The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [53]
In his book The Third Man Factor, John Geiger lists the conditions that are associated with the generation of a sensed presence: monotony, darkness, barren landscapes, isolation, cold, injury, dehydration, hunger, fatigue, and fear.16 To this list we can add sleep deprivation, which probably accounts for Charles Lindbergh’s sensed presence during his transatlantic flight to Paris. During the historic journey, Lindbergh became aware that he had company in the cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis: “The fuselage behind me becomes filled with ghostly presences—vaguely outlined forms, transparent, moving, riding weightless with me in the plane. I feel no surprise at their coming. There’s no suddenness to their appearance.” Most critically, these were not aberrations of the cockpit environment such as fog or reflected light because, as Lindbergh recounts, “Without turning my head, I see them as clearly as though in my normal field of vision.” Lindbergh even heard “voices that spoke with authority and clearness,” yet after the flight reported, “I can’t remember a single word they said.” What were these phantom beings doing there? They were there to help, “conversing and advising on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.”17
The famous Austrian mountaineer Hermann Buhl, the first person to summit the 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat—the ninth highest peak in the world and known as “Killer Mountain” because of the number of climbers (thirty-one) who have perished there—suddenly found himself with company on his way back down, even though he was climbing alone: “Out on the Silbersattel I see two dots. I could shout with joy; now someone is coming up. I can hear their voices too, someone calls ‘Hermann,’ but then I realize that they are rocks on Chongra Peak that rises up behind. It is a bitter disappointment. I set off again subdued. This realization happens frequently. Then I hear voices, hear my name really clearly—hallucinations.” Throughout the ordeal, in fact, Buhl said, “I had an extraordinary feeling, that I was not alone.”18
Such accounts have become legion in climbing lore. The most famous climbing soloist in history (and the first to summit Mount Everest without bottled oxygen), Reinhold Messner, recalls having many conversations with imaginary companions during his expeditions into the thin air of the Himalayas. Linking the sensed-presence effect to beliefs more broadly, I was intrigued to read the account of climber Joe Simpson about what happened to him during the descent from the 20,814-foot summit of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes after an accident threatened his survival. As Simpson struggled to make it back to base camp, a second mind suddenly materialized in his head to give him aid and comfort. After determining that the voice was not emanating from his Walkman cassette player, Simpson decided that it was something else entirely: “The voice was clean and sharp and commanding. It was always right, and I listened to it when it spoke and acted on its decisions. The other mind rambled out a disconnected series of images, and memories and hopes, which I attended to in a daydream state as I set about obeying the orders of the voice.”19
Consistent with belief-dependent realism and my thesis that belief comes first, explanation second, the self-declared atheist Simpson attributed his experience to a “sixth sense” that he figured was probably an evolutionary remnant from the distant past that he simply called “the voice.” By contrast, in William Laird McKinlay’s classic survival memoir, The Last Voyage of the Karluk, the deeply religious Arctic explorer