Posted:
The Ethiopian running secret
🏏IPL 2026: CSK vs LSG, 59th Match, Lucknow on 15/05/2026🏏
🏏IPL 2026: GT vs KKR, 60th Match, Kolkata on 16/05/2026🏏
Episode dtd 15.5
Anupamaa 16 May 2026 Written Update & Daily Discussions Thread
What do you think guys?
Pati Patni Aur Woh Do has dull start
Abhishek Bachchan New Look
Official Teaser - Welcome To The Jungle
Episode dtd 16.5
The Ethiopian running secret
https://psyche.co/ideas/the-uncanny-feeling-that-a-dead-person-is-still-close-by
The uncanny feeling that a dead person is still close by
by Alicja Nowacka, psychology researcher
The sense that a dead person is still with us is both eerie and common: can we find a naturalistic explanation for it?
After the devastating death of her 11-year-old son, Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln, said that she received nightly visits from the boy. He stood at the foot of her bed, she told a relative, ‘with the same sweet adorable smile he always has had’. She sometimes also recognised another of her sons, who had died several years earlier.
A century and a half later, similar reports appeared after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Many survivors described seeing, hearing or feeling the presence of people who had died. These encounters were often experienced as moments of comfort or reassurance, as if the dead remained close in some way.
Across many cultures, people describe comparable encounters, all involving some sense that a deceased person is present. This presence may be felt simply as someone ‘being there’, or it may be accompanied by sensory experiences: a sudden trace of a familiar scent, a recognisable movement or shadow, hearing the person’s voice, or a fleeting sensation of being touched.
It’s very possible that you know someone who has had such an experience, or that you’ve had one yourself. Although the ‘ghost story’ templates shaped by movies like The Sixth Sense (1999) or Ghost (1990) portray encounters with the dead as vivid, dramatic and unmistakable, the experiences described by many bereaved people are quite different. They are typically subtle, spontaneous and brief, even when the bereaved person wishes they would last longer.
How should we understand these phenomena? Historically, psychologists have grouped them under the broad category of ‘anomalous experiences’, events that don’t fit easily into existing scientific explanations. Could they merely be tricks of the senses? About two decades ago, a research team attempted to create an artificially ‘haunted’ room using manipulated electromagnetic fields and infrasound. They asked people who spent time in the room to note any unusual sensations, and many did – including some who said they felt a presence. In the researchers’ interpretation, a person’s level of suggestibility likely affects how they make sense of ambiguous environments and whether they perceive anything unusual.
Some phenomena historically labelled ‘anomalous’ may reflect explainable psychological processes
But explanations based solely on suggestibility miss something important. Not all unusual experiences arise from the misinterpretation of environmental cues. Synaesthesia is a useful example: some people naturally experience a blending of the senses, such as seeing colours when they hear music or read numbers. For many years, this too was treated as an anomalous phenomenon because it didn’t fit with conventional understanding. Advances in neuroscience have since demonstrated that synaesthesia is associated with identifiable brain patterns. What once seemed mysterious became understandable as the underlying mechanisms were recognised. This shift suggests that some phenomena historically labelled ‘anomalous’ may reflect explainable psychological or neural processes.
Based on recent work in bereavement research, a similar reframing is possible for experiences of presence. This account does not rely on supernatural explanations. Instead, it suggests that the very mechanisms that enable human relationships in life also underlie moments in which the deceased still seem perceptually near – moments that can help shape what the relationship becomes after death.
Early in the grieving process, people often continue to seek proximity to the deceased. They hold on to physical reminders, keep belongings close, or create memory boxes as a way of maintaining their connection. According to theory developed by Colin Murray Parkes and John Bowlby and refined by others, when someone begins to accept that shared physical presence with the deceased is no longer possible, they typically move from despair and disorganisation toward a phase of reorganisation. During this shift, the connection with the deceased becomes more psychological – maintained through rituals, traditions and internal conversation with the person who has died. Continuing bonds theory proposes that a relationship does not end at death but instead takes a new form, within the life of the bereaved.
The writer Joan Didion captured aspects of this experience after the death of her daughter. Reflecting on the instinct to search for someone who is no longer physically present, she wrote in the memoir Blue Nights (2011):
I know that I can no longer reach her.
I know that, should I try to reach her – should I take her hand as if she were again sitting next to me … – she will fade from my touch.
Didion’s words echo what many bereaved people describe: the mind’s habit of looking for someone who is gone, and the painful realisation that reaching cannot bring them back.
To gain a deeper understanding of these experiences, it is helpful to examine what happens in the brain during the grieving process. The psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor’s work offers an important perspective. Drawing on neuroimaging studies, she suggests that grief involves a form of learning in which the brain must update its internal expectations of the world. Prior to losing someone, our routines, habits and predictions all assume that the person will continue to be present – we expect a message, anticipate their return home, or navigate daily life with them in mind. After a loss, these ingrained predictions do not disappear immediately. For a time, the brain continues to operate on its old model because it has been shaped by years of attachment and repeated interaction. This disconnect between expectation and reality may help explain the disorientation that characterises grief, and why moments of sensing someone’s presence often emerge in the early stages of adjustment.
The type of relationship did not predict whether someone reported a sense of presence. What mattered was emotional closeness
Understanding grief as a process of relearning has informed a recent theoretical model for a neurocognitive explanation. My research collaborators and I suggest that a set of brain areas involved in memory, emotion and social perception – what we call the ‘person network’, because it contains neural representations of specific individuals – can help explain why some bereaved people feel as if the deceased person is present. If the brain continues to expect the deceased to be part of daily life, it makes sense to examine the system responsible for storing the associations one has with that person.
In interviews with people from diverse backgrounds about their experiences of presence, I noticed a consistent pattern: the type of relationship (partner, parent, sibling, child, friend, neighbour, etc) did not predict whether someone reported a sense of presence. What mattered was emotional closeness. For those we care about deeply, the brain appears to maintain a rich, active ‘map’ of who they are.
People vary in how they interpret these experiences. Some described what they felt as a spirit. One person recalled times when they were feeling alone or scared, and then perceived ‘a hand on the shoulder or a hug’ or felt as if ‘they’re behind me … the guiding force behind me’, referring to deceased relatives. Other people described their experience of a presence as something generated by the mind. ‘I think it was partly my own brain,’ one person said. ‘This is just externalising what was in my mind’s eye.’ Some moved between both spiritual and psychological possibilities.
We propose that the brain’s representations of a close loved one may continue to be activated for some time after they die, especially while the brain is still adjusting to the loss of their physical presence. Through years of interaction, close relationships become deeply embedded not only as memories of shared experiences, but as deeply ingrained sensory patterns – the sound of the person’s voice, their movements, the feel of their touch, the way they looked, their scent, and how they tended to inhabit the space around us. When such ingrained representations are reactivated – whether by emotion, context or subtle sensory cues – they may influence perception in ways that momentarily recreate the sense of that person being physically nearby. In this way, what feels like an external presence may arise from the continued activation of neural systems that were built through repeated, lived interaction.
These bereavement-related presences are different from those described in the neurological literature, such as the ‘doppelgänger effect’ (the experience of perceiving a double of oneself from an external perspective). In neurological cases, the presence is often unfamiliar, ambiguous or occasionally unsettling. In contrast, grieving individuals tend to report immediately recognising the presence as belonging to their close person. We propose that recognising who the presence belongs to shapes the whole experience, including its emotional meaning, how it is understood, and the role it takes in the person’s ongoing relationship with the deceased.
People in our study often noted that moments of sensed presence became less frequent over time. This did not reflect a desire for the experiences to fade; many wished they would continue. Instead, it seemed to mirror the changing nature of the relationship itself. As grief evolved, the connection shifted from something experienced physically or externally to something internal. People described staying close through memories, inner conversations, rituals, or everyday reminders that helped them feel connected.
Not everyone reports sense-of-presence experiences, of course. One possibility is that some people simply do not notice the small moments that others would interpret as meaningful – a movement in the corner of the eye, a sudden scent, or a fleeting sensation. As many participants explained, their visitations lasted only seconds, and they rarely resembled cinematic depictions.
When these moments do register, the meaning someone assigns to them could be just as important as the sensations themselves. Our beliefs shape how we interpret, remember and value these experiences, and whether we recognise them as meaningful at all. The psychologists Edith Steffen and Adrian Coyle explored this meaning-making directly. They found that many people who experienced a sense of presence felt that the deceased continued to exist in some form. Many understood it as an expression of an ongoing relationship. Maintaining this bond not only provided comfort but also supported people’s sense of identity and self-understanding in the aftermath of loss.
A sensed presence might be seen as a reminder of how deeply the deceased remains woven into the self
In my own interviews, I saw the emotional significance that these experiences often held for the bereaved person. For some, the presence briefly eased the ache of longing:
I felt … devastated that my mom wasn’t here when I got married … all the things that she’s not part of. Which is why I’m so grateful when she turns up and lets me know that she’s here.
Another interviewee thought the person they had lost was sending them a message ‘giving permission for me to continue on with living, and, you know, that she would be there’.
Each person’s available frameworks will inform how this kind of experience is understood and integrated. Some, particularly those with religious or spiritual frameworks, might interpret a sensed presence as evidence that the deceased continues to exist and is actively reaching out, offering a sign of protection, guidance or reassurance. But it’s also possible to find these experiences meaningful without seeing them in supernatural terms. A sensed presence might be seen as a reminder of how deeply the deceased remains woven into the self, as an internalised presence, and an ongoing bond.
From either perspective, sensing the presence of the dead is neither strange nor unusual. It is a natural expression of how people hold on to significant relationships while learning to live with their physical absence. The bond remains; it simply takes on new forms.
Alicja Nowacka is a PhD student at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Her work focuses on understanding how we sustain a connection with those who have passed away. She is particularly interested in understanding the neural connections that underlie these experiences.
Why hantavirus is not like COVID, according to infectious disease experts
Why Japan has millions of abandoned houses
Bade Achhe Lagte Hain
Avatar and Signatures Shop
Cricket
