The Puzzle to Solve When You Have a Ghost Experience

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Skeptics try to explain what's going on when people have anomalous experiences. Often they come back to this idea that they can feel it or sense it, but they don't have any sensory evidence. So sometimes I call that the presence paradox. You've got to kind of think, well, actually, how does that even make sense? How would we take a psychological framework and try and understand that particular question? Right.

Shermer and Alderson-Day discuss the psychologist’s journey to understand the phenomenon of sensed-presence: the disturbing feeling that someone or something is there when we are alone. Using contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and philosophy, Alderson-Day attempts to understand how this experience is possible. Is it a hallucination, a change in the brain, or something else? The journey to understand takes us to meet explorers, mediums, and robots, and step through real, imagined, and virtual worlds.

Ben Alderson-Day is an Associate Professor in Psychology and a Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing at Durham University. A specialist in atypical cognition and mental health, his work spans cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and child development. His new book is Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other.