Why some people say they can ‘hear the dead’

According to new research, spiritualist mediums might be more prone to immersive mental activities and unusual auditory experiences early in life

YOUR WORK FOCUSES ON A QUALITY CALLED ‘ABSORPTION’. WHAT EXACTLY IS IT?

Absorption has to do with a tendency to get lost in your own thoughts, become immersed in mental imagery, or become lost in an altered state of consciousness. It’s been found that high absorption rates predict things like mystical experiences among those who use psychedelics. So, among a group of people who took MDMA, those who scored higher on absorption would more likely report a mystical experience. And it’s correlated with a lot of things, like measures of dissociation and openness to experiences.

WHAT MADE YOU THINK THAT ABSORPTION MIGHT INFLUENCE SPIRITUALISM?

Academics have spent years trying to understand why people have religious experiences. Why do some say, “I heard God’s voice” or “I heard the spirit speak to me”? Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has really championed the idea that absorption, and the scale used to measure it, helps identify those who have the most vivid, frequent religious experiences. We wanted to discover whether clairaudient mediums – mediums who said they had received auditory communications from spirits – have a proclivity for these experiences. And also, how they’re experiencing them. Somewhat surprisingly, existing work doesn’t go into detail about what it’s like to hear the dead, although there are discussions around whether it’s real, related to parapsychology, or whether it’s similar to hallucinations among psychiatric patients.

WHAT WERE YOUR KEY FINDINGS?

We found that spiritualists did score higher on levels of absorption and proneness to auditory hallucinations, compared to a control group. Many of the spiritualists had early experiences, about 20 per cent for as long as they can remember, while over 70 per cent had unexplained experiences before encountering spiritualism that they now deem spiritual. Also, spiritualists Yere figuratively speaking off the charts in terms of personal identity and really didn’t care much about how people saw them, which corresponds well with spirituality being a subjective, personal issue.

DID YOU FIND OUT WHAT IT’S LIKE TO EXPERIENCE ONE OF THESE EVENTS?

We’re still engaged in one-on-one interviews with spiritualists, but for instance, 65 per cent reported these experiences occur inside their head. So even though it’s reported as auditory, the vast majority don’t mean it’s heard

“Depending on the survey, anywhere from 5 to 15 per cent of the population hears voices in their lifetime”