So, awhile back, I wrote a piece about casting spells, how to do it, and how I think it works, along with a couple other ideas on how other people think it works. However, I left out how people who don’t believe in magic think it works. This is the piece that presents their ideas on what is at work.
Say what? People who don’t believe in magic have no reason to think it works, right? Well, right, but they also know that some people do think it works, and sometimes remarkable things happen or seem to happen. So, they’ve studied it and come to some of their own conclusions. Whether or not they’re right about all paranormal effects resulting from these phenomena, you definitely want to know about their insights, because they are all real effects observable in other areas of study, and they are things that you can do to trick yourself into thinking you’re performing some paranormal activity when you aren’t. By no means is this list complete, but it should give you something to think about.
1) Confirmation Bias
This is when you subconsciously pick and choose your evidence. The time you nail the exact card being drawn from a deck of cards sticks out in your mind more than all the times you get the wrong card. That one part of one dream you had (and wrote down), then it happened sticks out compared to all the dreams you had that have never come true. Forcing eight heads in a row to come up out of ten coin tosses, even though most of the time you end up with four to six. Unfortunately, this really doesn’t mean anything, because statistically speaking, that one time is insignificant compared to all the times nothing happened.
Wikipedia’s Article on Confirmation Bias
2) False Memories
Ever have a dream, then something happens just like what happened in the dream, and that causes you to remember the dream you had? If you didn’t write it down, what may have happened is you constructing a false memory instead. It’s actually very common for us to construct false memories, because our memories aren’t anywhere close to perfect. It’s just how we are. Anytime you have a vision, dream, or other prediction of the future, but don’t write it down before the future event happens, it could be you creating a false memory of predicting the event instead.
A News Story on Meta Religion about False Memories
3) The Placebo Effect
Technically speaking, this is something that happens when you think you should be healing, so your body activates systems designed to induce healing. In most clinical trials of new drugs, there are two groups of people told they are receiving the new drug, but one group is given a placebo pill, which is just a capsule containing sugar, milk, and/or other inert substances that don’t provide any medical benefit. And sometimes, people taking placebos show just as much improvement as those taking the real medication on trial, and it’s simply the act of taking a pill causes the body to use it’s own healing systems to take care of the problem.
Now, the first area to look for a placebo effect is in energetic healing. When people go to see a healer, if they fully believe the healer can help them, they actually might. However, the way it happens would be by inducing a placebo effect in the patient which causes their bodies to heal themselves. Obviously, placebo effects don’t cure everything, but they can hit a lot of common ailments that aren’t too serious, and even some serious ailments. To be clear, this is not to say placebos could replace real medicine, however, they are a real effect shown to exist and they are scientifically explainable.
Another area where you might see a “placebo effect” is in general energy manipulation. I put it in quotes because it’s not truly a placebo effect, but a lot of people seem to believe it’s a similar response. Basically, you expect to feel subtle energy, so your body obliges you and provides a tingling sensation to simulate the feeling of subtle energy. Heat, cold, wind, and tingling are all common perceptions to energy manipulators, which makes sense, because people commonly associate these feelings with energy of some kind.
Read about the placebo effect at Science Daily
In Conclusion
The point of this isn’t to say the paranormal does not exist. If you read my site, you know I do believe in paranormal things. Rather, the point is to air some real science that explains at least some of what seems paranormal, and to remind everyone that just because it seems paranormal doesn’t mean it is. In general, people interested in the paranormal are far more easily swayed than those who don’t, because those who are interested are inclined to believe things like “anything is possible” and “you can’t know for sure”. While both of these things are technically true, they are not license to throw out all the knowledge we have, and doing so can lead to problems. So just remember to keep your head about you, and don’t be too quick to label things as paranormal when there may be another explanation.
Related Posts:
- Paranormal Experiences I’ve Had
- Lucid Dreaming and Other Dream Experiences
- Science Is Not a Religion
- The Relationship Between Science and Religion
- How to Cast a Spell
Tags: Paranormal, Science