Alien Abductions Are Real If You Want Them To Be
I saw Kripal’s discussion surrounding Meheust’s book about abduction narratives at the very beginning of this section of “Authors of the Impossible” as the perfect opportunity to start a tangential discussion about sleep paralysis in the context of the sixth sense or paranormal experience in general. Both as a psychology student and an individual that has experienced sleep paralysis on a fairly regular basis, I find this phenomenon fascinating and a really useful example through which the sixth sense can be discussed. Last semester in the psychology senior seminar, we read a book titled “Neurologic, The Brain's Hidden Rationale Behind Our Irrational Behavior,” by Elizier J. Sternberg. This book surveyed a number of different neurological and psychological anomalies and unusual conditions, one of which was sleep paralysis. Sternberg wrote of individuals that had given vivid reports of being abducted by aliens in the night, held down, and experimented upon in some way before being returned to their beds and awaking. This was understandably a very unnerving experience for them because they had never experienced anything like this prior.
A few of these components are characteristic of sleep paralysis, the central component of which is the inability to move. When you enter REM sleep, your brain paralyzes your muscles. Sleep paralysis occurs when there is a delay in regaining muscle control after someone has woken up. This produces a half-waking, hallucinatory state where people are unable to move their body. Many people with particular forms of social anxiety were also likely to feel a presence or see an entity during sleep paralysis. If someone had never experienced this before or had never even heard of sleep paralysis, the event would be even more shocking and they might be more likely to believe it had a paranormal explanation. A theme in this book is that many mental anomalies can vary with personal experience. This can change the perception and rationalization of particular experiences. This comes to light in a very interesting way when looking at Cotard’s Syndrome and Capgras Syndrome. These two disorders are two completely opposite manifestations of a one phenomenon. Cotard’s Syndrome describes an individual’s sensation that they are deceased or not real while every person that they encounter is both alive and real while Capgras Syndrome describes a condition wherein an individual becomes convinced that every person other than themselves is an imposter that is being continually replaced around them.
This all leads me to what should have been a fairly obvious conclusion in the first place: our interpretations of the same events will differ based upon our prior experience. I do feel like this is important to think about when talking about paranormal experiences though. While some people might assert that certain psychological conditions or studied phenomena are logical explanations for their unusual experiences, it can also be thought of as a way to explain them away and not think about them any more deeply. At the end of the day, our experiences take on the meanings that we assign to them and if we are always trying to explain them away, we might miss out on these transcendental experiences.
Ooo! I'm so glad that you mentioned Neurologic because, as a fellow psych major, I have read this book as well. To dive deeper, the cases of Mr. Patel and Mr. Murphy (in Neurologic) show how the unconscious system in the brain can generate different narratives to explain the same symptoms.
ReplyDeleteMr. Patel and Mr. Murphy both had trouble connecting their perceptions to their emotions, especially when it came to recognizing people’s faces, yet they came up with different theories as to why. This is because the narrative that ends up becoming our life experience is the one we are most likely to believe.
Mr. Patel had Capgras syndrome which means that he believed that everyone he knew had been replaced by a physically identical imposter. He knew that the woman he was having sex with looked like his wife, dressed like her, and talked like her, but somehow, she didn’t feel like his wife. Therefore, he believed that she must be an imposter, and he was probably more predisposed to developing paranoia.
Mr. Murphy suffered from the Cotard delusion, or the “walking corpse syndrome” and believed he was dead. He saw his wife and recognized who she was supposed to be but didn’t have the warm feelings he should have when seeing her, so, therefore, he must be dead. He felt emotionally distant from other people and dissociated from reality, and this broken link between his emotion and his senses extended to every experience in his life. Thus, death was the easiest explanation for his unconscious brain to reach for when it tried to figure out why his emotions and experiences of the world had been blunted, and he was probably more prone to depression.
In conclusion, when concocting a story to reconcile conflicting stimuli, the brain has to dig deep, calling upon our buried convictions, tendencies, and wonders, and the results can seem supernatural.
I completely agree, experiencing things as "paranormal" all has to do with what you consider "normal." So, if you regularly experience sleep paralysis, then seeing shadowy figures while you sleep would not seem paranormal because you would understand that it's just your brain playing tricks on you, so to speak. I had never heard of Cotard's Syndrome and Capgras Syndrome before, though. They sound very terrifying...! It's crazy how our brains can manipulate our understanding of the world so much so that it confuses our reality.
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