Strange Phenomena gauntlet

The amygdala watches for external threats, so without it snakes and haunted houses didn't scare her. But an internal alarm, rising CO2 sensed as suffocation, reached terror another way. Fear does not live in a single spot.

When researchers inserted a delay of up to about 200 milliseconds between the person's movement and the resulting touch, ticklishness returned, and grew with the length of the delay. Break your brain's prediction and the sensation stops being cancelled.

In 1998, engineer Vic Tandy traced his 'haunted' lab to a new extractor fan pumping out a ~19 Hz standing wave, infrasound, below the ~20 Hz floor of human hearing. The leading idea for the grey figure is that the human eyeball resonates near 18 to 19 Hz, so a strong wave there could smear peripheral vision into a shape. Turn the fan off and the 'ghost' went with it, though the eyeball-resonance mechanism is contested, not proven.

The paranormal researcher Fiona Broome coined it around 2009, after finding many people shared a false memory that Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. He was released in 1990 and died in 2013.

In 2012 a team on the Qinghai Plateau was recording ordinary lightning with cameras and spectrographs when a ball of light appeared by chance. They reported the first recorded optical spectrum of natural ball lightning in 2014.

Stimulating the left temporoparietal junction induced the vivid feeling of a shadowy person positioned behind her, mimicking her posture. That region helps build the brain's own body representation.

Every night during dream sleep your brain paralyses your body on purpose, REM atonia, so you don't act out your dreams. In sleep paralysis your mind boots up while that paralysis is still on: a 'REM-wake dissociation.' You're genuinely conscious inside a frozen body, usually for seconds to about two minutes. It's frightening but completely harmless.

As crowd scientist Keith Still puts it, people don't die because they panic, they panic because they are dying. The lethal pressure builds from density and geometry long before anyone is frightened, so blaming panic misdirects attention away from the real cause: how the event was run.

French and colleagues found suggestibility predicted anomalous experiences far better than the infrasound itself, so the haunting effect is modest and genuinely contested.

Two of the four pieces were laced with roughly 17 Hz tones, and about 22% of the audience reported more chills, anxiety, sadness or unease during those passages, a real but modest effect.

Entomologists found no biting insect. Sociologists Kerckhoff and Back found the illness spread along lines of friendship and sight: most of the roughly sixty affected workers were women on the same overloaded shift, and many only fell ill after seeing or hearing of others. Stress and suggestion were the real bite.

Two of the four patients showed a marked surge of gamma activity in the posterior hot zone after ventilator removal, and the other two showed nothing. It is something some recorded dying brains do, not all.