Have you ever felt a “presence” – someone next to you, even speaking to you, when no one is there? Dr. Ben Alderson-Day, a psychologist at Durham University in the UK, studies the phenomena of felt presences, or what he calls “the unseen other.”
These experiences are not always symptoms of mental illness – these are universally reported and not always distressing. Learn what’s happening in the brain during these hallucinations – or should we call them visitations? Plus… how the Internet brings together groups of people who can conjure up invisible friends, seemingly on command.
Phil Stieg: Hello I’d like to welcome Professor Ben Alderson-Day, a specialist in atypical cognition and author of the book, “Presence: A Journey Through the Science of Connection”. We will talk about his research into the feeling of being visited by a presence. You have probably heard of presence referred to as the “third man”, “guardian angel”, or “shadow figure”. Let’s learn about the context in which these experiences occur among explorers, scientists, researchers, and mediums. Ben, thanks for being with us today.
Ben Alderson-Day: Thanks, Phil. Great to be here.
Phil Stieg: So, what exactly inspired you to write this book?
Ben Alderson-Day: Well, I’ve been working as part of a project in Durham, in the UK for a number of years, focusing on experiences of hearing voices. Voices that other people can’t hear, what in psychiatric terms would usually refer to as auditory verbal hallucinations. And one of the things that kept coming up in our project again and again when we spoke to people with these experiences was an uncanny feeling, a feeling that they knew the voices were there even when they weren’t speaking. They could feel it. They were just there. They didn’t need to speak. And what they were describing was actually something which is more commonly known as felt presence or sensed presence. And for me, it was both a puzzle and a challenge. I didn’t quite know how to get my head around it, how to understand it.
Phil Stieg: Can you tell me what it feels like to experience a presence?
Ben Alderson-Day: So when they occur, quite often people will describe a feeling like somebody’s too close, as if somebody’s whispering in your ear, as if you get a kind of the hairs rising up the back of your neck. Sometimes people describe tingling or a kind of goosebumps feeling, not always, but if they do describe these kind of bodily or tactile sensations – it is that sort of it’s just on the edges, just on your skin kind of very subtle feeling.
Sometimes a bit of a gut feeling as well actually. There’s a sense in which this is a pretty visceral experience. And that’s important too, because sometimes people think that this is just about believing that something’s there, that it’s just a kind of you’re mistaken. You think somebody’s in the room, but they’re not. When you talk to people about this, particularly if it’s persistent, it’s something that they really feel in their bones.
Phil Stieg: Can you give me some idea about how common this is? Is it one in ten people? Is it one in a million?
Ben Alderson-Day: That’s a very tricky question to answer. Clinically, we’re only just starting to assess for this. there are some estimates. So, for example, in Parkinson’s, some studies reported up to 50% of samples of people with Parkinson’s are reporting these kind of presence phenomena. Presences occur, like I say, around the boundaries of sleep. They occur in, for example, in grief and bereavement and they occur in these extreme environments. They have kind of limits of survival and endurance. So, through many different routes they could potentially be occurring to a lot of people. Hearing a voice, for example, often say something like 5% to 15% of adults have had that experience before. I doubt the presence would be as high as that but it could be somewhere between two and 5%, for example. I wouldn’t want to speculate further.
Phil Stieg: So what I noticed in reading through the book is it seemed that the examples that you give seemed to occur in a lot of individuals that were maximally stressed with nutritional deprivation, extreme weather. Just every challenge that one can imagine that in my mind would make me think that, yeah, it’s stressing the brain.
Ben Alderson-Day: Well, it’s definitely one part of the story, and you’re absolutely right that many of the most famous examples, famous stories of presence occur in really extreme environments when the body is put under the most stress. Indeed, you’re highly liable to have a range of hallucinatory experiences occur when the brain isn’t functioning in a way it needs to. If it’s deprived of oxygen, if it’s deprived of water, then you see some pretty unusual things happening. But the challenge with something like presence is really trying to explain what even is happening in that moment. Because at the heart of presence is a paradox. People are saying that they can sense another, but they don’t actually report any sensory cues. They’re not talking about hearing a person. They’re not talking about seeing a person. They just feel it somebody’s close by. And the challenge there is to explain that paradox and to think, well, what are the minimal conditions under which we feel like another is present.
Phil Stieg: In your book you refer to Shackleton’s trip in the Antarctic and the presence that they experience. Can you please describe that to me?
Ben Alderson-Day: This was something that happened at the end of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition that set out in 1914 and it was led by the British expeditioner, Ernest Shackleton. Now, the expedition went wrong because their boat, the Endurance got stuck in the ice in the Weddle Sea and led to many months of the whole crew being stuck on the ice and then needing to abandon their ship and make a trek back on lifeboats back to safety. The final part of this odyssey essentially culminated on the Isle of South Georgia where Shackleton and two of his crewmates had to basically make their way on foot across the interior of South Georgia which is a highly mountainous terrain, and they didn’t have any equipment or anything like that. They basically had an axe and some rope and that was about it.
But the whole crew depended on them making this journey to get to the other side of the island where there was a whaling station to save everybody’s lives. and they made this trek. It took them 36 hours. These three men. They marched through the night and eventually they made it. And just after they made it a huge storm rolled in and if had they taken one 2 hours longer, they would have died and probably the whole crew would have died as well. And after that moment, what all three men said was they felt like there was a fourth person with them somebody who was their companion all the way through that trek over the island. Shackleton considered it Providence in some way. Providence had come to save them, and the other men largely described it in the same way. Although all three were fairly reticent to talk about this experience.
Phil Stieg: I would think that Shackleton and his group were so tired, so exhausted and starved and sleep deprived that there’s no way they could have any other sensation than what it is.
Ben Alderson-Day: Well, quite. But the cue there as well, the clue there is also that their bodies are changing right when they’re under that much stress, they might be numbing pain, they might be de-sensitized to things. And what happens is the mind creates new bodies, creates new people. You can’t be the guy who’s leading the expedition because you’re exhausted. But luckily the shadow guy is over there and he’s in charge now.
Often in these sorts of survival situations where people have this feeling of presence, essentially, they feel like they’ve been saved. Something beyond them has come and kind of got them out of the situation. It’s not uncommon for these experiences to be referred to as guardian angels in some way. It feels like something really spiritually significant for them.
Phil Stieg: Well, that’s what I couldn’t stop thinking about also is – how is this different than the burning bush with Moses or the apostle Paul walking on the road to Damascus and being visited by something? Is it a delusion? Is it a hallucination? I mean, all these words come out.
Ben Alderson-Day: Yeah.
Phil Stieg: But what is it?
Ben Alderson-Day: Potentially it could be all those things and they could all be connected. And the challenge is to try and investigate that. I guess just thinking of the examples you gave there, they’re primarily visual and sometimes they’re auditory. People get told these are the commandments. People see the burning bush. And what’s notable about, say, the kind of experience Shackleton had, which, by the way, is now known really as a kind of “third man” experience. This is in survival situations or mountaineers; they would talk about the third man factor or the third man effect. We call it the third man because the poet T.S. Eliot wrote about or referred to this experience in his poem The Wasteland in 1922, and he’d read about Shackleton’s experiences, and he has a few lines in that poem that allude to this. So that became the legend in that moment.
The spiritual is never far away. When we’re considering these kind of unusual, potentially hallucinatory, what we might term kind of non-self-phenomena occurring. Often, the only explanation that it feels like might apply is potentially a spiritual one. If you think about it, it’s natural survivor bias and survival stories. We don’t hear about the presences that push you off the mountain. Right? So, we always need to kind of be wary of the particular kind of powerful narrative of Providence, of God saved us because we might only be hearing half of the story.
Phil Stieg: So I think most people can kind of imagine the psychological component of this, given the circumstances. But l? What’s going on? What parts of the brain are being activated either by the presence or by the circumstances leading to the presence?
Ben Alderson-Day: We know a number of things about how we think presence works in the brain, plausible mechanisms. And indeed, there is a group based in Geneva, in Switzerland, who claimed to have identified a presence network in the brain. So, the science is really advancing here.
What we know comes from a few different sources. First of all, neuropsychological cases of people with different types of kind of brain damage in some way or brain injury. Changes to the brain caused by, say, tumor or lesion often lead to some very unusual presence phenomena, including things like duplicated bodies or feeling that somebody who’s close by who’s essentially mirroring your own body shape. These are more generally known as autoscopic phenomena. Very specifically, felt presence is often described as a kind of Heautoscopic phenomena.
Phil Stieg: Pardon me for interrupting, but can you please describe what you mean by Heautoscopic?
Ben Alderson-Day: So these are phenomena where there’s a feeling like your body is duplicated in some way. So there’s a figure outside of you that is kind of like a reflection of your own body but not necessarily seen. Maybe some visual elements, maybe a bit of an outline. It’s usually distinguished from autoscopic phenomena where there’s a literal doppelganger that you can see. So it feels like your body is being changed somehow and being mirrored outside of you. Now, what that has identified in the brain is certain areas are really key in producing presence. One area seems to be the insula,
Phil Stieg: Which is a deep part of the brain,
Ben Alderson-Day: A very deep part of the brain, often mapping how you’re feeling inside and relaying that to the rest of the cortex, a process that we sometimes call interception, but also tracking things like what’s salient in your environment? What are the things that you really need to pay attention to? What’s kind of really maximally significant is the insula lights up and makes us pay attention to something.
So it’s no surprise that many of the presence experiences and hallucinations more generally associated with changes to the insula often feel really damn significant, emotionally significant, too. A second area is the temporal parietal junction, or the TPJ, and in particular, the one on the left-hand side.
Phil Stieg: Those are the different lobes of the brain.
Ben Alderson-Day: Yeah, think of it like a crossroads, okay? An intersection in traffic. And we’ve got three lobes of the brain meeting at this point in the kind of back corner of your brain that –
Phil Stieg: I was unclear. Was it right or left side that’s important?
Ben Alderson-Day: It’s left side for presence. So there was an experiment reported in 2006 led by Shaharazi, where there was a woman who was awaiting surgical treatment for epilepsy and consented to have parts of her brain stimulated with electrodes to see what kind of experiences occur. And there’s a long history going back to the middle of the 20th century of research being done in this way with an open skull. So this young woman, they were stimulating parts of her left temporal parietal junction and suddenly she felt like there was a shadow figure immediately to her side mapping her body position. She didn’t know who this figure was, it didn’t really have a name. There’s a vague sense of agenda. When they tried it again at one point it felt like the Presence was embracing her somehow. So, the TPJ seems like a pretty important area for Presence, but I think we can also say why that’s likely to be the case as well.
There’s been research done on this where if you map the distance away from sensory or motor regions, the TPJ is one of the furthest places you can go in the brain to get away from those immediate senses. And that means it’s kind of in a good like bird’s eye position to abstract information from lots of different senses. Okay, so one idea about the TPJ is it’s combining information from what we know about where our bodies are in space, what we know from what we can hear and what we get from the occipital lobes, what we can see and bringing all these things together to map where our bodies should be.
Thus, when you stimulate it with electrodes, you disrupt that map. Where is your body in space? You don’t know, but suddenly there’s this shadow dude next to you. Okay, so that’s one idea about why presences might occur.
(Interstitial Theme Music)
Narrator: Most appearances of a “presence” are spontaneous and unexpected. But there is a growing community of people who welcome these “apparitions” and teach each other how to “will them” into being. Some scientists are even willing to concede that not all apparitions are hallucinations, and not all voices heard inside your head are signs of mental illness. Welcome to the world of Tulpamancy!
Excerpt from “Harvey”
Elwood: Yes, I’m looking for my friend Harvey. I turned my back for an instant and he seems to have wandered off.
Mrs. Chumley: But how will I recognize your friend?
Elwood: Oh, you can’t miss him Mrs. Chumley- he’s a Pookah. But Harvey’s not only a Pookah, he’s also my best friend…
Narrator: The charming character Elwood P. Dowd (as played by Jimmy Stewart in the 1950 film “Harvey”) might today be considered an early example of a tulpamancer – someone who can create a tulpa – a separate entity – who lives entirely inside his mind. Like Elwood’s friend Harvey – an imaginary six-foot-tall rabbit – tulpas can take on fanciful shapes, but always have distinctly human personalities. But are they signs of mental illness, or something else entirely?
The practice of tulpamancy originated in ancient Tibetan Buddhism. Monks would create tulpas through imagination and meditation to overcome unwanted phobias and desires. If a monk had a fear of spiders, his tulpa could approach a spider first to demonstrate how pointless the fear was.
Tulpamancy blossomed in the age of the internet, spread by a community who took their inspiration from a very unlikely source.
“My Little Pony” theme song.
A group of adult men who were fans of the animated series “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic” (who, charmingly refer to themselves as “bronies”) established a Reddit forum in 2012 to teach each other how to create tulpas based on their favorite characters from the show.
It’s true that some mental health professionals have equated tulpamancy with Schizophrenia or Dissociative Identity Disorder. But those who enjoy their apparitions would dispute that, pointing out that they are in no distress and exhibit no other clinical dysfunction. Like Elwood P. Dowd, they just wanted to create a friend. And when an imaginary being makes you happier and less lonely – who’s to call that an illness?
As Ele Cambria, a tulpamancer from Warrensburg, Missouri explains: “Bronies are very accepting of weirdness. The My Little Pony characters evoke a simple goodness. What fan wouldn’t want one for a friend?”
Phil Stieg: Could you tell me how presence is similar or different from a near death experience – an out of body experience?
Ben Alderson-Day: So, they’re probably related. If you do things like stimulate or look at lesions to the right TPJ, you get things like out of body experiences. You get feelings like you’re not in your own body. So, there’s a sense in which where we can disrupt or interfere with a network which, again, is responsible for mapping the body in space. But the position of the self in some way is very different. And the kind of experiences you’re describing, particularly near death experiences, classically people would feel like they’re above their body, they’re outside their body, and they’re looking back down. So, we think it’s related. It’s probably part of the same family of phenomena that depend on essentially body maps in some way. But this is subtly different. Really, felt presence is very distinctly about an other is here. I’m recognizing this other agent in our space.
Phil Stieg: I can understand an individual that has a spiritual sense of presence, and they feel positive about that. But other individuals that might see ghosts, how does that affect them and their willingness to talk about it? My God, I saw ghost people and they’re going to think I’m nuts.
Ben Alderson-Day: Yeah, people who I’ve met before who might describe experiences like that two different kinds. One, for example, are people who regularly have problems with their own sleep and might have experienced sleep paralysis, which is the phenomenon where you wake up and you suddenly realize you can’t move your own body. It’s actually a very common phenomenon thought to affect up to a kind of one in six adults. And often people in that instant have a strong feeling of a malevolent force in the room, a feeling of presence, but one that really means ill for them. And friends of mine, for example, who have had this experience, think it’s ghost like, have actually gone then to talk to their parents, have gone, okay, I didn’t think this thing was real, but I need to talk to you about ghosts. And they feel embarrassed that this thing has happened to them because they don’t have a means of explaining what’s happened.
The other kinds of people I’ve met and spoken to are people who actually end up, say, working as mediums psychics, end up in spiritualist churches. But when you talk to them about their early experiences as a child, they have tons of these experiences of kind of ghosts or other unusual things that other people don’t see or hear or feel. And they don’t really have a framework for a number of years to explain what’s happening to them, and they kind of end up doing this thing of working in a particular way or working with spirits, for want of a better word, because that was the way they always experienced the universe.
Phil Stieg: And then you cite examples of individuals whose lives have been saved or changed by a presence. And I’d like you to go through the example of George at the World Trade Center and George, what, heard his mother told him he was living right next to the World Trade Center, and he heard a voice from his mother to get out of there.
Ben Alderson-Day: He did? He did, yeah. So George had had that experience, and he wasn’t the only person who’d had that experience on that day when the world trade center came down.
You do get these sort of on the brink moments that seem to be accompanied by a feeling of presence. And sometimes the presence will talk, but sometimes it doesn’t even need to talk. It’s just this kind of feeling that you’ve got to move now and somebody’s here to kind of make you move.
That feeling of something beyond them that’s kind of stepped in is so important. People kind of cherish those experiences. These experiences can be really transformative for some people when they occur.
Phil Stieg: You’re a psychologist so I want to offer some advice to people listening to this. I would think a medium doesn’t care what people think. But you know that stray individual that has that sense of presence, – George hears his mother’s voice. I would think that they have a compelling urge to talk about it or to share that where do they go so that people don’t think he had a bad moment or he’s crazy or whatever. How do you approach that clinically?
Ben Alderson-Day: Well, I think a lot of presences, if they’re kind of one-off experiences probably we are in most of the cases talking one off experiences, thinking of all the context we’ve already talked about. There may not be a need to go and talk to somebody about that or a kind of clinical need there but there are definitely some persistent presences which people find really problematic. And actually, I think more counselors and psychologists would be open to talking about these things than people might expect. So, for example, I know counselors working in grief and bereavement for example, who are really used to this thing happening. Sometimes people need support because the enduring presence of, say, a lost loved one can actually be quite an ambivalent thing too. A lot of people turn to the internet, they turn to places like Reddit or anything like that where they might sign this.
Phil Stieg: Is that a good place to go or is that more misinformation?
Ben Alderson-Day: Well, it depends if it’s a matter of just sharing something “if anybody else had this experience?” then sometimes that’s enough. But I’ve spoken to people with psychosis for example, who are used to talking about their voices and they’re used to talking about kind of pretty unusual beliefs some people might call delusions. But sometimes it’s the presence that they hold back because they think that’s the really weird stuff. I’m not going to tell people about that because I don’t even know how to describe it myself. So I suspect quite a few people might even be at that stage if they’ve had this experience, but they’ve just got no frame of reference for what is it, how is it possible? If we can answer that for them a bit, then actually it might make it easier to even start that conversation with somebody that they feel like they could talk to.
Phil Stieg: What are some of the common misconceptions about presence that just irritate you to no end?
Ben Alderson-Day: Well, sometimes people think you’re just talking about ghosts – that’s not to say they aren’t relevant. But it was really striking to me how many people don’t necessarily describe things as ghost like per se. Part of that is often when people have a feeling of presence, they feel connected to it in some way. Imagine that kind of shadow figure, but where you’re connected via an umbilical cord or kind of like imaginary, like line. Like this is something which somehow you’ve got affinity with but you don’t know how or why. That’s something that comes up again and again.
But for a ghost, if we walk into a particular room or a haunted house, the connection is between the experience and the place, but it’s not necessarily us. So there’s something about felt presence which is it’s a story about us as much as it is about, you know, an unusual place or kind of a phantom figure that’s got nothing to do with this really.
Phil Stieg: You talked about the use of virtual reality to treat psychosis. Is the virtual reality that you’re employing, is that a sense of a presence and then that’s used to treat the psychosis? I didn’t quite understand it.
Ben Alderson-Day: Sure. To clarify, in virtual reality, presence is a concept on its own, and it’s really about – do you feel present in a particular virtual environment? Do you feel like you’re in something convincing you’re actually in a world as opposed to, here I am, sat in a bedroom with a headset on. But the reason I write about it in the book is that it’s vitally important to finding new ways to support people who find their experiences distressing, whether it’s voices, whether it’s presences, because they’re in and encountering a world which is very different from our own. It’s very hard to bring a voice into the room. It’s very hard to invoke a presence that you could then work with. So computer based and VR based techniques allow a therapist, for example, to support somebody working through a situation which is closer to the kinds of reality they are experiencing on a day to day level, if that makes sense. In a way, you can bring a presence into the room with VR. You can make a voice manifest which is otherwise only ever heard in somebody’s head.
The Avatar Project, which I talk about in the book, is doing exactly that, is trying to essentially use computer-based techniques for people to, if they hear distressing voices, model what their voice sounds like, what they think it looks like, rate whether it feels like it’s present or not. And then the therapist essentially ventriloquizes that voice through a computer setup. And that’s all about supporting people who are distressed by voices for kind of usually 20 years at a time, supporting them to engage with the voice and move on to another place, essentially, where they can manage their experiences a bit better and try and make the underlying experience less distressing.
Phil Stieg: So we’ve just taken this all too brief tour through your book Presence the Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other. In your final comment, what is your hope that this book will change in our perception of presence and in psychology?
Ben Alderson-Day: I hope that a book like Presence makes it easier for people to talk about experiences that they found really unusual, that they felt that they couldn’t describe, and they felt like maybe only ever happened to them. We know across a whole range of mental health conditions that if you have something happen to you that you feel like you can’t tell people and you can’t explain, then usually bad stuff follows, right. And I think that’s particularly true for kind of what we might term hallucinatory phenomena kind of unusual perceptions and sensations, so that not all presence is distressing and not all are part of kind of what we might term mental health conditions. But if it would allow people to talk about these things more or just maybe even be relieved that there are explanations, they’re not the only person and actually presences are all around us, then hopefully the book will have done its job.
Phil Stieg: Well, I think that you’ve said it multiple times throughout the conversation about the continuum of mental health or the spectrum of it, and there are innumerable individuals that might have these visitations, presences, whatever, but they’re leading completely normal lives and it would be hopeful that we could talk about them in a much more open environment.
Ben Alderson-Day: That’s right.
Phil Stieg: Dr. Ben Alderson-Day, I have the greatest appreciation for you spending time with us, describing presence, in our overall mental health, and in particular. How the sense of presence and virtual reality mechanisms may be beneficial in the treatment of psychosis. It’s been a great time talking with you. Thank you so much.
Ben Alderson-Day: Well, thank you. It’s been a pleasure.