Chennai: One of the biggest mysteries since time immemorial is how do certain people ‘hear the dead’?
A new study has attempted to decode this baffling question as to why and how do individuals receive communications from the dead.
The research by Durham University, has found that spiritualist mediums might be more prone to immersive mental activities and unusual auditory experiences early in life.
The study, published in the journal, Mental Health, Religion and Culture, found that mediums who “hear” spirits are experiencing clairaudient communications, rather than clairvoyant or clairsentient communications.
The researchers conducted a survey of 65 clairaudient spiritualist mediums from the Spiritualists’ National Union and 143 members of the general population,
Published in the journal Mental Health, Religion and Culture, the study found that 44.6 per cent of spiritualist participants reported hearing the voices of the deceased on a daily basis, with 33.8 per cent reporting an experience of clairaudience within the last day.
A large majority (79 per cent) said that experiences of auditory spiritual communication were part of their everyday lives, taking place both when they were alone and when they were working as a medium or attending a spiritualist church.
Although spirits were primarily heard inside the head (65.1 per cent), 31.7 per cent of spiritualist participants said they experienced spirit voices coming from both inside and outside the head.
When rated on scales of absorption, as well as how strongly they believe in the paranormal, spiritualists scored much more highly than members of the general population.
For the general population, absorption was associated with levels of belief in the paranormal, but there was no significant corresponding link between belief and hallucination-proneness.
There was also no difference in levels of superstitious belief or proneness to visual hallucinations between spiritualist and non-spiritualist participants.
Lead researcher Dr Adam Powell of Durham University said: “Our findings say a lot about ‘learning and yearning’. For our participants, the tenets of Spiritualism seem to make sense of both extraordinary childhood experiences as well as the frequent auditory phenomena they experience as practising mediums. But all of those experiences may result more from having certain tendencies or early abilities than from simply believing in the possibility of contacting the dead if one tries hard enough”.
Dr Peter Moseley, the co-author on the study at Northumbria University, added: “Spiritualists tend to report unusual auditory experiences which are positive, start early in life and which they are often then able to control. Understanding how these develop is important because it could help us understand more about distressing or non-controllable experiences of hearing voices too”.