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Scientists have identified traits that might make people claim to “hear” the dead. A new study suggests that those who describe themselves as “clairaudient” – as opposed to clairvoyant (“seeing”) or clairsentient (“feeling” or “smelling”) – have certain traits in common, including susceptibility to auditory hallucinations and childhood experiences.
If you’re wondering why scientists are spending precious time investigating the suspected paranormal, researchers say the study’s results are of great value in understanding the sometimes traumatic auditory hallucinations that can accompany mental health issues. Their study, appropriately, is published in Mental Health: Religion and Culture.
The claims of spiritualists, mediums and mediums have long fascinated scientists. They face both skepticism due to the lack of evidence and genuine curiosity as to why someone would claim to be able to hear, contact or converse with people who are no longer alive. 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 psychics ready 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 auditory experiences are more likely to adopt spiritualistic beliefs and engage in the so-called practice of “hearing” the dead, while that others who find the experience more distressing may be diagnosed with mental health.
“Spiritualists tend to report unusual auditory experiences that are positive, start early in life and are often able to control by then. Understanding how these develop is important because it could help us better understand the distressing or uncontrollable experiences of hearing voices, ”said Dr. Peter Moseley of the University of Northumbria, co-author of the study, in a press release.
They recruited 65 members of the UK’s National Union of Spiritualists and 143 members of the public, who do not regularly claim to hear the voices of the dead, to conduct the largest scientific investigation into the experience of clairaudient mediums to date. . The researchers put together detailed descriptions from psychics of how they experience these “voices,” and compared absorption levels, propensity to hallucinations, aspects of their identity, and belief in the paranormal.
They found that among self-proclaimed spiritualists, 44.6% reported hearing the voices of spirits every day, and although these voices were heard primarily in their own heads (65.1%), 31.7% reported experiencing spiritual voices coming from inside and outside the head. .
Compared to 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. The majority of them had the opportunity to hear voices for the first time when they were young, on average 21.7 years old. They also reported a higher level of absorption, a term used to describe total immersion in mental tasks and a person’s degree of effectiveness in ruling out the “outside” world. They also reported that they were more prone to “unusual hallucination-like hearing experiences.”
For the general population, higher absorption was associated with belief in the paranormal, but there was no link between this belief and propensity to hallucinations.
What these results suggest, the researchers say, is that claiming you can hear the voices of deceased spirits is unlikely due to belief in the paranormal. Instead, people who embrace spiritualism are more likely to be predisposed to absorption and to have had unusual hearing experiences when they are young, and spiritualism beliefs align with their experience.
“Our results say a lot about ‘learning and desire’. For our participants, the principles of spiritualism seem to make sense of both the extraordinary experiences of childhood as well as the common auditory phenomena they experience as practicing mediums, ”said Principal Investigator Dr. Adam Powell , from the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University.
“But all of these experiences may result more from having certain early tendencies or abilities than just believing in the possibility of contacting the dead if enough effort is put in.”
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