Spirits, Ghosts & The Strange New Neuroscience of Unseen Others | Ben Alderson-Day

Ben Alderson-Day is a cognitive scientist and author of the book Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other.In this podcast, we discuss the experience of sensing presences even in otherwise healthy people, why such experiences are more likely in extreme situations, how the brain constructs a sense of another being, how to think about the metaphysical status of spirits and ghost encounters, how this capacity shapes everyday reality, how AI might induce the feeling that someone is really there, and much more...Timestamps:00:00 The Strange Science of the Unseen Other 03:38 The Feeling of Presence of Beings06:15 The Third Man effect in extreme environments and survival situations11:46 The psychological function of presence capacity 18:46 Disrupting presence with the "presence robot"22:20 Are Spirits and Ghosts Real?27:04 Presence as an underlying component of everyday cognition31:28 Representing others and virtual social cognition35:59 The role of stereotypes and generalized models38:35 Anthropomorphism and presence in interactions with large language models42:28 Clinical implications and future research on AI and psychosisFind Ben:•Presence: The Strange Science of the Unseen Other •Reader Bank — https://readabank.org•Hearing the Voice — 10-year project at Durham University (funded by the Wellcome Trust)•Discovery Research PlatformFind Jack:• Youtube: https://youtu.be/LDAVqatEWTk• X: https://twitter.com/jack_roycroft• Substack: https://substack.com/@jackroycroftsherry?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page