FT270


There’s a sudden drop in temper­ature. The room feels icy cold. You feel an unearthly, malign presence. You can just see it out of the corner of your eye – at least you think you can. Congratulations! You’ve just seen your first ghost. Or have you just had your first temporal lobe seizure?

A number of sceptics, scientists and parapsychologists think that many strange experiences can be explained as the result of disturbances in the brain’s temporal lobe. Thanks to our increased understanding of the workings of the human brain, we may now have a handy physiological explanation for a wide range of anomalous experiences: disturbances in witnesses’ temporal lobes (such as an epileptic seizure) could be responsible for their experiencing a whole range of uncanny symptoms.