Why We Believe

The pervasiveness of belief in the supernatural and paranormal may seem odd in an age of science. But ours is also an age of anxiety, a time of economic distress and social anomie, as denizens of a mobile society are repeatedly uprooted from family and friends. Historically, such times have been marked by a surge in belief in astrology, ESP and other paranormal phenomena, spurred in part by a desperate yearning to feel a sense of control in a world spinning out of control. A study reported a few weeks ago in the journal Science found that people asked to recall a time when they felt a loss of control saw more patterns in random noise, perceived more conspiracies in stories they read and imagined illusory correlations in financial markets than people who were not reminded that events are sometimes beyond their control. "In the absence of perceived control, people become susceptible to detecting patterns in an effort to regain some sense of organization," says psychology researcher Bruce Hood of the University of Bristol, whose upcoming book "Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable" explores the mental processes behind belief in the paranormal. "No wonder those stock market traders are clutching their rabbit's feet"—or that psychics and the paranormal seem to be rivaling reality stars for TV hegemony ("Medium," "Psychic Kids," "Lost" and the new "Fringe" and "Eleventh Hour"). Just as great religious awakenings have coincided with tumultuous eras, so belief in the paranormal also becomes much more prevalent during social and political turmoil. Such events "lead the mind to look for explanations," says Michael Shermer, president of the Skeptics Society and author of the 1997 book "Why People Believe Weird Things." "The mind often takes a turn toward the supernatural and paranormal," which offer the comfort that benign beings are watching over you (angels), or that you will always be connected to a larger reality beyond the woes of this world (ghosts).

As science replaces the supernatural with the natural, explaining everything from thunder and lightning to the formation of planets, many people seek another source of mystery and wonder in the world. People can get that from belief in several paranormal phenomena, but none more so than thinking they were abducted by aliens. When Susan Clancy was a graduate student in psychology at Harvard University, she was struck by how ordinary the "abductees" she was studying seemed. They were respectable, job-holding, functioning members of society, normal except for their belief that short beings with big eyes once scooped them up and took them to a spaceship. They are men like Will, a massage therapist, who was abducted repeatedly by aliens, he told Clancy, and became so close to one that their union produced twin boys whom, sadly, he never sees. Numerous studies have found that abductees are not suffering from any known mental illness. They are unusually prone to false memories, and tend to be creative, fantasy-prone and imaginative. But so are lots of people who have never met a little green man.

Some 40 percent of Americans believe it's possible that aliens have grabbed some of us, polls show, compared with 25 percent in the 1980s. What makes abductees stand out is something so common, it's a wonder there aren't more of them: an inability to think scientifically. Clancy asked abductees if they understand that sleep paralysis, in which waking up during a dream causes the dream to leak into consciousness even while you remain immobilized, can produce the weird visions and helplessness that abductees describe. Of course, they say, but that doesn't apply to them. And do they understand that the most likely explanation of bad dreams, impotence, nosebleeds, loneliness, bruises or just waking up to find their pajamas on the floor does not involve aliens? Yes, they told her, but abduction feels like the best explanation. Larry, for instance, woke from a dream, saw shadowy figures around his bed and felt a stabbing pain in his groin. He ran through the possibilities—a biotech firm's stealing his sperm, angels, repressed memory of childhood sexual abuse—and only then settled on alien abduction as the most plausible. The scientific principle that the simplest explanation is most likely to be right is, well, alien to abductees. But again, an inability to think scientifically is exceedingly common. We are more irrational than we are rational; emotions drive voting behavior more strongly than analysis of candidates' records and positions does. The universal human need to find meaning and purpose in life is stronger and more basic than any attachment to empiricism, logic or objective reality.

Something as common as loneliness can draw us to the paranormal. In a study published in February, scientists induced feelings of loneliness in people by telling them that a personality questionnaire they filled out revealed that, by middle age, they would have few friends and be socially isolated. After this ruse, participants were more likely to say they believed in ghosts, angels, the Devil, miracles, curses and God than were participants who were told their future held many friendships, found Nicholas Epley, of the University of Chicago, and colleagues.

That we are suckers for weird beliefs reflects the fact that the brain systems that allow and even encourage them "evolved for other things," says James Griffith, a psychiatrist and neurologist at George Washington University. A bundle of neurons in the superior parietal lobe, a region toward the top and rear of the brain, for instance, distinguishes where your body ends and the material world begins. Without it, you couldn't navigate through a door frame. But other areas of the brain, including the thinking regions in the frontal lobes, sometimes send "turn off!" signals to this structure, such as when we are falling asleep or when we feel physical communion with another person (that's a euphemism for sex). During intense prayer or meditation, brain-imaging studies show, the structure is also especially quiet. Unable to find the dividing line between self and world, the brain adapts by experiencing a sense of holism and connectedness. You feel a part of something larger than yourself. This ability to shut off the sense of where you end and the world begins, then, may promote other beliefs that bring a sense of connection, even if they involve alien kidnappers.

Other normal brain functions can be hijacked for spooky purposes, too. Neither the eyes nor the ears can take in every aspect of an object. The brain, therefore, fills in the blanks. Consider the optical illusion known as the Kanizsa triangle, in which three black Pac-Man shapes sit at what could be the corners of a triangle, their open mouths pointed inward. Almost everyone "sees" three white lines forming that triangle, but there are in fact no lines. What does the "seeing" is not the eyes but the brain, which habitually takes messy, incomplete input and turns it into a meaningful, complete picture. This drive to see even what is not objectively there is easily hijacked. "Perceptually, the world is chronically ambiguous and requires an interpretation," says Stewart Guthrie, professor emeritus of anthropology at Fordham University and author of "Faces in the Clouds." And suddenly you see Satan in the smoke from the World Trade Center. "We see the Virgin Mary in a potato chip or Jesus on an underpass wall because we're using our existing cognitive structures to make sense of an ambiguous or amorphous stimuli," says psychologist Mark Reinecke, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University.

Scientists mean "see" literally. Brain imaging shows that the regions that become active when people imagine seeing or hearing something are identical to those that become active when they really do see or hear something in the outside world. This holds true for schizophrenics (their visual cortex becomes active when they hallucinate people, and their auditory cortex when they hear voices, in ways that are indistinguishable from when they perceive real people and voices) and for healthy people engaging in mental imagery (think of a pink elephant). It is not too far a step for mentally healthy people to see or hear what they are thinking intensely about. Christina Puchalski, director of the George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health, felt her dead mother's presence "with me in a very deep and profound way, emanating from a certain direction," she says. "Maybe if you're thinking very strongly about that person, your mind is creating the sense that he is there."