People who claim to be able to communicate with the spirits of the dead usually experience clairaudience rather than clairvoyance, that is, hearing things that are not available to the ears of ordinary people. Researchers from the University of Durham investigated the reports of 64 mediums belonging to the National Spiritualist Union of Great Britain and 142 ordinary Britons, publishing the largest paper on the subject to date.
Who Are Mediums?
A medium is a sensitive person who acts as a more gifted link between the physical and spiritual worlds. Researchers in England discovered that mediums are more likely to have immersive psychic activity and unusual sound experiences in childhood. There are entire websites, such as psychics-advisor.com, that feature a variety of psychics and experts. This is where people with supernatural abilities help others find answers to questions that science cannot always answer.
Scientists discovered that mediums are absorptive, which is a trait shared by those who engage in mental or imaginative activities or experience altered states of consciousness. They are also more likely to report unusual auditory phenomena, which are typically voices heard since early childhood. 44.6% of spiritualists claim to hear the voices of the dead on a daily basis, and 78% say communicating with spirits is a part of their everyday lives. Although they hear the dead’s voices primarily in their heads (65.3%), 31.5% believe the sound comes from both inside and outside the head.
Development of Abilities
On average, psychics begin hearing voices at the age of 21.6. However, 19% claim to have had this ability since they can remember. 72% were not interested in spiritualism before hearing about otherworldly phenomena. Many of them discovered Spiritualism at a young age, a religious and philosophical movement based on the concept of a soul that lives on after the death of the physical shell and can communicate with the living through mediums or psychics.
“Spiritualists report unusual auditory experiences, positive and beginning in early childhood, which they are usually able to control”, said the study’s co-author, Peter Mosley.
Scientific Experiment
Scientists at Thomas Jefferson University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, USA, investigated brain blood flow in mediums during spiritual sessions. The study discovered a decrease in brain activity during the mediums’ dissociative state, which occurred while they recorded the deceased’s speeches.
The study, conducted by a team of scientists led by Andrew Newberg, included ten mediums. Five of them were novices, while the remaining five were experts. All of the mediums were injected with radioactive markers to monitor their brain activity during a session of spirit communication in which the subjects entered a trance-like state. To determine which areas of the mediums’ brain are active during these processes and which are not, the subjects “shone” single-photon emission computed tomography.
The researchers discovered that when mediums communicate with spirits, they have lower levels of activity in the left hippocampus, which is responsible for the translation of short-term memory into long-term memory and spatial orientation. The anterior frontal lobe contains areas responsible for thinking, planning, speech, movement control, and problem-solving. The researchers hypothesized that the subjects’ lack of concentration and self-awareness was evidenced by their low activity in these areas during sessions. This could imply that when communicating with the dead, the medium’s brain decentralizes to establish a connection with the other realm.
The researchers also examined the psychics’ recordings and discovered that the deceased’s speeches were linguistically more complex than the writing done for the control task. In this case, the most complex writings were created by expert mediums. Writing such texts may require increased activity in the anterior and temporal lobes, but observations indicate otherwise.
Conclusion
Andrew Newport comments on the findings of his study, stating that this was the first neuroscientific assessment of the state into which mediums fall. It provided some interesting data that helped us better understand consciousness and its relationship to the brain. “These findings warrant further investigation”, says the scientist.
