Humans on a paranormal investigation interfere in more ways than they are probably aware of. Here I am going to attempt to explain just a few of the ways in which they interfere that I have learnt about in the last two years, both from experience and from researching in books and online.

 My favourite source for information is Skepdic.com - the online dictionary for sceptics, I also have the Skeptic Dictionary sitting on my bookcase which is very useful.

So lets begin with my favourite….

The Pareidolia Effect

Wikipedia: The term pareidolia describes a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hidden messages on records played in reverse.

It is easy to see things in a photograph or footage that appears to be something it isn’t. From birth our brain programmes itself to recognise the faces of our parents, it is a survival method we have from birth, being able to recognise those who look after you and feed you is important. So if we are presented with a mixture of shapes or colours that are not recognisable and we concentrate on this for long enough, our brain will send signals to our eyes and will start to pick things out that are recognisable, such as faces, or shapes of recognisable things. This is what happens when we see, lets say, a teddy bear in the clouds, now we know there isn’t a teddy bear in the clouds, yet that is what our eyes recognise the shape to be.

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Above are two examples of how the Pareidolia effect works. On the left is a sticky bun that looks like Mother Teresa, On the right is a clock, its mechanisms look like a sad face. 

Ideomotor Response 

wikipedia: The ideomotor effect is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions without conscious awareness. As in reflexive responses to pain, the body sometimes reacts reflexively to ideas alone without the person consciously deciding to take action. For instance, Automatic writing, dowsing, facilitated communication, and Ouija boards have also been attributed to the effect of this phenomenon. Mystics have often attributed this motion to paranormal or supernatural force. Many subjects are unconvinced that their actions are originating solely from within themselves.

I have witnessed the Ideomotor response personally on some of the earlier investigations I took part in, when I believe that table tipping and glass divination really were spirits moving the objects, rather than the people around the glass subconscousily moving it instead. Now that I look back, it was obvious that I was fooling myself, as were the others around the table. This is why any decent investigation team stays well away from these practices, and those that use them, are only fooling themselves and making themselves look silly. 

Apophenia

 Wikipedia: Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”.

I touched upon this in an earlier article titled “The need to be haunted” - I mentioned how people who had recently lost a loved one or a close friend would be more likely to put a picture of the deceased falling off of the wall down to the spirit of that person visiting them, than a coincidence. It is also something that regularly happens to people who haven’t necessarily recently lost a loved one. 

The Autokinetic Effect 

Wikipedia: The autokinetic effect is a phenomenon of human visual perception in which a stationary, small point of light in an otherwise dark or featureless environment appears to move. It was first recorded by a Russian officer keeping watch who observed illusory movement of a star near the horizon. It presumably occurs because motion perception is always relative to some reference point. In darkness or in a featureless environment there is no reference point, so the movement of the single point is undefined.

The autokinetic effect can explain many UFO experiences. We all know that our eyes play tricks on us, but a lot of people do not realise that when sat in the dark, if a light appears to be moving it is because our eyes have no reference point and is simply a sort of movement illusion.

False Memory

This is simply where you witness an incident yet when others tell you their point of view that happens to be slightly different your memory of the incident is influenced by this.

For example, If you saw a blue round light move across the wall from the left hand side to the right hand side, yet Peter, your friend, says he saw it move from the centre of the wall and go to the right hand side, and Luke agrees with him, you may suddenly remember that it as having started in the centre of the wall rather than the left as you originally saw.

This can sometimes occur in court cases too, peoples memory of an incident can be distorted by other peoples memories, so although they saw a blonde man wearing a green coat running away from the murder, their memory may change to having seen a man with brown hair running away from the murder. This is why the police like to use independent witnesses and like to take statements as soon as possible.

This can be a problem investigators come across when dealing with eye witnesses at supposedly haunted locations because they may have gotten into discussions in the past with others who think they have seen a ghost too, and their stories may become more similar than they were to begin with.

The Nocebo effect

The Nocebo effect is where people complain of feeling ill when told that something they have been exposed to will make them ill, when that is not necessarily true. An example of this taken from Skepdic.com is one occasion when more than two-thirds of 34 college students developed headaches when told that a non-existent electrical current passing through their heads could produce a headache.

This is due to the power of suggestion, which is something that also applies to…

The Placebo Effect

The placebo effect is the measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health not attributable to treatment, this can be attributed to suggestion that a remedy will make you feel better, when infact it wont. This is how holistical and alternative medicine works.

pragmatic fallacy

The pragmatic fallacy is committed when one argues that something is true because it works. This accounts for people who believe that palm readers and tarot readers really can see into their future, because their readings were meaningful or significant to them. This can be attributed to The forer effect that I touched upon in my earlier article titled The equation of successful fraud.

retrospective falsification

Taken from Skepdic.com: D.H. Rawcliffe coined this term to refer to the process of telling a story that is factual to some extent but which gets distorted and falsified over time by retelling it with embellishments. The embellishments may include speculations, conflating events that occurred at different times or in different places, and the incorporation of material without regard for accuracy or plausibility. This is similar to False Memory. 

Selective Thinking

Selective thinking happens more than people think in Paranormal Investigation, Skepdic.com explains Selective Thinking as:

“the process whereby one selects out favorable evidence for remembrance and focus, while ignoring unfavorable evidence for a belief. “

An example of this would be people who claim Orbs they have on a photograph are signs of a spirit, whilst ignoring the scientifically proven fact that orbs are actually natural particles caught in the camera flash.