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Haunted Houses Explained: Infrasound
anagama writes "For anyone who cringes whenever accosted by topics such as psychics, haunted houses, or any sort of new age drivel; for anyone who thinks James Randi is cool or has an active subscription to the Skeptical Inquirer - you're gonna love this story about infrasound. Here's a quote: "British scientists have shown in a controlled experiment that the extreme bass sound known as infrasound produces a range of bizarre effects in people including anxiety, extreme sorrow and chills -- supporting popular suggestions of a link between infrasound and strange sensations. ... Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute to a ghost -- our findings support these ideas.""
"Infrasound is also produced by storms, seasonal winds and weather patterns and some types of earthquakes. Animals such as elephants also use infrasound to communicate over long distances or as weapons to repel foes."
So now we just have to explain how the elephants got into the haunted houses. Or how it is we don't see ghosts every time there's a thundershower.
Seriously, trying to come up with a physical explaination of ghost stories that doesn't include the mind of the person is dumb. The range of reported phenomina is so wide as to be clearly "made up".
Furthemore, it strikes me, that just 22% of the people involved felt the differnce according to the article. This is not that much, meaning that majority of people don't seem to react to infrasound at all.
"Two beers or not two beers. That's the question." -- Shakesbeer
And how does that stack against the percentage experiencing paranormal phenomena?
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
why not stay the night in one of the most haunted houses in the world and see what they find?
Uh... because there aren't any hanuted houses?
Which is even more of a leap than the original story, considering that (A) "religious feelings" are not confined to churches, and (B) many (most?) churches don't have pipe organs.. and quite a few don't use instruments of any kind.
Or as I have often put it, science is a religion. It attempts to explain our world and justify our actions based on that explanation. It's not pure empirical observation and recording, if it ever was (remember that most of the first true scientists in the Western world were monks). It's adherents sure act like fundamentalists whenever someone deigns to question their closely held beliefs. "Prove to me X exists". I say prove it doesn't. The "death of science" and the "end of knowledge" and "impossibility" have been predicted far too many times in the past for me to believe that we have any real clue about what the world around us is really like. Studies are all fine and dandy, but they are not infallible. Stop treating them like they are.
I'm not saying this infrasound study is wrong. I have no proof either way. However, just because you can prove that an effect can be caused by a certain stimuli doesn't prove anything about specific instances of that effect other than the one you created. Claiming otherwise makes you just as foolish as the people who leap on the successive contradicting diet claims as "the truth".
That's how we got Blair to say the same drivel that Bush was spouting about Iraq's WMD...
Yes! That must be it! It would also explain how Clinton said the same things 5 years ago. It was obviously just the CIA or NSA experimenting with low-frequency sound waves and making a complete coverup, as opposed to a dictator actually having some weapons that he, the UN, the US, and every other country with any significant intelligence-gathering agency admitted were there... It's all so simple.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Again, whatever...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Let me play the logic cop here: you can't prove a negative. "Rob Malda does not exist". How do you prove that? "Rob Malda exists". That's doable.
I don't know where you're coming from with this talk about a "DC coupled amp" but bass speakers go all the way down to DC (0Hz). There's certainly no practical or theoretical problems reproducing sub-20Hz signals from a bass speaker. Even your tiny 6" mid-range drivers can (and do) reproduce 1Hz signals. You just can't hear it because so little air is being moved.
The actual problem is that the lower the frequency, the more air you need to move in order to hear it. The amount of air a driver can move is partially determined by the Vd figure (volume of air moved). This is simply Sd (surface area of cone) multiplied by Xmax (cone excursion). The 1Hz signal out of your 6" drivers is so quiet that you can't hear it, but it's there. Not enough air is being moved for your ears (which are heavily tuned to 2-4kHz) to detect.
So the trick is to make the excursion large, the surface area large, thereby getting a large value for Vd. Of course, you now need a lot of power to move that much air around. That's why subwoofers have 18" cones with 1/2" excursions driven by 400W amplifiers. Grunt. Grunt. Grunt.
Of course, super-low frequency generators don't bother with all this nonsense. They just use huge pistons behind a suitably long tube. Much easier to move the required amount of air.
But it's OK to be intellectually dishonest and scientifically unrigorous as long as you're disproving superstitious hokum. Research that would never fly in any other field gets accepted as truth.
Scientists - 1,000,001
I can't prove something doesn't exist, but you should be able to prove something does exist.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Attempting to find parsimonious answers to various questions is not a wholesale dismissal of anything. Consider that it may be you who are close-minded, unwilling to accept the possibility that what you want to believe may not be the truth.
This sort of closed-mindedness led to 'experts' being sure it was safe to turn cows into cannibals [..] The same cynical BS is responsible for hundreds of thousands of birth defects.
I'm encouraged by your skepticism toward what you call "materialism". Now, all you need to do is apply the same skepticism to what you call "new age thinking" and you're on the right path! Some further thoughts:
Honestly, since when did the subjects of ghosts and haunted houses suddenly become "new age drivel?" I grew up in a small Southern town where every family has at least two dozen ghost stories to tell with some going back two hundred years. While I realize that many "psychics" jump on the ghost bandwagon, please don't confuse their profession with the subjects they cover. Ghost stories are as similar to a new age concept as napalm is a food for deer.
No thanks. While it may be that these ultra-low sounds cause a range of sensations in human emotion does that really prove that any and all paranormal activity can be simply explained away? Aside from the obvious technical problems are the practical issues involved. Do we really need to explain away all of our dreams and fantasies until they're no more than mundane neural processes and heretofore unexplained natural phenomena? Trick or treating on Halloween "Oh, don't worry kids. That house isn't really haunted. That's just an ultra-low frequency sound causing you to have a negative emotional response. Nothing at all to be frightened of..." Either that or Old Mr. McCavity has really bad gas... (SBDs, is that smell real or the result of ultra-low frequency toots?)
Or as I have often put it, science is a religion.
Oh, come one. Science is nothing like religion. The only people who claim so are those who do not understand science. Saying science is a religion is equivalent to saying dog grooming is a religion. Science is a process - a method of filtering out truths from nonsense. There is no "belief" about this process, no deep-rooted truths about the universe inherent in testing a hypothesis.
Maybe science is too hard for you. Not hard in the sense that the rigors of science -- the mathematics, the formulas, the process of experimentation are difficult -- but maybe the cold reality of the pure, beautiful process scares you. What if that's all there is?
Now I've had close friends die from suicides and murder and pointless accidents and late at night I've conversed with Him or Her or Them or whatever could comfort me then, but this is completely different from science.
"...science is a religion."
I am so sick of hearing this. I am tired of being lectured on statistics and the weaknesses of the scientific method by people who evince no familiarity with either.
Science is a process. It is a method of attaching degrees of certainty to explanations of observed phenomena, of understanding our universe without bias or wishful thinking. The process has no ethical component, though the scientists who practice it do.
Unlike religion, science has no asserted dogma. If I so desire, I can follow every step in the chain from 2+2=4 through general relativity, and see, carefully footnoted, the areas where we think there needs to be further work, or we are not sure of our answers.
Unlike religion, science produces tangible results, like the penicillin that saved my life as a baby, or the computer I'm using to write this reply.
Unlike religionists, the only time scientists get stuffy when someone questions their data is when that someone has made no effort to understand the process, and is speaking from a position of obvious fallacy.
Unlike some other posters have asserted, you can prove a negative by contradiction (did it in high school), but insofar as science is concerned with proof, it doesn't deal in proofs in the geometrical sense, but of the statisical one--assigning percentages of certainty based on the goodness of the data. Scientific tests can be shown to have generality; that is, apply to larger groups than the test sample, otherwise, statistics would be a useless discipline.
So is the study valid? Can't tell from a Reuters article. Their methodology seems somewhat suspect. But no general interest journalist is going to report on control groups, selection methodology, or statistical analysis, and I'm not even close to interested enough to look up the actual paper.
But I've hied afield from my initial point, which is simply this: Science requires no faith...only hard work and an open mind. Maybe that's why religion is so popular?
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
a widely believed fact that quantum wavefunctions rule our lives
No, quantum mechanics rule the universe that we live in. We rule our lives. And I might add that how widely-believed something is has absolutely nothing to do with how factual it is.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I find it interesting that we look at the correspondence between infrasound and "spooky feelings," apply Occam's razor in the way we see fit, and conclude that this is a simple cause-and-effect. We overlook the lack of any explanation for /why/ humans might even be able to process this information. Personally, I would attribute any evolved correspondence to the dangers inherent from approaching thunderstorms and stampeding elephants, but who knows? I'd like to see some MRIs done that try to look at the neural circuitry and how it's behaving.
The ancient mystics would have used Occam's razor to conclude the simplest explanation: some ambiguous external force. In other words, in ancient culture, Occam's razor would really have meant we were invoking spirits, because we can use "spirits" as an extremely simple mystical explanation for everyday phenomena.
In our modern skepticism, the "obvious" conclusion is, interestingly, different from the "obvious" conclusion another culture might draw.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
I'm sorry, but you're confusing scientific method with human frailty. A common problem among those that understand neither. Scientists are human beings, after all, and don't always respond perfectly to the dictates of their calling. Even so, I respectfully submit that science has done far more for the human race than any amount of paranormal, supernatural, "new age", fundamentally irrational thinking ever will.
Contrary to popular belief, science is not in the business of proving anything. What science does do is create ever-more-refined models of how the world around us operates, and then tests those models against reality. And as those models more accurately reflect the nature of the Universe, we acquire the power to do more useful things.
As we evolved our intellect, our species took a dark detour of some tens of thousands of years. Finally, and only within the last few hundred years, did we create the mental tools to begin to really understand the Universe around us, and to unlock power on a significant scale. The value of those tools is incalculable. Make no mistake: it wasn't religion, ghosts, fairies, poltergeists or anything of that nature that created penicillin, computers, spacecraft and the Internet. Science, and those that applied knowledge gained from scientific research to the real world, are solely responsible. Much good and much evil has come from that application of knowledge, but on the whole Mankind is better off than ever before.
To those that would disagree with me I say: fine, go back to your caves, go back to your incurable diseases, go back to your comfortable ignorance. I will continue to enjoy my electric lights, my doctor, and my Internet. To decry scientific achievement and technological advancement on the one hand, while enjoying its fruits with the other, is hypocritical at best.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Science is nothing like religion.
On the face of it, this is true enough - but I think what the original author meant (and at least what I infer when I hear those words) is "Science is a religion to some people."
Science is a process - a method of filtering out truths from nonsense. There is no "belief" about this process, no deep-rooted truths about the universe inherent in testing a hypothesis.
Yes, but there are people (such as James Randi, for example) who treat it as such. And (as such) science is a religion to those people - even if they would deny it.
To non-scientists, science can be a religion, because they believe science can explain everything, and that anything not explained by science cannot exist. They believe, even though they do not understand. And that's what makes it a religion.
I am tired of being lectured on statistics and the weaknesses of the scientific method by people who evince no familiarity with either.
And I'm tired of being lectured on statistics and the scientific method, and how infallible it is, by people with no familiarity with either. (Note: this is not you, but other people.)
Science is a process. It is a method of attaching degrees of certainty to explanations of observed phenomena, of understanding our universe without bias or wishful thinking. The process has no ethical component
All true, but completely beside the point when dealing with people who don't understand that, and treat science as a mystical explanation of everything around us. Even when scientific method says "results cannot confirm or deny such phenomenon", they ignore the "deny" part, and harp on "confirm" - science cannot confirm it, so therefore it does not exist.
Unlike religion, science has no asserted dogma. If I so desire, I can follow every step in the chain from 2+2=4 through general relativity, and see, carefully footnoted, the areas where we think there needs to be further work, or we are not sure of our answers. (emphasis mine)
This is precisely my point - people who treat science as a religion believe that science provides all answers, all the time. There is no fallibility, and thus science itself becomes the asserted dogma.
Unlike religionists, the only time scientists get stuffy when someone questions their data is when that someone has made no effort to understand the process, and is speaking from a position of obvious fallacy.
This statement ignores people who don't question the data, and have made no effort to understand the process. These are the people to whom science is a religion - they are (as you say) speaking from a position of fallacy, but use reports of a scientific nature to assert their claims. People like this do exist (there are more of them than you know.)
So is the study valid? Can't tell from a Reuters article.
Yes, but there are people who will believe it - based solely on the article, and won't bother to check it, let alone understand it.
Science requires no faith...only hard work and an open mind.
Science doesn't need to require faith, but that doesn't exclude people from having faith in science.
In SOVIET RUSSIA, pr0n searches for you!
No matter where you live now, pr0n searches for you. Don't you have an email address? Maybe you've always had an intelligent server-side spam blocker so you don't understand...
Secondly, to refute your claim that this was not a double-blind study, I'll quote from one of my favorite movies: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Double-blind simply means that neither the subjects nor those who record the data know whether the group is receiving the treatment or a placebo. There is no reason to assume that this was not the case in this study.
What you actually seem to be criticizing is the fact that the same group of people is used as both the control group and the experimental group. There is nothing wrong with this for measuring a short-term effect such as those of infrasound. Likewise, there is nothing wrong with the fact that they were together in the same room. If infrasound did not have an effect, then discussion of the experimental samples would have the same effect as discussion of the control samples. Remember that the audience did not know which samples contained infrasound and which did not. I would imagine that there was also a proscription against talking during the study, but in either case, the results are still valid.
Finally, if you're going to criticize the methodology of a study, I would hope that you would at least read the actual study, rather than basing your criticism on a media sound-bite distillation.
The seemingly low percentage of people who noticed anything doesn't really bother me...it makes quite a lot of sense (at least to me) that people would have varying sensitivity to something like this. After all, not everyone has the same reaction to a supposedly "haunted" house.
What would be *really* interesting would be to take the 22% who said they felt something, and then rerun the same test in two groups; use one as a control (no infrasound), and the other as a group with infrasound. That would give a pretty good idea as to effectiveness, based on people who could possibly feel it in the first place. It could also give a good idea as to the number of false positives from the first test.
"22% reported more unusual experiences when infrasound was present in the music" is an ambiguous result. Depending on the exact makeup of the results, this could ALSO mean "78% reported LESS unusual experiences when infrasound was present," which would indicate that it has a mellowing effect.
Double-blind studies are necessary because the actions, subconscious or otherwise, of the experimenters can have an effect on the subjects, thus influencing results. I see no indications that this was a double-blind study.
You're right, I am relying on a media report on the study results. However, I still think having all the people in a room together is going to severely pollute the results. Assuming, of course, that any statistically valid results were actually obtained.