Ghostly Presences: Scientists Shed Light on the Unseen Forces Shaping Our Social Reality

Invisible presences manipulate the brain’s social counting mechanisms.
If you had to estimate the number of people in a room, without counting them one-by-one, by nature you would overcount them. That’s because, simply put from a Darwinian perspective of how we have evolved, it’s better to overcount potentially harmful agents and predators than to underestimate them.

This overcounting social behaviour is shown to be true in humans as well as animals. It’s certainly better to detect too many tigers (even if absent) during a jungle excursion than to miss a hungry one!

Now, EPFL neuroscientists show that if you experience hallucinations, especially when related to an illness like Parkinson’s disease, then you will overestimate the number of people in a room to a greater degree. They also show that if you have hallucinations but are asked to estimate the number of boxes in a room, which are inanimate control objects, then no extra over-estimation occurs, shedding light on the social nature of this overcounting. The results are published in Nature Communications.