The Shocking Science Behind Ghosts - FutureIQ

4,682 views Wait, is this logic right? • Oct 31, 2025

Slog Reference: The Science of Ghosts

Description

Every shadow has a story. Every cold breeze in an empty room feels a little too real. But what if ghosts aren’t real at all and it’s our own minds creating them?
In this episode of Future IQ, we explore The Science of Ghosts where evolution, psychology, and the environment come together to explain the unexplainable. Discover how our brains evolved to see patterns and imagine intent, how invisible infrasound and magnetic fields can trick our senses, and why false memories make ghost stories feel so vivid and true. From the mysterious “haunted lab” solved by science, to the tales of पीपल tree spirits and women in white, we uncover how culture shapes the kind of ghosts we see. And how grief, loneliness, and fear can make the mind believe almost anything. So, do ghosts really exist… or are they the echoes of our own imagination?
Stay till the end because once you understand the science behind ghosts, you’ll never look at the dark the same way again.

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Videos you may like / referenced in today’s episode:
How Astrologers Predict Future / Fool You: https://youtu.be/FcSuHP113NI
Mastering Both Your Brains | System 1 vs System 2: https://youtu.be/DIVTMooO7o4
Why Do We Follow Social Norms?: https://youtu.be/_XhIECCt_P8

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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:20 Pattern Matching & Imagined Intent
04:12 Environmental Physics
08:44 Cultural Priming & The Lying Brain
15:39 Physiological Lies
19:11 Social Reinforcement
23:35 Benefits & Dangers of Paranormal Beliefs

Source:
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/we-believe-in-ghosts-heaven-and-hell/story-SasxAY6Ij1eQBd8sk4fj6H.html
https://www.ipsos.com/en-in/8-10-urban-indians-claim-being-comfortable-around-people-different-faiths-them-ipsos-global
https://www.uhu.es/publicaciones/ojs/index.php/et/article/view/7636
Car accident memory experiment: https://labs.la.utexas.edu/gilden/files/2016/04/Loftus_Palmer.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://yakari.polytechnique.fr/Django-pub/documents/tadrist2015rp-1pp.pdf
https://www.jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/september-21-ganesha-drinking-milk-miracle-1995-science-behind-the-phenomenon-that-shook-the-world-1632131295-1

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The Science of Ghosts

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Transcript

- Shant ghosts don't exist. Ganesh does not drink milk. The woman sitting in the people tree does not have ulta legs. Right? Yet 46% of Indians believe in all this stuff. So what do you think these things actually exist? No. Right. But I don't think these people are lying. Right. So what's going on? What's the science that explains all of this? Wait. A what is going on? and B where does science even come into this? This is paranormal phenomena. We are going to give scientific explanations for why so many people in India and the world believe in ghosts. Where is this coming from? Right? The explanation is going to involve how our brain works, how our

0m 49s psychology works and also physics of the environment around us. And I'm guessing also how society makes us believe all of these things for no reason at all. And not just that, how society strengthens these things and then adds masala. Okay, this promises to be a very interesting episode because Naven is going to demolish the very concept of paranormal phenomena using science because that's what we do here at Future IQ. Use science. Right? So let's start with the quirks of our brain, right? Two specific things about our brain. One is pattern matching and the other is imagined intent. Okay, our brain is one of the greatest pattern matchers ever, right? I mean you see one round line and couple of squiggly

1m 36s lines and you see Gandhi G, right? You see two big dots and then one straight line below and it looks like a face to you, right? You see certain things in a tree trunk and suddenly it is Ganesh and you start praying for that. There is a woman in Bangalore who saw dots on a chapati and it was Jesus. It became an international incident in 2002. Right? I remember that. This is pattern matching. Yes. Okay. The second is that you see milk on a Ganesha statue disappearing because of surface tension and capillary action.

2m 09s Right. Yeah. But that kind of randomness is not what your brain thinks of. Your brain has to assign some intent to it. Like there is a person there drinking the milk, right? That is imagined intent. Yeah. And I fell for that imagined intent hard when I was a kid which actually turned me atheist. But another story another day. Go on. So there is a whole bunch of things where we just see patterns that don't exist. It's also called paridolia. And you know we see a bunch of random things happening just out of random chance. But we have to assign intent to it. Like there is a person who is doing that because of so and so reason, right?

2m 48s Yeah. I mean why why do we do that? Everything happens because of evolution in the African savana. We are back in the African savana. So imagine two people in the African savana, right? Scaredy-cat and strongman. Okay. Both of them see in the bushes like two dark spots and then one line underneath, right? Scaredy-cat looks at it and says, "That's a tiger there." Okay, that's pattern matching. Then it says, "Okay, that tiger is sitting there waiting because it wants to catch me and eat me." That's imagined intent. Okay, scaredy-cat runs away.

3m 25s The strong man says, "Yeah, that's just random spots." Yeah. The strong man turns out to be right. Okay, this happens a thousand times and 999 times scaredy-cat has just wasted his time by running away and wasted energy also. The thousandth time it was actually a tiger, strong man got eaten, did not pass on his gene that a scaredy-cat lived long enough to pass on his genes and all his descendants which is all of us today are now scared of random dots. Right? That is why we have pattern matching and imagine intent and we do that wrong so many times because that was a better mistake to make. Okay, in terms of evolution that was a better

4m 10s mistake to make. I agree. But at the same time, uh let's come back to the present where we now have haunted houses, we have forts and we have temples where there are ghosts and okay here is a lovely story. Okay, there's a guy called Vic Tandi, an engineer working in a lab. And he and his colleagues experienced a range of creepy things in the lab. Okay. Feelings of dread, cold sweats, glimpses of a gray figure slinking in the corridor in like, you know, the twilight and things like that.

4m 44s Was the lab haunted or something? That's what most people would have thought. But Vick Tandee did not believe in ghosts and he wanted to figure out what is going on. Right? So he did a whole bunch of investigations and finally found that there was one laboratory fan for some extraction something or the other which was an old fan and that when you turn it on would create a 19 Hz sound wave. 19 Hz. So 19 Hz is just below the frequency that human ear can hear. Correct.

5m 16s Okay. So nobody can hear that sound but the frequency is high enough that we can kind of feel it in our bones and it kind of goes to some parts of the brain. Right? Also interestingly it happens that 19 Hz is pretty close to the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. Right? So now when this fan is on, you can like feel something in your head because of this sound which you can't quite sense by your system 2 brain and your eyeball is vibrating a little bit. Right?

5m 49s So this causes blurry vision. It can cause strange visual effects and plus those strange visual effects can be misinterpreted through our pattern matching to be a shadowy figure and through imagined intent it becomes a ghost which is like you know following you around and haunting the lamp. Right? This is called infrasound. Right? Sound which is just below the possibility of human hearing. Right? And that is what gives feelings of cold dread. Okay? Right? But infrasound explains every haunting ever. No, there's a whole bunch of other things, right? So there is also magnetism and temperature effects. Okay.

6m 29s Okay. So first of all, our brains are electrical, right? So magnetic fields again similarly affect us in ways which we don't sense consciously but subconsciously we can feel things right. So there is a controversial experiment by a guy called Michael Persinger where magnetic fields directed at brains of subjects. Many of them reported feeling an un unseen presence in the room. Right? And uh they like feeling of like they were being watched by somebody. Right? Similarly, there are other correlations of anomalies in the earth's magnetic field because of mountains nearby or deposit and so on.

7m 13s And you know maranormal phenomena around those, right? Modern buildings are shielded. They have electrical properties are pretty good. Whereas old buildings with unshielded wires have much more magnetic anomalies. Right. Yeah. I mean whenever current passes through a wire there is always going to be electromagnetism. There is the parad effect and all of that temperature effects right again older buildings are not insulated very well the insulation is bad and the heating doesn't work as well. So as a result there are patches in the building somewhere where suddenly there is either a spot of cold or a draft of cold air coming from somewhere and that again is sensed as like a chill right and there is something here and so

8m 02s on right also old buildings have bad acoustics that can cause sound alumalies and you hear whispers which is just wind passing through some window far away and then getting channeled through this old building. Right. Yeah. I mean the acoustics is actually one of the most important parts of these hauntings and 99% of the time most of those acoustics are explained by a certain quirk of the architecture which causes the sound to behave in a certain manner. Correct. And add to that bad electrical things, old appliances that have problems with them which are producing vibrations, producing frequencies and so on and you get a lot of this. Right.

8m 43s Yeah. But there there are also plenty of stories in mythology in history in culture about uh say for example let's take the example of ghosts in people trees like vikram and veal of course is a series of stories but there are pop culture local references of yeah in India people tree is definitely like haunted right and there the explanation is that a people tree has very dense foliage so much more chances of deep shadows and vision tricks. It has a thick trunk, right? So, a lot more pattern matching and imagine intent just because it's a people tree, right? Also, the leaf shape of people tree, thin and long and so on, right?

9m 23s That has a long narrow tip and thin lamina, right? As a result, they are more prone to fluttering and producing a rustle in the breeze because of which you will get whispers. Okay? So combine all of this and you get very rich situation for pattern matching. Add to that imagine intent and you have ghosts, right? And you have Vikram and Vita. They made for really good stories though, right? See that's the thing about stories. Okay, we grow up hearing all these stories of ghosts. Okay, as kids these go into our brain before we learn about science, before we learn about the fact that there is no such thing is not possible, the scientific uh temperament

10m 10s and all of that. Right? So it is deep in our brain. This is called cultural priming. Okay, we have done an episode called believing is seeing. So if you believe there is a ghost in the tree and then this pattern matching happens then this intent imagination happens you are going to see a ghost and it will be exactly like the ghost which was there in the stories that have gone deep in your brain. You might not even remember the story but the ghost will look like that right cultural priming.

10m 37s Yeah and uh the it doesn't even have to be cultural priming. If someone tells you that there is a ghost on this stretch of the highway and you happen to pass through that stretch of the highway, you will see the ghost as described by the friend you we never question why we don't see a different ghost. Right? So, cultural priming is so uh important and widespread that we don't realize this is happening. Right? That's why in India you will see like a white woman in a white sari and her feet are backward because those are the stories everybody has heard. Uh whereas in the US it'll be like zombies, right?

11m 13s Or UFOs and aliens and all of that. So whatever stories are popular in your culture, those stories are the ones that translate into your paranormal experiences. But hold on a second. There are some very specific details to these stories like the inverted feet that you talked about, ults come from right. I mean, you know, I guess your question is that the pattern matching is going to show you vaguely a V shape and that it's a woman. Pattern matching can't show you inverted feet. That's what you are saying, right?

11m 49s Essentially. Yeah. Yes. So, that boils down to two things. One is that your brain is a liar. Okay. There is no such thing as memory. Okay. The way our memory works is that it cannot actually remember exact details of anything. Okay? It kind of remembers vague things and then every time you remember that memory, every time you recall it, our brain fills in the detail. Yeah. And as you say the story again and again, whatever you said the second time, that gets added as a detail. What you said the third time, that gets added as a detail. And the original vagueness is gone. With every repetition, all the details become specific. Right? Now add to that something like um you know when

12m 39s people ask leading questions. Okay? That changes your memory. And now some of you don't believe me, right? So there is a famous famous experiment by Elizabeth Loftess. Okay? What she did was she showed videos of car crashes to people. Okay? That's it. Later she asked them questions. One set of people was asked the question, how fast were the cars going before they smashed into each other? The other set was asked the question, how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other? Wait, they are the same question, but smashed versus contacted.

13m 16s Yeah, the first set of people wrote down a speed which was much larger. second set wrote a smaller speed just because of the way the question was asked. Oh, okay. Not just that, a week later when she asked them to recall what they saw in the video, the group that was asked how fast were they going when they smashed into each other, they remembered the glass shattering and pieces of glass. Oh, which was not there in the video. Okay. Just by asking them the question which contained the word smashed a week later now they remember seeing glass and they're like with my own eyes I saw it right that is what happens just leading questions can cause you right so

14m 06s imagine you mean you went past a people tree at twilights you saw something white there which was probably just uh old sari that had gotten caught there right you think of it as a ghost and now you have gone and you have told my friend oh my God, I saw there, right? Then your friends ask you, did she have inverted feet? And now that detail gets added to your story because Right. Right. See, in fact, what will happen right now is I'm not sure, but you know, probably she did.

14m 35s Yeah. If it was a harder, she had inverted feet. No. Exactly. Next week when you are telling the story, you will distinctly remember the inverted feet. Yeah. And you'll actually in remember it in the memory itself. Right. There are lots of studies of people having memories of things that really never happened, right? You can get people to remember being lost in a mall or seeing Bugs, you know, when they were young, going with your parents and seeing Bugs Bunny in Disneyland, which is impossible because Bugs Bunny is Warner Brothers and Disneyland is, you know, a different company. But this our memory is terrible. But we never realize that our memory and our brain is lying

15m 19s to us. Right. So, right, that is why eyewitness accounts are also not held as absolute truths by the courts these days because it has been proven by Elizabeth Loftess' uh experiment. Not just that, right? That was about memory. There's a whole bunch of other reasons why our brain lies to us. Okay. Another very interesting thing is that you know when we sleep there is a part of our sleep deep sleep called sleep right now during sleep our brain is very active there are dreams happening and problem is that if we try to act out those dreams we are going to you know thrash about and start doing nasty things. So our brain automatically turns off all our muscles during our sleep to

16m 06s prevent us from doing anything self-damaging h as part of our dream. Yeah. Especially in the African savannah if we were sleeping on branches on trees and we crashed around and we fell down. It was yeah dangerous. You know when we wake up first our muscles are enabled again from being the disabled state. Then we come out of sleep. Correct. In a few cases like maybe 20% of people what can happen depending on the situation is that this gets reversed. They wake up but the part where your muscles have been disabled has not yet uh been cleared out. Okay.

16m 45s So now you're awake. You have just recently seen a dream and you can't move. You're paralyzed. Oh sleep paralysis. Right. Now add to this pattern matching. Okay. What is a situation under which you can't move your muscles? It usually means that something some presence is sitting on your chest preventing you from moving. Sleep demons, right? Uh there are so many different names for this all across the world, right? Yeah. Uh so uh I mean basically you imagine ghosts and now add to it intent and guess what the ghost has come to do in your bedroom at night. There are various again people come up with various stories right people have difficulty breathing uh people feel like

17m 31s a weight on their chest they're paralyzed all of this part of it is also like the symptoms classic symptoms of a panic attack. Yeah where you have difficulty breathing where your chest is hurting but you also think that there is a weight on your chest. This is a classic panic attack. Plus generally your brain starts making up these things in other situations also right sleep paralysis is one thing where you have half woken up but also extremely fatigued then the brain can't keep track of all the things that it is supposed to keep track of and then hallucinations happen.

18m 02s Yeah. or extreme grief at that time you actually see the person you that that you just lost you imagine them right that is a part of a good part of grief but similarly migraines where you see auras or sensory deprivation meditation all of these will cause your brain to show you things which don't actually exist okay so this is your brain being a liar I am actually putting all of these things together in the example of the uh woman in white with inverted feet and then attaching all the various.

18m 35s Yeah. Imagine that. The same guy who just saw a fluttering white cloth but that became a woman with inter inverted feet. Imagine the same guy a couple of weeks later who had the sleep paralysis thing and the and the migraines and all of that. Any of those any one of those. And that woman is exactly the woman who is sitting on his chest with inverted feet probably. Right. And because of the migraine that woman now has an aura because of grief that woman now has a face.

19m 05s No, no, no. All of these don't happen to the same person at the same time. I'm just saying any one of them will typically happen right? Could typically happen. Now society gets into the act because society is also a liar. Right now think about this. Okay. In the US 36% of people believe in ghosts. Only 24% claim to have seen them. Okay? So there is this extra percentage of people who have never seen a ghost but they believe in them. Yeah. Why? Because you are willing to take other people's word for it. Right. So if everybody around you believes in ghosts then you also believe in ghosts. You think that that actually happens. This is a type of group consensus. An episode

19m 46s we have uh done. Right. I was just thinking this is either group confirmism or preference falsification. But you know like we've already talked about that all these people who believe in ghosts and they tell their children ghost stories. The possible reason one is that you don't want children wandering off at night. You want to keep them safe. That is one. But also because children love these stories. Okay. So you tell them these stories. So now you have cultural priming in their head. Okay. Now media reinforces this. Okay. If one person who went to a people tree and saw a ghost, right, and then later on that ghost got a whole bunch of details and later on that same ghost sat on his

20m 32s chest, media from everywhere is going to descend on this little village and start asking question and start making reals and start doing videos about this, right? I mean there are like thousands of villages where nothing like this happens and media will not rip out that oh so and so village did not see any ghost today so and so village did not see that doesn't happen right yeah because seeing the ghost is the story not seeing a ghost is not a story exactly so now suddenly media gives you the impression that this is happening everywhere right and confirmation bias now that you believe there is a ghost in that people tree other people walking around right

21m 11s if they see any evidence evidence which is kind of pointing towards that that will get remembered that will get amplified that will get posted everywhere. Any evidence to the contrary just gets ignored. Yeah. Or not posted at all. I mean if you don't see a pattern you're not going to click and post a pattern that doesn't exist. Put all of this together and you also understand why Indians see ghosts in people trees whereas Americans sees UFOs and aliens. Indians don't see UFOs and aliens. That's the cultural priming part of this. Right.

21m 41s Absolutely. Like I said, your culture decides what paranormal phenomena you tend to believe more in. So this whole thing about uh I don't know the English word for it. Hindi angana, right? Marati Angatiana, right? It's an Indian thing. It really doesn't happen anywhere else. So it Well, to be fair, there was an entire movie called The Exorcist where But that's a different kind. It's a kind of a possession. Yeah. But this is not possession. I do I don't It's not possession. It's a very different thing. Right. And there's a whole mental health aspect to all of this which we're not going to discuss.

22m 16s But just wanted to mention that there's a whole lot of paranormal phenomena which can be explained by pretty much the same factors here. Me personally I hate I hate paranormal phenomena. I hate ghost story simply because a lot of conmen use it to take advantage of innocent people which is I absolutely hate it. Right. So see I mean you know some people can argue that if he wants to believe in ghosts what's the big deal right this can get bad in cases where there is financial exploitation by bas and there's this whole jadua thing uh that happens right another problem is delayed medical treatment uh a third problem is unnecessary fear in children some children can't handle

23m 00s it a lot of most children will for them it's just this is good right they have fun, but some children can't handle it and develop lifelong fears. Yeah. There is also issues with property rates, right? If a house gets a reputation as being a haunted house, the price of that house is going to fall and that can have a significant economic impact on that family, right? Unless that haunted house becomes a tourist destination, in which case the property prices around the entire thing will just blow up. I mean, Bangard is an example.

23m 33s But you know what? This is the reason I want these practices to get shut down. Like no need, right? You know, you have to be careful there, right? You do want to shut down the exploiters, but you don't want to just shut down everything, right? There are benefits to these beliefs. Chesterton's fence. Yes, there are benefits. So, for example, okay, grief. 30% of people who have just lost their husband or wife. Okay, they report seeing their spouse in the weeks after the death, right? Okay, this is a good thing because it is comforting for them. It allows them to let go slowly, right? Otherwise the grief becomes too much. Okay, um it also has other benefits like

24m 20s allowing us to believe in life after death. Otherwise a lot of people can't handle that it ends at death right then pe some people might feel like not living at all okay yeah I mean the moment you realize life ends at death you tend to become nihilistic and you're like what's the point of even various problems yeah it also allows us to believe in justice okay in the sense so imagine you know that somebody got killed by the politician's son and nothing happened to that politician's son because example No specific reference. This is just an example. Go on.

24m 56s Now, if that happens, you might lose any belief in the justice system. But if you believe that the ghost of that person is going to come back and take revenge, then there is still some hope, right? The ability to finish unfinished business, right? You were trying to do something and suddenly you died, right? That might worry you quite a lot. But if there is a chance you can come back as a ghost, finish it off and then move on, it's again comforting, right? Yeah. It allows us to have a connection with our loved ones, right? That somebody died and that's just gone, right?

25m 34s But well, they're not gone gone. They're still a part of our memories, but they are gone from the ethereal from this world into the ethereal, etc., etc. I I I get what you mean. Psychologically, a little of it is a good thing. Yeah. When it becomes too much, it's a problem, right? H wow. Very scientific explanation for the paranormal phenomena, not just ghosts, but you realize that this can be applied to any paranormal phenomena that your culture believes in or that you have yourself experienced, right? So, you know, infrasound, magnetic fields, those combined with our brains pattern matching and imagined intent, right?

26m 15s Yeah. All of this can explain a lot of the paranormal phenomena. And basically these people are not lying. They experienced it because that's what their brain told them. And then over time society convinced them to add in details. Again not lying. It just happens because that's how our brain works. And you know to a large extent this is a good thing when it happens within limits in small cases right it's a good thing. It's only when somebody takes advantage of this that we need to stop it. Right? So it's the taking advantage that needs to be stopped and you know people like the andadhanulan summiti they are working on things like that. That's a great thing.

26m 59s They do some great great things there. There was James Randy also who was a wonderful guy who debunked a lot of these myths. Simplest thing there. Yeah. So James Randy had a million dollar prize for anybody who could show a paranormal phenomenon which couldn't be explained by science and over decades nobody was able to claim that prize because everything they came up with had a scientific explanation. Right. Absolutely. We don't have a million dollars but we keep trying to debunk as much of these uh uh as possible on this channel Future IQ. And you know that's not a reason to just go out yelling at everybody who believes in this stuff, right? There are let them believe as

27m 44s long as they're not harming themselves and others. Yeah. Yeah. The harming themselves and others part is where I definitely draw the line which is why I urge you to watch this next episode that we've lined up which is about this wonderful guy called PT Barnum and how he basically gave birth to these things called Barnum statements and how these Barnum statements are used by certain people. You are talking about how astrologers fool you. I'm trying not to be that direct but yes future IQ where we believe in being direct where he believes in being direct I love taking my time and going the roundabout way a little bit sometimes. Shriant Navidiv Future IQ.