UPDATE: Over at The New Republic, Isaac Chotiner also takes out after today’s Luhrmann piece. He also excoriates her for her last paragraph:
No one is saying that spirituality can be made to “go away,” and whether it does has nothing to do with whether ghosts actually exist. But for people like Luhrmann, the whole point is to muddy these waters. She concludes:
But what this research makes clear is that when people report that they hear their dead husband or are terrified by an evil presence that groped at their throat in the night, they are not necessarily making it up, nor are they crazy. Events like these are rather what Ann Taves, professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, calls the “building blocks” of religious experience. The experiences are psychologically real events. How you interpret them is up to you.
It’s all up to you! Well, of course it is up to you, since we have this thing called freedom of religion and don’t live in a totalitarian society. We can thank Luhrmann for reminding us of this. In the meantime, she might decide that if she wants to be an opinion columnist, she should offer her opinion. My hunch is that the reason she doesn’t want to do so is that it might lead to the following conclusion: Not all “interpretations” are equally valid.
____________
One of the worst (and most puzzling) things the New York Times has done is give Tanya Luhrmann a regular column. She does nothing but osculate the rump of faith, and all I can imagine is that the Times has decided it needs someone with street cred (Luhrmann is an anthropology professor at Stanford) to make nice to religion. The Times is really, really soft on faith.
In her op-ed piece in today’s Times, “In the presence of all souls,” Luhrmann has finally showed her hand: her work is not simply about objectively reporting the doings of religious people, but about justifying their beliefs. She has lost any shred of objectivity she claimed to have.
Lurhmann was apparently inspired by the death of her dog, as after that demise she still occasionally felt her dog’s presence. (That also happened to me with my late cat.) Doing a bit of digging, she found that people often feel the presence of dead friends or loved ones. In fact, 80% of people have such experiences, which Luhrmann calls “real sensory events.” That wording is an ambiguity that fuels this piece: the blurring between reality and psychological illusions.
She then takes up “sleep paralysis,” a phenomenon whereby people seem to be awake in bed but can’t move. This is often accompanied by strange hallucinations like the presence of ghosts or demons. Luhrmann argues that many allegations of witchcraft throughout history could be based on this form of temporarily paralysis. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about its physiological causes, and Luhrmann doesn’t describe them.
What she does do is argue that just because we experience such hallucinatory phenomena doesn’t mean that the spirits of the dead, or of evil, aren’t real. In other words, she’s using hallucinations to argue that the truth claims of religion could be real, an argument that simply doesn’t make sense. But if you think I’m making this up, just read her words:
To be sure, the fact that we can identify in-the-body phenomena (hallucinations, sleep paralysis) associated with ideas about the supernatural does not necessarily mean that those ideas are false. Mr. Hufford, who also studies near-death and other remarkable experiences, is very clear about that: “Learning as much as we can about spiritual experience does not make spirituality go away.”
But what this research makes clear is that when people report that they hear their dead husband or are terrified by an evil presence that groped at their throat in the night, they are not necessarily making it up, nor are they crazy. Events like these are rather what Ann Taves, professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, calls the “building blocks” of religious experience. The experiences are psychologically real events. How you interpret them is up to you.
Can you imagine? We identify delusions or illusions, and can probably show their physiological, neurological, and psychological causes. The ghosts and dog spirits aren’t real, and none of those returning spirits has yet imparted to us any credible information about the afterlife. We can mimic such experiences with various drugs or brain stimulation. Yet Lurhmann nevertheless concludes that there still might be something to spirituality: the presence of real ghosts, souls, and spirits. The fact that there is absolutely nothing to support their existence doesn’t deter her one bit. If they existed, there should be evidence for them, but there isn’t. Conclusion: we can provisionally abandon those beliefs until we get real evidence.
Instead, Luhrmann chooses the opposite, unparsimonious conclusion. She avers that the experiences are “psychologically real” and “open to interpretation.” That’s like saying that there are many people who are convinced that aliens are communicating with them, or that they’ve been abducted by UFOs. Will she then argue that these experiences are also “psychologically real”, and “how we interpret them is up to us.” If you take LSD you’ll have all kinds of “spiritual” hallucinations. Will she then claim that those, too, are grounds for spirituality, and that maybe, just maybe, they give credibility to what we experienced?
No, Dr. Luhrmann, reality is not a judgment call on a delusion. It’s something that can be investigated empirically and cross-checked with other researchers. Determining whether those experiences say something about reality is not up to the average person; it’s up to science. She fails to understand (or willfully promotes the confusion) that psychological reality is not always real reality. And the worst instance of that—the one that earns Luhrmann her grants, papers, and money—is religion.
The last sentence of her piece infuriates me. It’s a total cop-out, an abandonment of science, and a sop to believers, reassuring them they may be neither delusional nor crazy about God. As one of my friends said after reading this, “She’s slipped completely off the deep end. They might as well have Deepak Chopra as a columnist.”
Templeton, and the New York Times, has paid Luhrmann good money to write this kind of nonsense. Why they do it is beyond me.
Subscribe.
2
Might it be because they are trying to sell papers to Americans?
That, plus they’re sensitive about the perception that the NYT is liberal; perhaps they’re throwing a sop to the RR’s. Though I should think some of their editorial stances of late are doing a better job of that.
who at NYT allows this shit in? Name, shame, flood their inbox campaign
🙂
But I suspect the Luhrmannites could out-flood us.
“building blocks” of religious experience…
I read that as “building bollocks.”
So did I, Alexandra! Great minds…
Moi aussi
No, just no. Reality is not “up to me”.
That was the line that really stood out for me, too. I thought anthropology was regarded as a science. Ms Luhrmann shows herself to be far from a scientist with that kind of relativist nonsense. Perhaps the full name of her department at Stanford is The Department of Post-modernist Anthropological Studies.
When I was 29 and she was 50, my mom finally succumbed to her chronic heart disease. It was, obviously, a very emotional time for all of us, and a few days after she died, I had a very vivid waking dream where I saw her floating in front of me, and then she “whooshed” through me like a “Ghostbusters” spirit. It was deeply disturbing, but even then, with my relatively unformed views of religion and spirituality (I had long turned my back on the Catholicism of my upbringing, but wasn’t “aware” enough to call myself an atheist), it would never have occurred to me to assign any kind of “reality” to the experience. I guess some people just need that possibility in order to deal with their bereavements etc.
Prof. Coyne, I love your blog, but I do think you are too harsh on Dr. Lurhman (who is an MD in psychiatry as well as an anthropologist). I am also trained in anthropology, and her argument does not strike me as suggesting such spirits are real, but people’s feelings and thoughts are no different than if they were actually real. This is not unusual. She is pointing out that such beliefs are common to the human experience and not so easily dismissed even when we know what actually causes things. It reminds me of Malinowski’s understanding of religion as something that helps people cope with a scary world. We often choose to tell ourselves things because they make us feel better, safer, more comfortable. To rationally deal with everything could be mentally overwhelming.
If Luhrmann were indeed stating what you describe, she should do so more clearly instead of using dodgy language and complicated grammar. See my comment at #20. She does this throughout the piece. Someone with her training would know about using strong positive statements to avoid confusion. It seems highly likely that she is using this dodgy language to obfuscate her own feelings and appease everyone.
Lurhmann has a whole history of writing posts that enable religion. She is trying to let religious people know that it is okay to believe hokum. Just search for her name on my website and see what comes up. And I’m not the only one to think this about today’s column; see Isaac Chotiner’s piece (now added as a link to mine).
Luhrmann sees a lucrative path to renown by publishing this kind of stuff, and I stand by my criticism. And it is disingenuous for her to say, “How you interpret them is up to you.” That’s just ludicrous. If you have a hallucination of monsters to drug ingestion, you are not entitled to say that that shows that such monsters are real.
There is a big difference between anthropolohical agnosticism (what she doesn’t do, what you’re defending) and religious apologetics (what she does do. Here’s an example:
1. Anthropological agnosticism: “the experiences are important, regardless of whether they arise from internal or external phenomena.”
2. Religious apologetics: “the fact that we can identify in-the-body phenomena (hallucinations, sleep paralysis) associated with ideas about the supernatural does not necessarily mean that those ideas are false.”
#2 is clearly a defense of the notion that the idea of the supernatural might be true – albeit parsed in an oblique reversed language.
I dunno. Trying to convince a mentally ill person that their hallucinations are just hallucinations is pretty much impossible. I think that is what she is getting at (perhaps not making it clear in her writing). So, to the person experiencing the phenomenon, no explanation will do. To them, the hallucinations may indeed be as real as any rational explanation. It is a coping mechanism. Even the most rational people are not immune to this. We all tell ourselves little lies about reality. To not do so would make life unbearable.
I agree, but I think much of that rejection is due to social mores, not psychology. See my response to post #11. People would be more willing to accept that what they’ve experienced is a hallucination if our society treated having an hallucination the same way it treated spraining your ankle.
Yeah, well, look, Luhrman’s found a niche where she gets paid to write stuff like this. So she’s found a niche, and her meal ticket depends on ignoring such points as are raised here. OTOH, jac, IIRC, hasn’t yet been paid a dime to write this website.
What I’d like to see from the NYT is a Point, Counterpoint with both of them. But based on some nearly firsthand experience with that outfit, which spectacularly ignored some obvious things in their writeup, I ain’t holding my breath (as they say).
I lost an eye and like Ms Luhrmann & her dog, from time to time I “feel its presents”, however I never see binocularly or anything in 3-D. Know why? Because that’s reality.
BTW if you see my left eye let me know, I’ve been looking for it since 1996.
Jerry,
You have some gravitas, you could write a rebuttal or a piece for the NYT.
I think he asked them about that recently, even submitted a brief. They never got back to him.
Lurhmann was apparently inspired by the death of her dog, as after that demise she still occasionally felt her dog’s presence.
And people who’ve had to have limbs amputated often still feel sensations in those limbs. Does this mean those limbs are already in the afterlife, waiting to be reclaimed when the rest of the person dies? I think we should be told.
” Does this mean those limbs are already in the afterlife, waiting to be reclaimed when the rest of the person dies?”
No, but the feeling the people experience are real, no? Telling them their limb is not there (and providing them with our modern understanding of the neurology of phantom limb) does nothing to stop the phantom feelings. I believe that is the point Lurhman is making.
However if she is making this point, it isn’t very clear:
She does not definitively say that the experience is real (which I would wholeheartedly support) but instead says that the hallucinations “associated with ideas about the supernatural” are not necessarily false. There is no mention that the experience is real and these supernatural ideas aren’t even described as “real” just not necessarily false.
Sounds dodgy to me.
I suspect this depends on equivocation regarding the meaning of the word “false”. So much of apologetics is about redefining words to mean what you want them to mean in that half of the sentence.
But if something is not real, even though a genuine experience, shouldn’t we say so? If your child has a bad dream, do you explain that it wasn’t real? Or do you say “Well, the interpretation is up to you. Maybe there really are monsters under your bed?”
I don’t think anyone would argue that even after hearing an explanation that people would still feel that they had the experience. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t tell them the real cause. That doesn’t mean that you don’t believe that they had the experience.
My beloved white collie Queenie was run over and killed when I was 11, and that night I had a very vivid dream of us frolicking in verdant green fields. I hope freewheelinfranklin’s absent eye is watching out for her.
My thoughts as well. Nice!
Tanya Luhrmann at NYT. Suzanne Somers at WSJ.
Conclusion: David Icke at The Guardian.
Luhrmann’s erroneous thinking on this topic reminds me of the naive thinking described in a story by Douglas Adams, as related by Richard Dawkins:
A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained about high-frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, transmitters and receivers, amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen.
The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. “But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?”
All these things generally make for some wonderful fiction — quite entertaining stories that can sometimes even help bring insight into the human condition.
So why the fuck do people like Luhrmann have to shit all over it by pretending that make-believe is really real? Why can’t they just let us have our fantasies and enjoy them? Why must they constantly try to distort them into exactly that which they aren’t?
It’s fun when somebody opens a ghost story ’round the campfire with, “Here’s a true story that really happened to my brother-in-law….” But if, weeks later, they’re still trying to convince you that it really did happen, they’ve utterly destroyed the story and in so doing have turned themselves into an annoying and foolish git.
Cheers,
b&
I was initially disappointed to hear that the Coen brothers film ‘Fargo’ was not a true story. But after a while thinking about it I love it a bit more knowing it’s made up, even saying it was based on a true story made it more entertaining.
If the beautiful, pregnant cop wasn’t a give-away, the chipper scene should have been…
Jeez. I think that being able to identify ideas about the supernatural as hallucinations and delusions experienced during sleep paralysis is about all I need to accept them as false. Very strange conclusion by the author.
You and I both. However, our common view is deemed Profoundly Unsophisticated by Sophisticated Theologians™ and their ilk. Which really cracks me up. For example, one thing that Luhrmann’s arguments regarding religion most definitely are not is sophisticated.
That’s funny. Well I’m content to be labelled unsophisticated if it means I have a solid grip on reality 🙂
Yeah, it’s a shame because the article could have so easily gone in the other direction. Take the “sleep paralysis”. I have the impression, though I haven’t researched it, that the body does something to overtly immobilize your limbs during REM sleep so that you don’t thrash and hurt yourself while you sleep (one time this failed for me an my wife woke me up because my feet were running rather violently in place in bed). In my hazy picture of this phenomena this is turned off before you regain consciousness so you don’t normally notice it, but sometimes the sequencing goes a little wrong and this lack of limb responsiveness can overlap into wakefulness or partial wakefulness. In any case, it may actually be true that you can’t move so that simply saying that someone who reports such a phenomena is lying or “merely” imagining it might be an inadequate description of what is happening. No doubt various kinds of mental hallucinations and other odd physiological phenomena *do* contribute as building blocks for certain beliefs, or even the general perception that there is some supernatural realm. These are excellent points and could have been use to help people understand how their subjectively very real experiences may not be indications of anything real outside of their own brain and physiology.
I think it is a good point generally that unreal events, such as in fiction, can have a psychological reality that compares strongly with experiences of real events. Certainly Hermione Granger feels, subjectively, like someone I know, and her influence on my life, as someone I admire, as someone whose approval I might want, and so on, is in many ways similar to that of real people. Some part of my mind really is fooled by fiction in this way. The goal for people interested in truth, though, is to subject these substantially real feelings to tests of external reality, and to learn to reliably distinguish the difference. The ability to do this keeps you from sending birthday party invitations to Hermione, and keeps you from taking any “lessons” you might think you’ve learned by observing this “person” too seriously.
One hurdle to this is that there is still a large stigma in our culture around mental problems. People resist the notion that they might have some real trama stemming from a false memory or “purely mental” experience, because they find that notion far more socially embarassing than having real trauma from some external event. Heck, its more socially embarassing than being discovered to be lying about a fake trauma associated with a real event! Who would you feel more comfortable around – the guy who put on a neck collar to bilk an auto insurance company using a fake injury, or the guy who suffers real neck pain from a (transparently false) UFO abduction?
You’d feel more comfortable around the first guy, right? Isn’t that messed up? The first guy is clearly unethical. The second merely has a mental injury, probably suffered through no fault of their own. They’ve just done the mental equivalent of throwing their back out…yet most of us find such a person far scarier and alien than a known con man.
I think, therefore, that one of the necessary early steps in getting people to understand that mental trauma can be solely mental, is to work to make such ‘purely’ mental traumas as socially acceptable as purely physical injuries.
True, but part of what could have been a good teaching moment for this article, and what it looked like it was going to do before it punted to woo, is that there doesn’t have to be anything “wrong” with you in order to have an experience like this. A normally functioning brain is subject to many illusions (e.g. the optical illusions featured here recently), many glitches, and these things don’t signify anything more meaningful than the tingling you feel when your foot “goes to sleep”.
I think you’re correct that muscle paralysis is a normal part of the sleep cycle. Lurhman’s conclusions strike me as wishful thinking. She seems to want to believe…..or at least not dash the hopes of believers.
When my best friend and I were in our teens he was subject to periodic bouts of what he called, “The Wah-wah-wahs”: He would “wake up” paralyzed, feeling an oppressive, threatening presence approaching, and hearing a thrumming noise in his head that sounded like, “Wah, wha, wha.” This occurred less and less frequently as he grew older and finally stopped. He was amazed a few years ago when I informed him of what I’d just read on “sleep paralysis”- “That’s IT!” He exclaimed.
I experience sleep paralysis about once every couple of years.
The “wha wha” was likely his heartbeat (the sound of blood pulsing through the blood vessels near the tympanic membrane).
I should add that I’ve never felt a threatening presence, although it is frustrating when you’re sure you’re awake but cannot move.
Has Lurhmann ever described what god really sounds like? The only argument I consider I’ve won against a Christian went something like this.
Theist: I know God exists, He has spoken to me.
Me: That would be proof. What did he sound like? I bet he had a really sexy accent.
Theist:[long pause] He just used my voice, He sounded like I do.
Me: So you spoke to yourself and thought it was your god?
Theist: Actually, that makes more sense.
//
Alien abductions are a common psychological experience in the USA, but ghostly experiences are much more common in the UK. How would Dr. Luhrmann explain the geographical distribution of spooky psychological experiences?
Of course the Victorian buildings in the UK attract more ghosts – they don’t like skyscrapers. And of course aliens are more attracted to a country that has already sent people to the moon. Obviously!
Yes, and of course the buildings are older in the UK so there are more ghosts.
Duh. This is all really basic ghost and UFO-ology. I hate it when people don’t do their research before commenting.
Our anus’ (anii?) are more fun to probe.
ani 🙂
When I read Luhrmann’s piece, I wanted to comment on it. But of course, the NYT does not allow commenting on her bits of irritatingly slippery doggerel.
IIRC from my dabbling reading into memory research, UFO abductions are psychologically real.* Which is to say, the false memories of a UFO abduction are constructed by the brain very similarly to the way real memories are constructed. You can literally get real PTSD from a trauma that never happened – because your brain has a difficult time telling the difference between true memories and false ones. See, for example, the last 5 paragraphs of this brief bio.
Now, if correct, this would lead to the conclusion that we should treat honest sufferers from UFO abductions (and other false memories) seriously. They have a real mental trauma that they need help to overcome. But it manifestly does NOT lead to the conclusion that UFO abductions are real.
*There’s of course some fraction of people who are knowingly lying. But for this post, I’m talking about the sincere believers not the cons.
Ack, my apologies for the html closure fail. Mea culpa…
My wife and I read the NYTimes to be informed and because we like certain columns (Krugman and others) because they are informative and/or icon busting. I think without those I would be less likely to read it. We subscribe but also buy it when traveling for these reasons. The idea that the NYTimes has added this woo to satisfy certain customers is quite plausible.
Krugman rocks.
+ 1
Yeah, this part in particular — ” has paid _ insert here the names of any of the so – called faithful ___ good money to write this kind of nonsense ” is quite angering, isn’t it ?
When so, so much of the World by religionists is told ” to pray ” to relieve their suffering, then … … why not tell such ‘authors’ to pray for the rewards of their ‘words’ and, further, to let prayer’s imaginary money fulfill their contracts / their agreements to produce ( … … to produce such bunkum ).
Blue
People want ghosts. Tonight I will do as I did last year. I ask the kids one question:
“If you believe in ghosts you can get as many as three candies and if you do not believe in ghosts you can have as many as you like.”
A lot of the parents laugh hysterically, which is comforting, some of the kids ponder the relationship between this answer and what they are told to believe about god. It is interesting to watch their dilemma.
She gives herself plenty of wiggle room to cry that she is being misjudged when we call her out on her religious pandering.
Look how she writes: she starts with “to be sure, the fact” and you wait to see what she is emphatically saying is true. Then she muddles things; she doesn’t clearly say, “these ideas are true” or “these experiences are true”, instead she says creates a way too complex clause in which she ends up saying that it “does not necessarily mean those ideas are false”. Such weak language to describe something by what it is not! Either her language is betraying her or this is her little escape route.
Yeah, the extra verbiage and complex clause serves to shield the ridiculousness of the idea.
Here’s an equivalent: “To be sure, the fact that we can identify L. Ron Hubband, a known sci-fi writer, as the author of Dianetics does not necessarily mean that the story of Xenu sending convict souls to earth volcanoes is false.”
Good one. I tried to come up with an equivalency but failed.
So is she implying that dogs have souls? I wonder if they go to heaven, if there was an original dog sin, or if a doggy Jesus had to die for the sins of all other dogs.
I doubt she even begins to realize how bizarre it is to talk about animal souls, as if human souls were not bizarre enough.
I am pretty sure the argument is not “since there is a natural explanation no other explanation will ever suffice”. Rather, it is that the “spiritual explanation” has no decent evidence and therefore no merit until it gets some, if it could even be said to be coherent enough to actually even have a chance at making some kind of testable prediction anyway.
Dog souls are a point of heated debate among the religious.
http://now.msn.com/funny-church-signs-argue-over-whether-dogs-go-to-heaven
Tanya Luhrmann seems to be trying to embody the ideal New Atheist, one who both successfully explains religion as the result of completely human tendencies and foibles AND YET ALSO successfully manages to be completely respectful of religious belief. So there’s a schizoid quality to her writing that New Atheists can apparently see and the religious can’t, soothed and comforted as they are by her beckoning smile of approval and her sympathetic nod of understanding. “Here’s what’s going on — make of it what you will.”
Faitheism.
When I read her I sometimes imagine Richard Dawkins coming into the room wearing a comfy sweater, putting on his slippers, and reading The God Delusion in dulcet British tones, pausing every now and then to look up, smile at the camera, and say reassuringly “But I like you just the way you are.”
Fools them every time.
She’s evidently gone the route of William James’ “piecemeal supernaturalism” (from “The Varieties of Religious Experience”) aka the Buddhist parable of the 3 blind men and the elephant used to explain why religions disagree.
S.T.Joshi has a fairly strong rebuttal to this in his book “God’s Defenders” showing why the “argument from feelings” doesn’t work in part because such experiences are so often molded by cultural conditioning.
BTW the “shark of religion” is an aptly scary for Halloween. 🙂
When my 20 year old son died I had very vivid dreams involving him. I even spoke to him when I visited his grave. I was never stupid enough to think he was floating around somewhere or was going to answer me. Grieving is a shit process but you get through it without sky fairies or dickheads trying to “comfort” you with that garbage.
Hmmm. I think Luhrmann is saying that their is no defense against the charge of witchcraft, since even if there are potentially pyschological reasons for various manifestations and experiences, we could not rule out spiritual reasons. I can’t imagine she would think this is helpful.
Until a few years ago, I had a cat. As I (in my existence as a single person) found myself spending a lot of time away from home, I decided to give the cat away to someone who could be there for her. The experience has led to my conviction that keeping pets can be a very unkind thing for the pet, but I’m digressing.
Anyway, for some months afterwards I could still feel the tail of the cat stroking my leg every now and then, just as she used to do when we still shared the flat. The cat itself, however, was still alive – albeit in someone else’s house.
I guess that was a “real sensory event” of sorts, but for me it’s definitive proof that these sensations are proof of absolutely nothing outside of my own skull.
Actually, and unfortunately, it’s just an anecdote.
> Templeton, and the New York Times,
> has paid Luhrmann good money
> to write this kind of nonsense.
> Why they do it is beyond me.
To reassure waffling Religious folk
that Faith is not an insidious joke;
thus, keep Sheeple tithing from their poke.
imo,
The “sleep paralysis” sounds similar to pre-epileptic episodes known as “auras.” I went through a stressful period in my late 20s: I would be lying down, seemingly unable to move. I’d hear a low roaring in my ears, and it seemed as if I was being offered a choice, and all I had to do was choose to accept and everything would be OK.
I never did choose to accept, though.
Interesting about auras. I didn’t know they were pre-seizure events. They are also experienced by some migraine sufferers (I don’t get auras myself) and I’ve read that people who get migraines are more likely to develop seizures and that likelihood increases if you suffer migraines with auras. I also read that migraines can leave lesions on the brain so it seems migraines & seizures are cousins.
Migraine sufferers are also more likely to have strokes.
Well, crap.
I’ve suffered a few episodes of sleep paralysis. No ability to move the body, feel like someone is the room with you, in one case felt like someone was sitting on my legs.
I got them during stressful times and if I was having regular migraines.
I seem to have had an occurrence last summer — certainly there was stress, since I had been helping my wife recover from a nasty bicycle accident.
I was in the midst of dreams when F woke me to ask for a glass of water. Couldn’t move for a few seconds, which seemed like minutes. But I remember thinking “this could be a stroke, but it’s likely sleep paralysis, and if so, it will wear off” Always an optimist, and it did. But if I’d never heard of SP, I would have been terrified.
When I accidentally hit my finger with a hammer, I have a real physical experience. How I interpret it is up to me.
A) I am physically inept.
B) Thor is mocking my feeble efforts.
C) Loki is causing trouble again.
D) What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.
I don’t like A or B, and in my pain D seems rather implausible, so it must be C. QED.
Oh that Loki!
C) Loki is causing trouble again.
I’d say
E) You were a bit unLoki.
I am convinced that sleep paralysis incidents occur in a very deep state of sleep. You are trying to wake up for some strong physiological reason, e.g. a need to empty your bladder or move out of an uncomfortable sleeping position, but the state of sleep is so deep that you can’t.
I seldom experienced them except for a period of time I was taking a combination of drugs that were all known to have a strong influence on brain chemistry. Normally I am a very light sleeper, but during this time it was nearly impossible for minor external events to wake me (e.g. dogs loudly barking or a howling wind).
These sleep paralysis episodes were sometimes frightening and sometimes amusing, but I looked forward to them since they were so unique in my experience. I never woke up thinking they reflected any reality.
Even though the science is far from complete it gives us a different (naturalistic) framework to consider our experiences against.
But if you have only a supernatural framework then gods and demons (and aliens, vampires, zombies, miasmas, spirits, luck, spooky agency etc) populate an alternative framework. Not necessarily a pleasant or real framework but one that does provide *an* explanation – which is better than nothing (perhaps).
In addition to sleep paralysis on waking (hypnopompic hallucinations), there is also sleep paralysis while falling asleep (hypnagogic hallucinations).
I’ve had both kinds–they’re usually scary as hell.
In addition to sleep paralysis on waking (hypnopompic hallucinations), there is also sleep paralysis while falling asleep (hypnagogic hallucinations).
I don’t think either of those involve sleep paralysis.
Decades ago my mother, then in her sixties, volunteered for a sleep experiment at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She was given a questionnaire to fill out. Having done that and waiting for others to do the same, she turned it over to discover that, for reasons of economy, the questionnaire had been printed on the back of other stuff — in her case, a paper about hypnagogic dreaming.
This was the first time my mother realized that she was quite unusual in that she very often had hypnagogic dreams: up until then, she’d assumed everyone had them.
From the Wikipedia entry on “Hynagogia:”
“Mental phenomena that occur during this “threshold consciousness” phase include lucid dreaming, hallucinations, and sleep paralysis.”
Far be it from me to dispute Wikipedia, but the fact that various phenomena are associated with “threshold consciousness” (I haven’t checked this but have no reason to doubt it) doesn’t mean that the experience of one necessarily involves the experience of another.
I’ve endured sleep paralysis (and very nasty it is) but never enjoyed lucid or hypnagogic dreaming. Likewise, my mum’s hypnagogic dreaming didn’t involve sleep paralysis. And, back in the 1980s when I was young and foolish and researched and wrote a whole flabbily long book on the subject of dreaming, I never came across this supposed connection.(Perhaps I was wrong, or perhaps it simply wasn’t known at the time. But . . .)
So, to repeat, I suspect that
In addition to sleep paralysis on waking (hypnopompic hallucinations), there is also sleep paralysis while falling asleep (hypnagogic hallucinations)
is wrong.
Well, I always experience both together, so it’s not completely wrong.
From the little reading I’ve done on it–not like you have of course–I found the two (three I guess) often linked as well. The horror of sleep paralysis usually involves a dire need to flee some dreamt-of danger while not being able to move.
Well, from my experience, the paralysis does not always come with hallucinations, but majority of the time it does (and the majority of the time they are nasty, too). The hallucinations can come without the paralysis, though this is usually considered something that only occurs in severe sleep deprivation or with serious pathology. Lucid dreaming certainly overlaps with sleep paralysis/hallucination: I lucid dream fairly often and the physical experience is extremely close to that of the paralysis (including the fact that its likelihood is promoted by certain physical positions when sleeping), though not unpleasant. Indeed when lucid dreaming I am dimly aware of my actual unmoving body, though focusing on it has the same effect as thinking about gravity to Arthur Dent when he is flying: it suddenly brings the whole business crashing to the ground. I understand that people who actively seek out lucid dreaming experiences (what kind of idiot deliberately mucks with their sleep processes?) often sleep on their backs, which seems to encourage it — and is exactly the reason I do not, as the paralysis is also encouraged by this position.
I’m a Level VI narcoleptic (what? aren’t a allowed an X-Men reference in this august domain?), so enjoy the full range of sleep dysfunctions that ones body can throw at one; but at least this means that over the years I have had plenty of opportunity to observe them in detail…
Stuart, a belated remark I meant to make earlier about how interesting and informative I found that.
I concur with your observation that sleeping on one’s back encourages sleep paralysis.
Narcolepsy must be hell to live with.
Ah, don’t worry on my sake. The same bunch of genes that gave me the narcolepsy also made me gratingly cheerful and optimistic. There are far, far nastier diseases to have. Overall, being a white male[1] in a western country in the 21st century places my basic quality of life so astronomically higher than the vast majority of people who have ever lived that I would feel rather churlish for moaning about what is, in comparison with so many other diseases, just a pain in the butt. A right royal one, but just a pain nevertheless.
[1] This is not to endorse white male privilege, but my very refusal to endorse it means that I have to acknowledge I benefit from it.
Just because Kepler explained the stable orbits of the planets doesn’t mean that Newton’s angels don’t exist.
/@
All that nonsense because she missed her dead dog? Ahahaahahahahahaha, that’s hilarious. When my cat died I kept expecting to see him around the corner, but I didn’t try to base an academic career on the experience! Oh the joys of narcissism. Some people are just so thrilled with their own fabulousness that they cannot believe they will ever cease to exist. Don’t expect them to change, narcissists don’t.
When the grieving period for her dog ends, Luhrmann will come to her senses.
Did she use the term, “resonate”? She might as well have: I define it as “The more strongly an idea pleases me or the more strongly I identify with it, the more true it must be.”
I have suspected for a long time that there may be a common “link” in this magical thinking, a link that, although perhaps not the primary motivator, gives power to everything from belief in Nessie, to UFO abductions, to religion: I theorize that there is a certain percentage of people to whom, by fault of brain structure and thought “patterns”, find the idea that everything is explainable, or even potentially explainable, to be emotionally painful. It seems that these peoples’ “knowing” (and they DO “know” empirical knowledge: how to speak, write, drive cars, etc.)just HAS to be “balanced” by the presence of a “something” which cannot be known, or will never be known. I’m certain that there are a great many believers in Bigfoot who would actually feel a “let-down” were Bigfoot be proven to actually exist; they’d have to go looking for some other “unknown” to balance their knowing.
Actually, I thought if was the opposite.
The more they fear the unknown the more likely they are to invent an entity in which to embody the unknown.
It may not say much for my sociability, but the worse loss I’ve ever endured was the loss of my beloved moggie to illness about three years ago. It took me a long, long time to get over, and I still can’t bring myself to adopting another kitty.
Did I feel my cat’s presence after he had died? No. Not even remotely. I did see his favorite places, and the marks he’d left where he used to rub himself against things, and feel sad.
Tanya Luhrmann’s expressing something that’s really the province of believers in unevidenced things. And she’s a scientist?
I’m narcoleptic, so am an old hand at sleep paralysis (though it can occur in that weirdo portion of the population who manage to get by with one sleep per day, too). It’s basically a screw up in the sleep process, where the partial paralysis that your body enacts during sleep occurs too soon (as you’re falling asleep) or continues after waking. It’s common to dream during it as well, though you are very definitely awake.
One of the added perks of narcolepsy is this non-sleep dreaming (technically called hypogogic hallucination) can occur without the paralysis, and I usually hallucinate for a few minutes upon waking up. When I was a young lad, brought up in an atheist household, I started to see lots of people walking around the room at night and became quietly convinced I was psychic, because I had no other explanation. Then after some years (rather too many, actually) I was diagnosed, the condition was explained, and rather than maintaining my belief in being psychic, I thought. “Oh right, that explains it all,” and reverted to sensible non-belief, even slightly more aggressively so. What Lehrmann would seem to want is that, at this point, I accepted my hallucinations as such, but nevertheless maintained my belief in my psychic abilities.
Interestingly, the dreams — particularly those associated with the sleep paralysis — tend towards those that are credible to me. It is notable that, in the twenty years since I was diagnosed and my resultant discarding of my temporary flirtation with credulity, the content of the hallucinations (which are, annoyingly, almost always unpleasant) have shifted from supernaturalistic to wholly realistic. I am uncertain whether Lehrmann therefore would wish me to conclude that I should be paranoid about burglars breaking into my house, simply because I regularly hear them doing so whilst inconveniently incapable of confronting them due to the combined problems of (a) not being able to move and (b) them not existing. The whole process lays very bare the Kahneman-type model of our cognition, where my reasoned, rational part is absolutely aware of what is happening, and is saying to itself “This is a hallucination,” whilst the emotive bit is screaming “But I can hear it. This time it’s real!”
I certainly concur, from my experiences, that a lot of religious experiences are psychologically valid. We live our lives under a kind of uber-realist presumption that there is an almost direct causal relationship between our sensory input and our mental representations of the world. Clearly there is not, and there is actually a lot of room for our perception to get it wrong, and impose its own biases, whether these be ghosts, alien abduction or just some bugger breaking your door open — I think this is probably an awful lot more common than we allow for. As such, I am possibly more sympathetic than many on this thread in acknowledging the genuine experiences of people who believe God is talking to them, or what have you. But to propose that psychological validity corresponds to ontological reality is just the worst kind of anthropological wishy-washy relativist nonsense.
Sorry about your narcolepsy! Enjoyed your dry descriptions of the hallucinations. 😉
Now that you mention it, my hypnagogic + sleep paralysis hallucinations are never of the supernatural sort, either. They always concern very plausible “bad guys,” sometimes recognizable, sometimes not. All in all I think that makes them even more terrifying.
IIANM at least a few well known religious visionaries of the past are considered quite likely to have been epileptics. One wonders how many others may have been narcoleptic, or just prone to these hallucinations.
Indeed, I would go further and suggest you don’t even need a pathology of any type to experience these things. It seems a no-brainer to me that, given our minds are quite capable of producing perfectly acceptable (to themselves) though wildly non-real perceptions at the most ordinary of times (i.e. in sleep) that the brain is extremely active in “creating” perception, and that sensory input is much closer to a failsafe mechanism, checking that the percept aligns with reality in a way that is not too detrimental to our wellbeing! As such, all perception is (to me) intimately intertwined with the brain’s cognitive processes — as I said above, we tend to work on a presumption of input > mental representation > cognitive analysis thereof, but I think the latter two are extremely interlinked (this is pretty much taken from Dennett, whose “Consciousness Explained”, whilst not entirely living up to its title, certainly has been a huge influence on how I see these things). In the case of sleep paralysis — and, for that matter, the reported phenomena of near-death experiences — the brain lacks the level of sensory input to which it is accustomed, and so has free reign to build up non-reality-matching fantasies: but these fantasies are still being built in co-operation with the cognitive system (and with a certain amount of sensory input too), and so are “believable”, that is, they do not jar with the usual way that particular brain analyses the world.
I also think that it is a common mistake to presume that we cognize the world in a way that is particularly similar to people from many centuries ago. In a hugely credulous society where supernatural explanations were the norm (I think even the most superstitious of moderns might believe in the existence of, say ghosts, but accept that they are not *commonplace*) a supernaturalist phenomena could easily be the *first* point of call for the cognitive system. Add to that the vagueness of input that would result from uncorrected sensory organ problems such as short sight, or temporary disruptions such as migraine, and you have the perfect grounds for people to genuinely perceive (reserving that term for the mental representation, not the sensory input) all manner of flibbertigibbets and spooks. There doesn’t even need to be anything “wrong” (in the pathological sense), just a weakness of input and a cognitive system biased towards the supernatural, coupled with our strong tendency to see false positives (an evolutionarily understandable trait).
There is, I would claim, little psychological difference between hearing God speaking to you and feeling your phone vibrate when it is not (http://mindhacks.com/2013/07/16/why-you-think-your-phone-is-vibrating-when-it-is-not/). I certainly get the latter rather a lot.
The point of this lengthy repeat rant is that I think we should be very careful when mocking people who honestly report supernatural experiences. We need to fix a culture that bizarrely still embraces their existence as an acceptable ontological assertion (which Lehrmann is a egregious offender in perpetuation of), but individuals labouring under these misapprehensions should (I think) be given a bit of slack, although maybe gently guided towards the light. Lehrmann deserves mockery, certainly, but not the people she is talking about.
Psychology has been teaching us for ages that we can’t trust our perceptions and ‘feelings’. This ‘academic’, is believing the story that she has concocted and connected to her feelings. When an earlier cat died in 1995, I wrote a eulogy where I said, ‘she was everywhere and nowhere’. However, as I’m psychologically literate, I knew that I would have a variety of perceptions. I’m not arrogant enough to believe them, or the stories I concoct.
Must look up this ‘academic’ – who should be as literate as a Psych 1 student! I can’t tell you how much I hate this BS.