The Intersubjective Presence of Bereavement

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

If you live with somebody for a long time, you do have a sense of their presence. You might sink or look at that sick of the scene almost through the eyes of somebody else who's there to go, come on. It's actually about what would they do? What would they think? And that's a different sense of presence almost you could call it an intersubjective presence.

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.