The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [105]
Auditory components are also sometimes part of the hallucinatory experience, such as hearing your own name called out, the sound of a doorbell or rapping sound on the door, and even fragments of speech from others imagined to be in the room. A lucid dream is stronger still. This is a dream in which the sleeping person is aware that he or she is asleep and dreaming, but can participate in and alter the dream itself. Sleep paralysis is a type of lucid dream in which the dreamer, aware of the dream, also senses paralysis, pressure on chest, presence of a being in the room, floating, flying, falling, or leaving one’s body, with an emotional component that includes an element of terror, but sometimes also excitement, exhilaration, rapture, or ecstasy. Psychologist J. Allan Cheyne has documented thousands of cases of sleep paralysis and believes that they are associated with the temporal lobes as well as the parietal lobes, which are associated with how the brain orients the body in space.11
Several centuries ago, the English referred to nighttime sensations of chest pressure from witches or other supernatural beings as the “mare,” from Anglo-Saxon merran, or “to crush.” So a nightmare was believed to represent a crusher who comes in the night. Since they lived in a demon-haunted world, they called these crushers demons. Since we live in an alien-haunted world, we call them aliens. Your culture dictates what labels to assign these anomalous brain experiences.
The power of these beliefs is unmistakable and the experience can lead to a condition similar to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a fact demonstrated by Harvard University psychologists Richard J. McNally and Susan A. Clancy in a 2004 paper entitled “Psychophysiological Responding During Script-Driven Imagery in People Reporting Abduction by Space Aliens.” McNally, Clancy, and their colleagues measured heart rate, skin conductance, and brain wave activity of people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens, as they relived their experiences through script-driven imagery. “Relative to control participants,” the authors concluded, “abductees exhibited greater psychophysiological reactivity to abduction and stressful scripts than to positive and neutral scripts.”12 That is, some fantasies are indistinguishable from reality and they can be just as traumatic. McNally noted in his 2003 book, Remembering Trauma, “The fact that people who believe they have been abducted by space aliens respond like PTSD patients to audiotaped scripts describing their alleged abductions, underscores the power of belief to drive a physiology consistent with actual traumatic experience.”13 In addition, McNally found that abductees “were much more prone to exhibit false recall and false recognition in the laboratory than were control subjects” and they scored significantly higher than normal on a questionnaire measuring “absorption,” a trait related to fantasy proneness that also predicts false recall.
The vividness of a traumatic memory cannot be taken as evidence of its authenticity, an effect subsequently documented by Susan Clancy in her follow-up 2005 book-length study of the phenomenon, Abducted, noting that abduction beliefs provide “the same things that millions of people the world over derive from their religions: meaning, reassurance, mystical revelation, spirituality, transformation.”14 Respectfully disagreeing with Carl Sagan, who argued that belief in pseudoscience was directly proportional to misunderstanding of science, Clancy concluded her study by