From & To Sathish #7 - Page 37

https://psyche.co/ideas/when-memories-from-fiction-become-part-of-who-you-are

Scenes from books, movies and games sometimes carry as much weight as events from people’s own lives. We’re finding out why

Ask someone to describe their most vivid and emotionally charged memories and you might expect them to recall an especially joyful birthday, a remarkable holiday or a traumatic argument. But what if instead they told you about an emotional scene from a movie or television show they’d watched? Something like a scene from the series Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) – the one where Iroh sang for his deceased son on top of a hill in the fictional city of Ba Sing Se. Would you be surprised if they said a memory based on a fictional event like this had as much clarity and emotional intensity as important events from their own life?

To understand the potential impact of memories from fiction, it pays to take a step back to consider the influence of our real-life autobiographical memories. One function they serve is to help validate how we see ourselves. If you believe you enjoy solitude, your memories of solitary enjoyment will affirm this. On the other hand, you are less likely to rehearse and share memories of events that contradict your self-image. Autobiographical memories can also guide our decisions by informing us about the consequences of our prior choices. They also promote social sharing and bonding. I can talk about my memories from high school or my grandparents to initiate a meaningful conversation with someone.

Increasingly, psychologists are realising that memories of fictional stories can serve similar functions. Although the story is not based on reality, the experience of the story makes it real. Consonant with this view, a study from 2017 showed that the themes that people consider most important in their lives align with the fictional stories that they say most resonate with them, and the stories they choose to engage with also frequently mirror their identity.

The psychologist Elizabeth Marsh and her colleagues have highlighted the way memories from fiction can also teach us about situations and concepts we are not exposed to in real life. A teenager might decide to pursue a career in physics or mathematics because of the influence of the characters in a science-fiction novel, such as Perdido Street Station (2000) or The Dispossessed (1974); or someone who lost a family member for the first time could draw upon the grief experienced by fictional characters such as the ones in the book Six Feet Under (2001) and find a framework to understand and deal with their feelings.

All of this resonates with my own experiences. The themes from A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999-2006) that I read when I was a child had a lasting impact on my outlook on life. I also often think about the execution of Ned Stark or the trial of Tyrion Lannister in the book series A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-). Alongside the impact of real-life events of a similar nature, these memories have been formative in my ideas about the accustomedness of injustice and the desperation of virtue in times of absolute corruption. There is a good possibility that you too refer to some fictional events when conceptualising real-life problems. Or that fictional experiences have become part of your toolkit to understand the world – even if you aren’t aware of it. If you’re partial to horror, perhaps somewhere in your mind the townsfolk of Innsmouth might be lurking with all their Lovecraftian hostility, driving your avoidance of isolated small countryside settlements and your worry about xenophobia.

We found that movie memories were remembered with more detail than book memories

Given the psychological importance of memories for fictional events, my colleagues and I wanted to find out more about the kinds of fictional media that tend to seed significant memories – including memories from video games, which until recently have been overlooked by psychologists – and whether some people are more receptive to fictional memories than others.

One key distinction is whether the sensory aspects of a fictional event are delivered to a person, as is the case with movies, or whether they must be imagined, as is the case in books. It is a well-established phenomenon that memory for perceptual details is stronger for events that are actually perceived rather than imagined. In the case of pure imagery, where the mind conjures the scene without the aid of external stimuli, the usual flow of perception is inverted. The mental operations generating perceptual material trace their path backward, moving contrary to the natural course of sensory experience. Notably, the mid-layer of the primary visual cortex, activated during direct perception, does not show the same level of activation, suggesting a weaker sensory signal.

These neuroscientific findings chime with the results of our own study, in which we asked hundreds of people to describe their memories of fictional events from different media types. We found that movie memories were remembered with more perceptual details than book memories. I am sure some of you have experienced the characters’ appearances in the movie adaptation taking over your original imagination of these characters while reading the book. For instance, my mind now paints the actor Hugo Weaving whenever I read the character Elrond from The Lord of the Rings (1954-55).

What about memories from video games? There are good reasons to believe these might have special characteristics. Whereas people will typically describe the characters in a movie or a novel in the third-person singular, gamers describing a memory from a video game will often refer to their character in the first-person singular, removing the linguistic distancing between the character and themselves. The reason behind it is rather straightforward: video games have some level of agency, sometimes just enough to make our character jump or look around. In richer worlds, such as role-playing games, your choices can shape entire storylines. When we roleplay in a beautifully crafted narrative, it’s a two-way street; the game leaves us with meaningful memories while real-life experiences guide our choices in-game. It’s like painting your identity on a limited canvas, where the lines blur between fiction and personal memory.

Yes, I was the Harry Du Bois of the video game Disco Elysium who turned a church into a music club in Martinaise and survived the conflict between union workers and military contractors, all while trying to solve a murder case. This involvement of self through agency helps explain our finding that video-game memories are remembered with more perceptual details than books, and with more confidence than both books and movies.

Forming empathetic connections with story characters deepens immersion

Despite being viewed on a screen (and often from a third-person vantage point), we also found that video games were the only media type more likely to be remembered from a first-person rather than third-person perspective, similar to autobiographical memories for real-life events. They are also highly immersive – which is another important factor known to increase the memorability of fictional events. This may be tied to agency and embodiment. Controlling a virtual character activates motor simulations in our brains. Have you ever found yourself tilting left or right while steering in a game? That’s embodiment.

Yet another important factor to consider in memories for fiction is believability. This is distinct from ‘ontological intuitiveness’ (our sense that dragons are not real or that humans cannot fly). It concerns the complexity and accuracy of the representation of human interaction in the story world. If you’ve watched it, you will definitely remember how big Game of Thrones (2011-19) was. Many people, including me, remember some scenes from the series extremely well and some dialogues by heart. As an explanation for its success, some scholars have proposed that the narrative of A Song of Ice and Fire (the book series by George R R Martin that the show is adapted from) resembles real-life social networks, for example in the sense of how many social connections people are realistically able to sustain. Despite being a fantasy story, the complexity of the characters, factions, relationships and behaviours in A Song of Ice and Fire reflects human nature better than many ‘realistic’ stories.

Of course, the nature of the fictional medium is only one part of the equation – whether or not a fictional event takes root in memory and exerts a psychological influence also depends on the person consuming that story. Some people easily engage with stories, while others find them meaningless. A lot of it seems to come down to empathy. People with a greater predisposition to experience the emotions of others also tend to engage with their mental representations (of stories) as if they are part of reality, increasing immersion. Empathy can be thought of as extending the field of self to capture non-self-referenced information as if it is self-related. In turn, information organised around the concept of self is more durable than non-self-referential information. That’s why forming empathetic connections with story characters deepens immersion and creates richer memories with higher emotionality than for those who don’t.

You might also think that people who frequently use fiction to escape from reality are more likely to form memories about fictional events. After all, you can’t form memories for fictional events if you don’t encounter them. In our study, we found that a stronger desire for ‘escapism’ (as measured by agreement with statements like ‘I read to escape from real life’ and ‘Playing the game helps me forget about some of the real-life problems I have’ ) was associated with engaging with fiction more frequently. However, encountering fictional worlds often is not enough to form rich memories of them. One person might watch hours of television daily to distance themselves from their stressful lives yet remember little of it. By contrast, someone else might only watch a few movies yearly and yet form more meaningful, emotional and long-lasting memories of fiction. Frequency is not as much of a manifestation of rich subjective experience as empathy and emotionality.

To understand why, let us return to the scene from Avatar: The Last Airbender, where Iroh sings for his son. This emotional scene is remembered by many people. A former general in exile returns to the city of his greatest defeat in which he lost his son. He is now trying to help his troubled nephew and everybody around him. We know him to be a wise and humorous man, but at this moment, we see him vulnerable. Despite brightening the lives of people around him all the time, he could not help his son, and no repentance would change that. When he cries alone while honouring his son’s memory on his birthday, the emotional intensity is high. In turn, emotional material induces empathy. Research shows empathy-inducing events are better remembered than trivial events. It is also believable because, by this point in the series, we are familiar with this character and his world. We do not find it unconvincing or out of place that this is something the Iroh we know would do. Our deep immersion is sustained.

There is also beautiful scenery in this animation sequence: on top of a hill at sunset, Iroh removes his hat then kneels down in front of a tree from which the leaves are falling. The aesthetics make the perceptual details more memorable. If you remember this scene, you are probably also hearing Iroh’s singing in your mind, his lines delivered with haunting emotion. Additionally, research shows that rehearsing events makes their details more memorable. This event crafts a compelling narrative structure that can resonate with and mirror the viewer’s personal experiences. There is a good chance an emotional event in real life will make me remember this fictional event or talk about it with other people, increasing the rehearsal of it.

If you are someone who finds it easier to absorb imagined or fictional content and form empathetic connections with it, all of these aesthetic and narrative qualities of different types of media will be boosted for you. Even for scenes of lower quality or not so overtly presented emotionality, your empathy will make you more emotionally invested, and barriers between the self and others will be thinned when processing the scene’s information. Now it is not something completely independent from you; it is somehow related to you.

While certain recollections of fiction can mirror significant autobiographical memories, it seems inevitable that real-life memories overall will tend toward being more meaningful, especially because, by their very nature, they are so deeply imbued with personal significance. Yet, within the hierarchy of memories, there exist rare fictional narratives that transcend their boundaries and offer a semblance of autobiographical significance. When we recall these stories, they serve not merely as fiction but as places where we feel truly at home. It is a home that can sometimes feel more real than the material existence from which we are seeking to escape.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/worlds-most-powerful-passports-2025-150728225.html

The world's most powerful passports in 2025, ranked

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01550-w?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=0ad157124a-nature-briefing-daily-20250521&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b27a691814-0ad157124a-499400700

How ‘organized looting and plunder’ drove Britain’s second scientific revolution Manuscripts and specimens accumulated by the colonial East India Company lie at the roots of modern science and museums.

https://psyche.co/ideas/why-our-flawed-flexible-memories-come-with-social-benefits

Why our flawed, flexible memories come with social benefits

by Gillian Murphy and Ciara Greene, memory researchers

Though relationships are grounded in shared memories, some gaps and inaccuracies can help us live well in a social world

Human memory appears to be terribly flawed. We forget. We misremember. We construct entirely fabricated memories for events that did not happen. However, as psychologists who research memory, we argue that these imperfections can often be very useful and functional. Human memory is thus perfectly imperfect – and some of its apparent flaws may in fact be features.

Decades of cognitive psychology research has conclusively demonstrated that, despite how it may feel inside your head, human memory does not work like a video camera. We do not ‘record’ events as if saving a file on a computer, to be reopened and viewed at will. In fact, our memories are reconstructed every time we recall them, leaving them open to change. These changes can, of course, have significant negative outcomes, such as arguments with a spouse or a friend about who said what. In a forensic context, eyewitnesses are prone to misremembering what they saw at a scene or misidentifying an innocent person as the guilty party. Individuals have even been shown to provide confessions based on false memories of committing a crime, both in the lab and in real-world cases. Because misremembering can have such significant consequences, flexible memories tend to be framed as a weakness of the human condition.

However, in many other contexts, imperfect memories confer substantial benefits. Though it may sound paradoxical, forgetting is an important part of learning: you forget the unimportant in order to focus on retaining crucial information. In fact, the ability to extract the ‘gist’ from your memory of many similar events, while forgetting the individual details, is essential to the ability to learn important lessons and avoid repeating mistakes.

Our imperfect memories also have social benefits. Humans are social animals, and maintaining strong networks is essential for survival and happiness. You might be forgiven for thinking that flaws in memory can only hurt your relationships, especially if you have ever forgotten a partner’s birthday. This isn’t always the case, though. Flawed recall can actually improve social experiences and connections, as three everyday examples will show. After learning about them, you might agree with Jane Austen that, in the context of social relationships, ‘a good memory is unpardonable.’

We selectively forget rejection and criticism

It is well established that people tend to selectively forget negative experiences. Actually, people not only tend to forget unpleasant events faster than pleasant ones, but misremember the past as being better than it really was – suggesting that some forms of forgetting might make us happier.

In a social context, forgetting can help to bolster your self-image and soothe the pain of negative feedback. In one study providing evidence for this, participants were presented with a description of a person that included both positive and negative traits (eg ‘they are honest, but boring’). Each participant was told either that this was a summary of how others described them, or that it summarised how someone else (‘Chris’) was described. A little while later, participants were asked to recall as much of the description as they could. They were less likely to remember the negative adjectives from the list – but only when they themselves had been described (they more easily recalled negative aspects of Chris’s character). This kind of tendency could be self-protective, ultimately helping people maintain a more positive self-image, and thus supporting social engagement in future.

Older adults tend to be more positively biased in their recollections than younger adults

In a clever follow-up study, researchers found that when the negative traits attributed to participants were presented as easy to change (eg, ‘anyone can become less boring almost instantly’), they were recalled at about the same rate as positive traits. However, when they were presented as fixed traits, participants were more likely to forget hearing about them. This suggests that when peers offer critical feedback that someone can do nothing about, it’s more likely to be forgotten. So, you might forget the time your friend told you that your eyes are too close together (since you can’t change that), but remember someone telling you that you speak too quickly, and strive to correct it. In this instance, and in others, forgetting what is painful could be adaptive.

People do differ in their ability or tendency to selectively remember the past. For example, those who report higher self-esteem tend to recall more positive events from their past than those with lower self-esteem. In contrast, individuals with depression are particularly likely to recall negative memories. There is also a general tendency for older adults to be more positively biased in their recollections than younger adults, and this may contribute to the tendency for older people to report greater wellbeing.

Taken together, these findings show how malleable memories might support mental health by sanding off the rough edges of past interactions. This doesn’t mean that people forget every unpleasant experience that has happened to them but, on the whole, many of us have a bias toward a rosy interpretation of the past.

We misremember our own social behaviours

Just as people seem to selectively forget times when others are uncharitable, there’s evidence that we tend to misremember when we’ve behaved poorly ourselves. In one study, each participant was anonymously paired with someone else for an experimental game, and was given the role of the ‘dictator’. The dictator was responsible for deciding how to divide a pot of money. They had the power to behave cooperatively (split the money fairly with their partner) or selfishly (take more money for themselves). Later in the experiment, participants were given a surprise memory test and were asked to recall how they had split the money. They had no incentive to lie at this point; they were even promised an additional reward for recalling their decision accurately. Despite this, participants recalled, on average, that they were more generous than they had actually been. This effect was particularly evident among those who felt that selfishness was not part of who they were or wanted to be.

This study and others like it suggest that people misremember their own actions in order to preserve their sense of self and, ultimately, to maintain happiness. We all have moments in our lives when we behave in a way that doesn’t fit with our values or self-perception. A mild example would be losing your patience with a learner driver because they’re driving slowly and you’re in a hurry: you know that it’s not their fault but, in the moment, you grow frustrated and might drive close behind them or even beep at them to hurry up. Research suggests that moments like this are prime candidates for being forgotten or misremembered, sacrificing perfectly accurate recall to spare your sense of self.

We remember in ways that support relationships

There is a saying that ‘the key to a long marriage is a short memory.’ And, in fact, research supports the idea that misremembering the past may improve marital satisfaction. In contrast to the general tendency to misremember the past as being better than it really was, studies of marriage have suggested that misremembering the past as less good than it really was might confer benefits in a relationship. In a 20-year study of marital satisfaction, wives were surveyed at multiple time points about both their current relationship satisfaction and how satisfied they remembered being in the past. The findings showed that these wives systematically misremembered their prior ratings – remembering their previous satisfaction as lower than it really had been at the time. These inaccurate memories of the past likely created a perception that their relationship was on an upward trajectory, getting better all the time. This illusion of improvement was replicated in a study of newlyweds who were surveyed every six months in the early years of their marriage.

You might no longer notice your partner’s positive traits as much because you’re used to them

There is even evidence that this misremembering can be functional: the degree to which participants in the 20-year study underestimated their prior relationship satisfaction significantly predicted their happiness a decade later. The authors of this study noted that, though memory may not serve as an accurate record of a relationship’s history, it may nevertheless play a role in the maintenance of commitment over long periods of time.

An illusion of improvement could be a nifty means of staving off so-called ‘habituation effects’, where couples grow insensitive to the continuing positive qualities in a relationship. In other words, as a relationship goes on, you might no longer notice your partner’s positive traits as much (‘he always listens to me when I’ve had a bad day’) because you’re used to them, while simultaneously being more attuned to negative changes (‘he used to wake me up with a cup of tea, but he doesn’t do that any more’). A tendency to recall that, on the whole, you are more satisfied with your relationship now than you were last year might counteract this effect, even if it isn’t really true.

We propose that our flexible, fallible memories evolved as they did for good reasons, and the maintenance of social bonds may be one of those reasons. While the misremembering processes occur naturally and without conscious awareness, it is possible to engage in these practices intentionally. Many wellbeing interventions in the field of positive psychology are focused on reframing the past and choosing to focus on the good things in life (for instance, by reflecting or writing about positive elements of one’s past experiences).

At the same time, it might be helpful to remain aware of the tendency to forget and misremember the past, so that we can supplement our memories with external aids if needed. Knowing how distorted a memory can be might motivate you to record contemporaneous evidence of your experience that you can consult later. For example, keeping a diary of your mood or relationship satisfaction might be useful if you’re trying to come to a decision about a major life change like leaving a job or ending a relationship.

People tend to think of forgetting and misremembering strictly as weaknesses – as the reason for lost car keys or the inability to recall someone’s name when you bump into them; as a sign of neurological illness; or the cause of miscarriages of justice. However, everyday forgetting and misremembering are also normal, useful parts of how memory works – and they may be key to managing well in a highly social world.

https://psyche.co/stories-of-change/when-a-friend-ghosted-me-i-faced-my-childhood-abandonment?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=e4d0f78e01-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_05_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-8e23a7006c-838120577

Discarded

The end of a friendship cracked me apart, triggering hidden memories – and helping me heal old wounds

by Antonia Malchik

I’d been escaping to the cupboard under the stairs for a week. An hour here, an hour there, lying in the dark crying and listening to gloomy Nordic music. The concrete floor, coated in a glossy mottled sealant, glowed in my phone’s light as I looked for text messages that didn’t appear. My need for those messages, for connection with a friend who’d begun ghosting me, chewed through my feelings. The strength of that need embarrassed me. I didn’t mind telling people I seemed to be losing a friendship, but didn’t want anyone to know that the loss was driving me into a depression so dark it felt like my mind was unravelling.

Sometimes a small, innocuous shift – in my case, a friend’s loss of interest – can dismantle who we thought we were, make us question everything we thought we knew about ourselves. I’d had friends ghost me, even angrily break up a friendship before, but this particular discard cracked me apart, creating an opening into a years-long journey of excavating the lasting effects of my abusive childhood, a journey I had no idea was beginning as I sat crying in the dark.

The cupboard under the stairs was an unfinished space in my house, where the water heater lived and where I’d eventually started working in desperation for a quiet space where neither my husband nor my kids would bother me for an hour or two. After I moved my laptop and books into that room months into the COVID-19 pandemic, my husband had taken to calling me Dobby. I kept reminding him it was Harry Potter who lived in the cupboard under the stairs, not Dobby the house elf, but what bothered me more was what that characterisation said about how I was perceived, who I’d become to those closest to me: wife, mother, housekeeper, laundress, cook. A drudge who existed to serve others, to make their lives comfortable and possible, not a person in her own right. But the cupboard under the stairs was still a place of my own.

My work was there, balanced on top of the ironing board I used as a table, but I wasn’t working. I was lying on the floor looking at my phone, its screen the only light, and wondering why my friend seemed to have stopped texting me over the previous week. The Swedish musician Forndom’s dark Nordic beats kept me company, its tension reflecting my own – intensity, grief, a search for something to believe in. A self to believe in. Dark forests, I thought, listening to the music. Vengeful gods. Unforgiving seas.

The friend whose text I was waiting for was another writer, someone I’d known casually for a few years. A few months previously, they’d started texting me more often and more personally, and I’d responded. We talked about our shared interest in nature, our love for the mountains and rivers of the region of Montana we both lived in, stories of our childhoods in those same mountains, struggles with and hopes for our writing. They complimented my work and insights, giving me validation I hadn’t realised I needed and a glimpse of the writing community I was missing.

I hadn’t even had this kind of reaction to the end of a romantic relationship

The way this friend seemed to see me, to understand me as a person in her own right beyond the wife-mother-laundress-cook caregiver roles, changed the way I saw myself. After more than a decade of trying to balance motherhood and work – and losing that struggle on all fronts through the pandemic’s early upheavals – I started to feel like a whole person again, someone I hadn’t been in decades, a woman with a mind and imagination and intelligence and curiosity and talent beyond meeting my kids’ emotional needs and getting dinner ready on time. Another writer, one I respected, seemed to understand me – saw me as an equal, but, more importantly, saw me at all. The life I’d almost given up on, a life I’d made small and insignificant to meet everyone else’s needs – that life suddenly seemed possible again.

Then, after about four months of almost daily conversation, my friend stopped texting me as often. From one day to the next almost, they started to seem distant, less interested in the things we used to talk about – birds, the Moon’s phases, writing, rivers, walks – and I was crying about it.

I’d never had this kind of reaction to the loss of a friend before. I hadn’t even had this kind of reaction to the end of a romantic relationship. The constant crying felt nuts. There I was curled up on the floor in the dark, feeling about as devastated as I had nearly 15 years previously when I almost lost my prematurely born baby, and at the same time like a complete idiot.

This is absurd. You’re insane. So a friend isn’t texting you, maybe lost interest. You’re not dying.

It felt like I was dying, and dying alone. Like not a single person in the world cared whether I existed or not. As if I were being erased from the lives of everyone I’d ever known.

I texted my friend once during that first week, hesitantly, to ask if anything was wrong, to say their messages seemed different. Of course not, they said, and I didn’t ask again. But any sense of connection felt like it was disappearing, and their increasingly infrequent and terse responses over the next few weeks where once paragraphs had flowed brought up a terror that I couldn’t remember being conscious of before: of being left. Abandoned.

It was a sensation so all-encompassing that it took weeks to put words to. And far longer to piece together why the friendship discard provoked such an extreme emotional response. Over several months, I forced myself to search for reasons for my breakdown, both online and in my own mind, metaphorically crawling back through the person I’d created via adulthood, marriage and motherhood and then, perhaps inevitably, into a place I’d avoided for most of those years: the violent, unloving childhood marked by repeated abandonment, buried for decades under what looked like a normal, happy life.

There’s a reason solitary confinement in prisons is a form of torture

My father once told me of coming home from work to find me, 18 months old and still in my nightgown, alone in the house, sitting on the kitchen floor eating Cheerios out of the box. He told me that my eyes were dead, empty, that he never saw anything that scared him more. That wasn’t the last time my mother left me alone. With regular physical and emotional abuse as well as unpredictable spells of abandonment, she taught me the horrible truth that I was alone in the world, that I could slip out of existence and nobody would know, or care.

Those memories lingered in my sense of self, buried under years of caregiving and competence and my own desire to move on, to forget – the shame, the rage, the burning sense of injustice that never seems to fade. But it’s the trauma of that abandonment that the friendship discard brought back to life most viscerally.

Abandonment. Science fiction specialises in bringing this horror to life. There’s a Twilight Zone scene of a man being left alone in the world after a nuclear holocaust; an episode of Black Mirror in which, as punishment for a crime, a main character is rendered forever invisible to every other person. Connection is a fundamental human need, almost as essential to our survival as food and water. Much of human existence is spent trying to hide ourselves from the terrifying possibility of aloneness. There’s a reason solitary confinement in prisons is a form of torture. And a reason its reality in a child’s life leaves scars.

I can’t remember the first time I heard the term ‘ghosting’, but the word had never felt so apt. My friend remained solid, corporeal, a presence whose importance in my own life was all too real. It was me who felt I was dissolving out of existence. To be turned into a ghost, told with no words at all that one’s existence does not matter, is a surreal and sometimes reality-shattering experience. As if the very fabric of life has been called into question.

That particular experience, of being ghosted by someone I thought was a friend, brought up everything from my childhood I’d wanted to forget. Everything that, by my mid-40s, I thought I’d outgrown. The way my mother beat my father every day. Her regular reminders that I was a manipulative little bitch, that I was selfish. Her repeated abandonments. It took metaphorically being turned into a ghost, emotionally triggered beyond what I thought I could survive, to make me face the trauma that still lingered.

The loss of that friendship felt like the most important thing in the world

Once I started to connect my overwrought reactions to a friendship discard with the childhood wounds that had been left to fester for decades, my behaviour no longer seemed absurd or insane. It was abandonment trauma making itself felt. Why right then, after all those years, I had no idea. But once I knew why I’d fallen apart so badly, I finally had a way to start putting myself back together. Over time, I got off the floor and moved my work out of the cupboard under the stairs. I tried to grapple with finally seeing who I’d become: someone who sacrificed all her own needs for others, because caregiving was how I’d survived abuse and abandonment in childhood. Abandonment, it turned out, was what I knew best.

At the beginning of my former friend’s incremental withdrawal, then ghosting, the loss of that friendship felt like the most important thing in the world. But, in the end, it turned out to be only the first, if crucial, step on a long journey. It opened up a path backward in time to where all that pain – everything that clawed and gnawed and ate me alive as I lay crying in the dark – truly lived.

It took a long, long time, and I still felt hurt by the discard, but finally I was able to grieve the friendship itself, including loss of the moments of commonality and humour we’d shared, without buried memories getting in the way. I silently wished my friend compassion and care through whatever burdens they carried and whatever their life held – my healing had finally begun. Perhaps we were on parallel paths. Maybe we all are.

Antonia Malchik has written on science, environment and the history of privatisation for a variety of publications, and writes the newsletter On the Commons. Her first book is A Walking Life (2019). She lives in northwest Montana.

https://nautil.us/why-we-sense-somebody-who-isnt-there-469446/?utm_campaign=website&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nautilus-newsletter

Why We Sense Somebody Who Isn’t There

When expectations aren’t met, our brains spook us.

For 10 months, Ernest Shackleton and his crew, bound for the South Pole, were stranded in Antarctic ice. The massive pressure of the ice was slowly crushing their ship, HMS Endurance. When the ship began to break apart, the men abandoned it and camped on the ice. A few weeks later, the Endurance sank. The freezing days dragged on, but the men saw hope when their icy campground began to splinter, revealing a watery lane for their small boats.

In May 1916, the explorers set off for land, battling violent winds, currents, and ice floes. They rowed until their bodies were ragged. Soon they began seeing things: “resemblances to human faces and living forms in the fantastic contour and massively uncouth shapes of berg and floe,” Shackleton wrote in his account of their survival, South. During a 36-hour trek over mountains and glaciers, with two crew members, Shackleton wrote, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.” Inspired by Shackleton’s account, T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Wasteland,” “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”

Who indeed? Now, cognitive scientists have taken up the quest to explain the mysterious third. The felt presence of an unseen person, they have found, results from breaks in the neural connections that normally link expectations and actual experiences. During extreme conditions, or when the connection is broken and actions don’t meet unconscious expectations—a sign of land, a rescue team—our brains feed our minds a phantom substitute.

She reported an invisible man clasped her in his arms.

Ben Alderson-Day, an associate professor of psychology at Durham University, in the United Kingdom, and author of Presence, winner of a British Psychological Society’s Book Award for 2023, says it doesn’t always take Shackleton-like extremes to generate a felt presence. “People often describe a very distinct feeling that someone is there with them when they’re drawn into some sort of social situation where they need to act or change their position to make themselves safe,” Alderson-Day says.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have long believed this felt presence may link the sense of ghosts, spirits, phantoms, wraiths, specters, and apparitions, across all cultures. An early theory pioneered in the 1980s by psychologist Justin Barrett, attributed supernatural agency to a “hyperactive agency detection device,” a neural mechanism that biases us to presume the presence of purposeful agents. Its existence stems from our evolutionary success of erring on the side of caution when it comes to detecting predators. Around the same time, the late psychologist Michael Persinger began his notorious “God Helmet” experiments. He created weak electromagnetic fields in a motorcycle helmet, which participants wore while undergoing sensory deprivation. Persinger claimed he could induce a presence, often in the form of God, in 80 percent of participants. (Nearly all replication attempts failed to confirm the effect.)

Most recently, neuroscientist Olaf Blanke, a Swiss-German neurologist working in Lausanne, is using more rigorous methods than Persinger. While evaluating a 22-year-old woman for epileptic surgery, his team serendipitously discovered that it’s possible to induce neural activity that consistently elicits a felt presence. The procedure involved stimulating specific parts of her brain with electrodes, a fairly common technique that can produce a variety of hallucinatory sensations and perceptions. But this time, after a small electrical zap, she reported the clear yet unseen presence of someone behind her. During subsequent stimulations, she reported a man clasped her in his arms.

The stimulated region, called the temporoparietal junction, is where the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain meet. It is heavily involved in processing corporeal information relative to oneself and to other bodies. Damage or malfunctioning here can induce strange, out-of-body experiences where one views a remote, disembodied perspective of their own self. Aberrant functioning can also distort what are normally clear distinctions between oneself and others, where you end and something, or someone, begins.

To explore bodily illusions, Blanke and his team created an experimental device that seemed inspired by a Philip K. Dick novel. Participants wear a haptic sensing device that tracks their finger motion while they make poking movements into empty space in front of them. These movements are then replicated by a robot behind them, which they can’t see, that pokes them in the back. When a delay between the participants’ movements and the felt pokes is introduced—disrupting the causal relation between action and sensation—the participants attribute the pokes to an unseen but felt agent. Fosco Bernasconi, a senior scientist working with Blanke, explains that an impairment to self-body signals “causes the brain to misinterpret its own body signals and attribute them to somebody else.”

A neurological model of motor control, formally known as the forward model, says that whenever we execute movements to carry out an action, we create predictions in the form of neural body signals—called “efferent copies”—that allow us to anticipate the sensory consequences of our actions. When this causal relation gets disrupted by say, a delay, and the sensations deviate from our expectation, our brain can resolve the mismatch by attributing them to the actions of someone else. It makes sense, Alderson-Day says, “that if you disrupt sensorimotor signaling, you have an illusory body turn up.”

Blanke’s model provides a plausible mechanistic account to explain the feeling of a presence, but one explicitly tied to the activation of the motor system. In contrast to the experience of meeting God while seated and motionless, as Persinger claimed his experiments showed, Alderson-Day explains that Blanke’s work “is more focused on the clinical and neurological correlates of very distinct presence experiences—separate from the spiritual and ecstatic.”

Under stress, our brains feed our minds a phantom substitute.

What originally inspired Alderson-Day to investigate felt presence was a patient who constantly heard a voice. The patient didn’t have to perform any action to hear the voice, he just expected to hear it at any given moment, as if it was always “there.” Such motionless presence experiences fit well with another theoretical candidate for explaining their neural basis, called predictive processing, which holds that when one has high unconscious predictions or expectations of events, they can generate a bias that overrides perception.

Predictive processing is a revolutionary theory because it overturns the notion of perceptual experience as constructed primarily from incoming sensory signals. It implies, rather, that experience arises from a continually updated mental model of the world. Our brain is constantly generating predictions of sensory inputs around us. If we encounter something new, our brain may initially provide a faulty prediction, but in time, with more information, it tweaks the model to fit the reality.

The theory goes a long way to explain the massive amount of brain connections involved in making sense of the world. (Incoming sensory signals alone only comprise 1 to 2 percent of the brain’s energy consumption.) And how easily our perceptual experiences can go astray. Alderson-Day says that even mild disruptions between expectation and experience can result in the perception of a presence. “Predictive processing basically says that we all have the propensity to experience presences and other hallucinations, because we all rely on expectation to some degree in our perception of the world.”

In freezing Antarctica, it wasn’t only the extreme circumstances that gave rise to the “third who always walks beside you,” it was a precise set of unconscious processes born out of the misery that Shackleton and his men found themselves in, and the dire need to find their rescuers. These processes are universal in all of us, and so the next time you sense somebody who isn’t there, you might reflect on why that should be.

Phil Jaekl is a freelance science writer and author with an academic background in cognitive neuroscience. His latest book is Out Cold: A Chilling Descent into the Macabre, Controversial, Lifesaving History of Hypothermia. He lives in the Norwegian Arctic in Tromsø.

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