From Haunted Brain To Haunted Science: A Cognitive Neuroscience View of Paranormal and Pseudoscientific Thought

Abstract

Guidebooks to haunted places usually organize their contents according to geographic criteria or to the main types of "paranormal" events a visitor is invited to expect. This chapter is intended as an introductory guide to the most frequently and thoroughly haunted site, indeed, the cradle from which all hauntings ultimately emerge. It is the human brain. Localization criteria seem premature. Although we know a great deal more about the functional neuroanatomy of psychotic and paranormal belief than we did a century ago, when the American neurologist George Beard wrote about the topic (Beard, 1879; see Brown, 1983 for a review and bibliography), we are still far from being able to pinpoint, in a physical sense, those brain loci giving ghosts a permanent housing. Nevertheless, as cognitive neuroscience enters the 21st century, it is increasingly successful in identifying interactions between distributed neural systems and the experience of and the beliefs in forces whose origins some of us project into the outside world.