The Power of Narrative and Legend

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There's something going on there at different levels right you know that kind of whether it's hypoxia or whether it's sensory environments sure you're going to get. The things that you really interact with the things that you take home with you that have real meaning are often more those like social things or those sensitive presence or the things that feel like they have function. And I'm always interested in but also slightly suspicious is too strong a word but essentially that power of kind of narrative and legend looms large of a lot of those accounts. You've got that sense of companions or presences that comfort people just in timeYou've got that kind of like legend or that feeling that these experiences are

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.