Are Ghosts Just Brain Creations?

July 6 -- Have you ever seen a ghost? “Felt” a presence? Has your phantom double ever followed you around? Ever leave your body for a few moments?

These might not be paranormal experiences. But they don’t necessarily mean you’re crazy, either.

Much like some people experience a “phantom limb” after an amputation, you could be experiencing the presence of a “phantom of the entire body,” according to Swiss neuroscientist Peter Brugger of the University Hospital in Zurich.

This can be caused by brain damage, but intense emotion can also trigger the “ghosts,” he told ABCNEWS.com. An article on Brugger’s doppelganger theories will appear in an upcoming edition of New Scientist magazine, according to Reuters.

“Many healthy people have ghost experiences and do not suffer from overt brain damage,” said Brugger. “Normal brains can easily be duped about the source of an ‘action at a distance,’ that they themselves have the agency over actions.”

Looking at the Brain

These phantoms could be the result of damaged pariental lobes, which help the brain distinguish between the body and the space surrounding it, but it can also pop up in “normal brains” as a result of powerful emotions such as intense fear, sadness, or euphoria, said Brugger.

He pointed to the example of automatic writing, in which practitioners claim other entities take control of their hands in order to write messages from beyond.

“If one’s own hands to not seem to obey one’s own brain, the brain must construct an entity responsible for an action,” he said. “In cases of brain damage, the threshold for unreasonable conclusions/misinterpretations [of all kinds] is simply lowered.”

Other research bears this out: Amputees often describe not only the presence of a phantom limb, but the presence of the very pain once associated with that limb — pain that, neurologically speaking, should no longer exist (see Web link).