Auditory Pareidolia

There’s a perfectly normal reason you may hear random sounds in white noise or any other continuous noise (spirit box). It’s called auditory pareidolia. When you’re born, your brain is basically a sheet of blank paper. It files every experience it has to later recall as needed. The brain’s desire to find patterns it can recognize from random information is why pareidolia occurs.

On a physiological level, your brain, which tries hard to find meaning in all the sensory input it receives, goes digging into its archives to match an erratic jumble of noise. It is trying to find meaning and familiarity to the complex noise, therefore possibly causing confusion.

It attempts to fit the closest pattern it already has in its memory to what you are hearing. What you end up hearing is your brain’s rationalization of the sound. You don’t hear what your ears hear, you hear what your brain perceives you to hear.

For the “ghost hunter” this is amplified because of the desire to catch that evidence. They go to a supposedly “haunted” location, so any voice over a spirit box or device, a spike on an EM meter or a hit on a REM Pod must be paranormal.

That is where the paranormal investigator will not fall into this trap, resist the temptation and stay objective. A quote I like to refer to of Jason Hawes from the TV show Ghost Hunters.

“If you go to a location to prove a haunting then any evidence you have is you’re going to say is proof of a haunting. If you go in trying to disprove a haunting and you’re willing to dissect every bit of information and you’re left with things, then you are left with things you can’t disprove.”

And with the latter at best inconclusive. One thing I live by is evidence needs to support evidence. But to be considered evidence it first needs to be thoroughly validated. Paranormal means not being able to explain with scientific means and normal experiences. You need to “INVESTIGATE” and exhaust the possible cause whether it’s man-made or natural to be considered evidence.

EVPs, spirit box and other ITC sessions are the most misinterpreted as being evidence. A good practice is that more than one team member needs to hear the exact same thing with no contamination or influence from someone else. Otherwise blurting out what you hear during a session or stating what you hear before someone reviews it will taint their conclusion. Like seeing a dog in a cloud then showing someone where the tail, ears and nose are until their brain “recognizes the pattern”.