Hearing Ghost Voices Relies on Pseudoscience and Fallibility of Human Perception

A perceptual explanation of EVP


It can’t just be chance!
Jeff Noble, CC BY

We concluded that EVP are an auditory example of pareidolia – the tendency to perceive human characteristics in meaningless perceptual patterns. There are many visual examples of pareidolia – things like seeing human faces in everyday objects (such as Jesus in a piece of toast).

Research from cognitive psychology has shown that paranormal believers may be especially prone to misperceiving chance events. A face-like configuration in a slice of toast seems meaningful. People ask, “What are the chances?” But if you add up all of the slices of toast you see over the days and weeks and months of a lifetime, it becomes inevitable that you will encounter some of these human-like configurations in toast due to chance.

Similarly, paranormal investigators record a practically limitless amount of audio and use all manner of sound-processing techniques including filtering the sounds to remove particular frequencies and boosting the volume. Inevitably they’re able to find samples of audio that sound somewhat like a voice.

Assuming some of these voice-like sounds can’t be attributed to shoddy data collection practices, their actual sources likely run the spectrum from ambient environmental noises to electrical interference to audio processing artifacts. If the listener is intently expecting to hear a person, virtually any sound can meet that expectation. One writer aptly suggested that EVP are like an auditory inkblot test: a blank slate upon which the listener can project any interpretation. The tendency for EVP investigators to hear a voice – a meaningful sound with agency and intention – is likely amplified by the suggestion of a paranormal context.

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