes you despair. How can a hospital full of people with a scientific training allows this nonsense to happen? I can see where the newspapers are coming from – it’s a great story and since when did truth or superstitious nonsense get in the way of a good story?
There have been previous cases of mass hysteria in UK hospitals before – most famously in The Royal Free Hospital in the 1950s when an epidemic of fainting, dizziness and other vague symptoms spread like wildfire amongst the staff. No cause has ever been found and it is thought to have been hysterical.
(Sigh)
Mike
daedalus: Dealing with fears not based on facts or logic is not something I know how to do.
_____
Draw your inspiration from that Indian skeptic (unfortunately I don’t have the time to google his name) who just laughed and laughed and laughed in the face of the shaman who was casting ‘lethal’ spells over him! And that is what the hospital authorities failed to do: to show their complete lack of fear. If it is a herd reaction to fear, it is also a herd reaction to calm ourselves down, and these hospital officials need to hang their heads in shame, because what they did was to feed the fears and not vanquish them by the proper behavior of showing cheerful confidence in the daily hospital routine.
I find fact that a hospital administrator –someone who supposedly has been scientifically trained—believes in ghosts, to be much more frightening than any supposed apparition.
Michelle B, you are referring of course to Sanal Edamaruku from Rationalist International in India. He stood up against a black magic that could supposedly kill him without touching him.
You can find the report here. It’s a good laugh.
The experience is that doing exorcism to calm scared believers has a very short term effect – because it is not dealing with the root cause, the underlying belief and delusion.
Better to diffuse the hysteria with some rationality. The core believers who are driving it will not change (they are likely fantasy prone, as Baker and Nickel showed) but they will be marginalized.
Doing an exorcism legitimizes the whole thing, fueling the next inevitable cycle of hysteria.
We would do well not to accept as a given that the hospital staff are ‘scared witless’. I’ve no doubt they claim to be scared witless, but my experience with ghosties – and it’s considerable – is that ghost believers, claims of fear to the contrary, are almost always delighted to be the ‘victims’ of a haunting. You can see the delight as they tell the tale, over and over, clearly happy to be part of the story, and to have been chosen for contact by spirits from the other side. It’s as if they’ve come in contact with something they greatly fear – death – and survived to tell the tale.
A question I will ask people who believe in or claim to have seen a ghost is “Why do ghosts wear clothes?” Invariably they will get a perplexed look as they momentarily consider the import of such a simple child-like question. How can a night gown be incorporeal? Does fabric have some spiritual essence as well? I mean really, would it not make so much more sense if all ghosts were completely naked?
neokortex – I mean really, would it not make so much more sense if all ghosts were completely naked?
Duuno – but it would be much more fun and I would really, really want to believe in ghosts then!
How is immaterial clothing less plausible than or inconsistent with immaterial hair and skin and bones? Maybe being a ghost is like being in the Matrix; you appear as you were or you want to be…
Have they investigated the possibility of a carbon monoxide leak?
I agree the hospital should scientifically investigate what is going on there. I just finished reading Quirkology by Wiseman. In it, he mentions studies about Infrasound. I suspect a hospital might be a good place to find infrasound due to all the machines typically found in hospitals. It should be a fairly simple test.
stavros,
I believe it was Ben Goldacre of BadScience.net who said that. (If not, I’m going to have to edit my email signature.)
England is not the only place where hospital staff quiver. I worked at a State Hospital in Rockford, Il where they thought the unit next to mine was haunted. When I counseled the staff, I found that they did a lot of triage, and felt guilty over the loss of life on the unit. In order to compensate for their loss, they hung up ghosts on the ceiling at Halloween. I asked them to name each one, describe the care that was given, and then I requested after they mourned them at Halloween, to be at peace with themselves.
The current Royal hospital staff are afraid of working at the new hospital because they feel the last hospital created an unholy space by the care given. All I can say is there must be a lot of superstitious and guilt-ridden employees there.
-Insert friendly jab at daedalus2u here:
I thought for sure daedalus2u was going to explain seeing ghosts as result of low NO levels.
I’d be scared of a ghost, too!!! The undead drain experience levels and then you lose all your attack bonuses and feats! Clearly the hospital staff is terrified of having to go back to medical school!!!
Karl, I think it was Jonathan Swift who came up with the quote you mentioned; at least, I’ve seen it attributed to him before (or something very similar, anyway).
As a Brit, this story really, really pisses me off. What a sad reflection on our society that money from an underfunded NHS has to be spent on reassuring the staff that there are no ghosts haunting their hospital. X-(
Actually, it is low NO levels that cause the state of hyperarousal and hypervigilance. That is the state that Dr N talked about, where it is better to run from what ever the rest of the crowd is running from even if it 99% of the time it is a non-existent fear.
As an aside, I think that this is similar to when herd animals stampede. When lightning strikes the greatest danger is not from the direct strike, but rather from the ground currents. The impedance of the body is such that a direct lightning strike usually doesn’t cause sufficient current to cause fatal injury. The impedance is so high that the air flashes over, becomes conductive and virtually all of the current flows through the ionized air (which is nearly as conductive as metal).
When the current from lightning flows through the ground, the voltage drop per meter of distance is higher (because the ground is much less conductive than ionized air), so much higher currents can flow through the body in a circuit in parallel with that ground current. That is why standing on the ground next to a tree is so dangerous during a lightning storm. Lightning can hit the tree, flow down the trunk and as it spreads out in the ground, the current can go up one leg, stop you heart, and then down the other leg. If you are standing on one leg, that can’t happen.
The same thing can happen in a herd of animals, the ground currents can kill the entire herd, but only if the entire herd has more than one leg in contact with the ground. A running four-legged animal has only one leg in contact with the ground at one time. If lightning struck a stampeding herd, it might kill the individual it struck (even if that individual was not in contact with the ground) but individuals with only one leg in contact with the ground could not be killed by the ground currents.
It may be some haunted christards coming back for non-corporeal revenge.
“Chances are it is witless belief that is driving these sightings, not the sightings that are driving people witless.”
Chances are it is a bunch of witless idiots who didn’t see anything at all, and that you can’t drive someone somewhere they already are.
fixed.
Come on! It’s a hospital, they must have an abundant supply of power-pills! Just take one and then eat the ghosts when they turn blue.
In all seriousness. The first thing I’d do when people complain of a haunting would be to investigate for CO gas leaks.
http://www.ghostvillage.com/resources/2004/resources_10312004.shtml
Another common bit of nonsense from the ghost mythology – Notice how those locations most often thought to be haunted are connected to death, dying, or a horrific living existence: cemetaries, old hospitals, scenes of historical death(s), mental hospitals, prisons, etc., based on the idea that souls haunted in life or by a horrific death remain somehow attached to the place of their corporeal demise. For an example, imagine a likely candidate location for a haunting, say, a gloomy old abandoned Deep South former prison hospital from the early 1800s where hundreds of inmates endured horrible conditions before succumbing. Seems a typical description, with the requisite number of ugly deaths. But….
Given that humans have lived in the continental US for, what is it, 15,000 years or so, it seems to me that there would be far more locations that are currently empty, simple farm fields or tracts of woods, where far more than hundreds of people died if you allow the timespan of 15,000 years for them to accrue. Why aren’t these arbitrary, nondescript, unhistoried, essentially empty locations also haunted?
A rhetorical question – they lack the necessary drama and back story to make a good ghost tale.
Everything I can find in searching, gives credit for quote,
“You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.”
to Ben Goldacre of Bad Science fame.
It’s possible he was quoting someone else, but I can’t find any reference that credit anyone else anywhere.
http://xchmp.com/tag/ben-goldacre/
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=284
http://www.waider.ie/misc/quotes.txt
and so on….
I would be very concerned if I were being treated in a hospital where the staff were afraid of the ghosts. Would the night nurse be afraid to walk down to my room at the end of the lonely corridor? Would they chalk up my curious symptoms to possession or mischievous spirits playing with the monitors?
For what it’s worth, I saw Linda Blair at a charity event last year, and she doesn’t really look that scary these days:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcardani/2504154188/
If the staff is afraid of ghosts, you just tell them that unless they give you excellent care, that you will come back and haunt them. It doesn’t matter if you believe it, only if they do.
One tends to believe that ghosts wear the same clothes that their bodies died wearing, but studies indicate that may not be the case.
Ghosts that appear to the unrelated living see no point in in doing so. The clothes are merely to establish that they too are purposive entities who anticipate causing either anxiety or amusement by their presence, depending on the particular circumstances and any instructions they may have received from the head ghost who runs the great super-organism of ghosts somewhat like a hive.
Karl, I had a quick google and found this:
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/it_is_useless_to_attempt_to_reason_a_man_out_of_a/169679.html
It’s slightly different from your quote, but in essence, it’s the same. I can’t vouch for the validity of it (tis the internet, after all), but at the very least, it explains why I thought that I’d seen it attributed to Swift.
Severe case of the willies, In ballet the willies refer to young virgin women who died and were transformed into dancing female apparitions who would lure young men to their death.
True romantic ballets required lovers have faith. A little faith in the new hospital in Derby and sound judgment on the part of staff could be useful in that community.
I am afraid nonsense has managed to thrive in ostensibly rational institutions. A number of years ago the chief of medicine in my hospital in Connecticut participated in an exorcism.
The funny thing about belief systems is that the mechanisms that close off the ability to process rational reasoning have to be disabled first. That may mean going back to the original experiences/assumptions and deframing those first… that way you can take away the foundations of those beliefs in the first place. Unfortunately this isn’t easy given that beliefs have emotional content too that strengthens the bias and confirmation filtering. Rational reason is a good step though, but most often it isn’t sufficient to change beliefs. (As can be seen in any discussion with a creationist).
Ultimately, admitting that there is so much cognitive and perceptual error that contributes to our views of the world is an important distinction. This combined with recognition of how science can enrich our perceptions of reality is what Dr Novella is all about.
I think there is a fundamental difference between a “theory of mind” and a “theory of reality”. I discuss this in the context of the autism spectrum disorders which I think is a manifestation of being in different places along that (multi-dimensional) continuum.
http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2008/10/theory-of-mind-vs-theory-of-reality.html
Theory of mind is what is used for communication, to emulate the thoughts of another and so “understand” what they mean when they send you a data stream (communication) generated by their theory of mind. Ideally, all communicating individuals have “the same” theory of mind which I call the mapping of a communication data stream (words, language, text, signs, etc) into mental concepts. Ideally this mapping is shared among a population and is invariant with time. There is no “wrong” mapping if everyone else shares it. There is enormous compulsion to adopt the shared theory of mind, to adopt the shared language of the dominant population when one is growing up. If you learn a theory of mind which is at odds with reality, unlearning that can be impossible for some people.
A theory of reality must be capable of being changed when it is found to be wrong (in contrast to the theory of mind).
In general, a theory of mind is generated from the top down, individuals learn it from others. A theory of reality in general is built from the bottom up; individuals have to learn it for themselves and generated the cognitive structure that holds that theory of reality together.
No individual learned about ghosts by first observing them. Individuals learn about ghosts by being told about them by others who believe in them. Seeing ghosts comes after believing in them, not before. It is the same with all the other beliefs generated by the theory of mind, believing is seeing. That is where all anthropomorphic thinking comes from, using your theory of mind which evolved to emulate how other humans think to try and emulate reality. A theory of mind doesn’t work very well to emulate reality because reality doesn’t correspond to human thought patterns and emotional constructs.
That is where the Creationists are. They have adopted a theory of mind that their group shares, and are unable to change it even though it is at complete odds with reality. The only way they can change it is if an individual with a more compelling theory of mind (a charismatic leader) displaces their current theory of mind with another.
No.
The Derby hospital administration could consider hiring security personnel and installing surveillance cameras to monitor whether undesirable persons, including those wearing theatrical cloaks are frequenting the grounds. This “ghost” may not be responsive to exorcisms.
Yeah, but a bug might crawl across or fly near the lens and create a fuzzy reflection held to be the image of a ghost. *sigh*
Not sure if hospitals are so desperate for paying customers, but when a family friend bought a old home in Wilmington NC to turn into a bed & breakfast, I was curious about the makeover. I asked her what the first things she’d be changing or installing, what was involved. She said, “First thing we install is a ghost!” She wanted to be a stop on the Haunted Wilmington tour.
Seeing how so many are attracted to hotels and B&Bs long rumored to be haunted, apparently many are creating ghosts to draw customers.
Is it just me or are there a lot of places named “The most haunted in the UK”. I’ve heard that stock phrase quite a few times.
How do they tell? are there competitions every year? did the hospital rush of sightings bring their tally past the nearest competitor, now cursing the low corporeal levels of their own spooks.
Exorcism of the Derby hospital would drive rational patrons away, but might attract irrational patrons to be serviced by irrational staff.