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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.""
A man willing to test his own beliefs! My goodness, what more do we want?!!?!
...tizzyd
Poor research methodologies produce ambiguous results: Film at 11
First, the ambiguous results: 22% reported feeling odd when the infrasound was playing. Howabout when it wasn't playing? 78% also didn't notice ANYTHING. This doesn't really demonstrate anything. Can anyone reliably determine, in a double-blind study, when the infrasound is playing? That would be interesting.
Now, the poor research methodologies: This wasn't a double-blind study. Heck, they crammed all these people TOGETHER in a concert hall. Can you IMAGINE all the "Hey, do you feel funny? I feel funny!" discussion polluting the results? If this had been a one-at-a-time, double-blind study then I suppose the results might actually be meaningfull.
Also, strange sensations like Deja Vu or Premonition I don't think can be explained through this study.
Deja Vu can be experienced by any person whose brain is properly stimulated. I worked as a Sleep Disorders Technician/EEG Technician at a hospital to finance my college education. Part of the on-the-job training was viewing videos and suggested reading by physicians and department managers. I recall seeing one video where a patient undergoing a medical study (from the 1960s) had a portion of the skull removed and the surface of the brain exposed. Doctors placed an array of electrodes on the cerebral cortex and stimulated the brain with a few microvolts of electricity. The patient, being conscious of course, said he had feelings of deja vu. On a related note, even the "tunnel experience" many people claim to see who have had near death experiences can also be stimulated without having the *real* near death experience.
Citing a strange experience, I very reluctantly went to a reknowned psychic with a close friend who said was known for helping police solve murder crimes. Being a scientist, I rejected the session as utter hogwash, but for the life of me, I cannot explain how most of everything the psychic woman told me has come true. Even the authors of the "The Mind's I", Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett have noted scientific studies that suggest some psychic phenomena cannot be explained by statistical chance alone. Perhaps these psychics are somehow able to extrapolate what clients might do in the future based on some electromagnetic signature or pattern in the brain. The reason I mention this is that part of my training as an EEG technician involved doing brain death determination studies. The test is performed using an Electroencephalographic recording instrument with the sensitivity set to the most sensitive setting. During that training, my mentor shouted in the room "nobody move", and I said "like this [waving my left arm]". My mentor then made a note in the patient log "technician waving arm" because my waving arm with an electromagnetic field was recorded in the dead patient's drain death determination EEG test. The EEG waves showing no brainwave activity from the patient, slowly swayed (very low frequency) in a manner associated with the movement of my arm. Perhaps these psychics are able to pick up on this electromagnetic field and obtain useful data from it. I know this is pure speculation without evidence, but when confronted with these phenomena, one can only guess as to a possible explaination based on current scientific principles.
Anyone who has ever witnessed a show by a heavy dub sound system (e.g. Jah Shaka) can tell you about the effects long and heavy bass signals can have on a person. Anything from dizzieness, nausea
and heavy headaches comes along. No wonder people see ghosts under the influence of ultrasound
fx! kicking and screaming
Remember all those blue, brown, beige boxes that used to float around the net? When I was a kid myself and a friend teamed up to build the pandora's box we found on the net. It was a hacker tool to annoy people. Not that we needed much help though.
IIRC it consisted of a variable capacitator, 555 timer, and a directional speaker. What you would do was tune the device until it was just the tiniest bit past the perceptible human sound range. Then you would walk around and point it at people and see how stressed you could make them. It worked pretty good. People would get irritated very easily without knowing precisely why. Those who were very susceptible would start to sweat. It clearly induced stress.
Seems like it might be useful for haunted houses too...
A previous student had found a old organ that a church was throwing out. He had collected the assorted bits, repaired it, and put it in the back of the RPI playhouse. I had taken over maintenance of the organ. The job came with the right to tell others that you had the largest organ on campus.
As a side note, a succession of VERY talented people treated the RPI playhouse as their own personal stereo system. What appeared onstage may not have been great, but we could pump fabulous sound into that room.
One day we were running some new lines in order be able to patch the organ into our mixing board. We decided to try a test to see how hard we could drive the system. Our subwoofers were a pair of EV 20 inch speakers. Each was driven from its own Crown DC300 amplifier, located next to the speaker for minimum cable losses. The DC300s were crossed over so that both channels drove the same speaker, which has the effect of quadrupling the power output.
I played the lowest note on the foot peddles. It was around 20 Hz. We brought the power up to max and it was pretty impressive. Then I added in the second lowest note. That set up an approx. 2.5 Hz beat frequency. The curtains were up, exposing the cinder block wall behind the stage. Due to the insistance of some architects, the house was plaster, with no sound dampening. The beat frequency corresponded exactly with the length of the space, plaster wall at back of house to the cinder block wall behind the stage. At this point the house was quite uncomfortable.
We stopped the experiment, rigged the organ so that the two lowest notes would play continuously, then retired to the glass enclosed sound booth. We added an extra pre-amplifier to boost the signal a little more. Then we drove the systam as hard as we could. The technical director at the playhouse was in a classroom half a mile away. He later reported that he felt the vibration and said to himself, "What are those guys up to now." After running this for about 5 minutes we called the geology department. The seismograph did indeed capture our experiment from several miles away.
Only dead fish swim downstream......
The whole "religious experience" thing is kind of interesting. There is a particular system in the brain responsible for it that can be seen with fMRI. It normally responds to a very personal set of stimuli, if anything. On the other hand, there are things that tend to trigger it, including frontal lobe epilepsy and LSD. It wouldn't be too surprising if low frequency sound did, as well.
Of course, not all religious experiences are due to any of the automatic factors, but they could help significantly with getting a whole group of people to have religious feelings together. (There has, in fact, been a study of this using LSD, and it worked well). There's actually a lot of fascinating research on the subject, with very interesting philosophical implications.
Being a scientist, I rejected the session as utter hogwash, but for the life of me, I cannot explain how most of everything the psychic woman told me has come true
Perhaps. But the truth is that you were made aware of her predictions as they were made, and therefore cannot draw any conclusions as to the validity of said predictions. A somewhat more reasonable (but hardly scientifically or statistically valid) test would be if she had taken her "reading" of you and written the predictions down on paper for you to read later, after they had come true (or didn't.) But most poeple won't pay for that: they want to know right now whether they are going to be successful, die of a blood clot, or marry the man/woman of their dreams.
And I will bet dollars to doughnuts that if you had made a recording of the event, and played it back later, you would have found that she was substantially sharper than you thought, and reeled you in like a fish. There may be true psychics out there (unlikely though that may be) but most of them are just very, very good at social engineering. The fact that you walked away believing that she had made valid predictions about you, or even if she was ultimately proven correct, says absolutely nothing about whether some paranormal or heretofore undiscovered neurological activity was involved. Unfortunately, none of the serious research that I've been able to find on the subject (and there appears to have been some) has ever shown that these powers exist. Proponents will say, of course, that such powers simply do not work in a laboratory setting. The simple way around that would be to interview and track several thousand customers of/visitors to so-called psychics and see whether any patterns appear in the recorded statistics. Recording the actual reading would be a good idea as well, so that any verbal con-artistry can be weeded out of the numbers, but I doubt that many psychics would submit to that.
Furthermore, I would want to see a name-brand university behind such a study, with some big name study-designers and statisticians behind it, before I would accept the results as having any validity. I would want some people running the show who have something to lose by performing bad science. There have been way too many "fringe science" studies done with the express purpose of proving the existence of paranormal phenomena (which is about as unscientific as one can get), rather than trying to find out what, if anything, is actually going on..
Amazing how few people grasp the tremendous utility and value of the scientific method, or even what it actually is, rather than perceiving it as a fly in the ointment of their personal belief systems. Oh well. No accounting for taste.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
How far below human hearing range are these infrasound notes anyway?
Plenty of psychos build pipe organs whose fundamental pitch are too low to be heard.
Pipe organ pitches are notated in terms of the length of an open flue pipe that it would take to create a pitch. An 8' long pipe plays a "C", two octaves below middle C. A 16' pipe sounds three octaves below middle C. A 32' pipe sounds four octaves below. The note E on a 32' rank is about 21 Hz. So C, Db, D, Eb are all below what you can hear.
Many large organs come with these 32' pitches. Why? It adds an incredible dimension of power to the sound when you play the full organ. You feel the music, not just hear it. It adds to the visceral experience of hearing the music. The fact that you can't hear it actually is part of the point!
Also, to drastically over simplify, there are two kinds of pipes. Flue and Reed. Flue pipes play like a flute-- just the vibration of the air creates the pitch. Reed pipes use the beating of a reed to produce the sound. If you ever heard a 32' reed like a Bombarde play, it definitely makes an audible sound. All the overtones of the reed slowly banging away. Then you have that fundamental 32' pitch shaking the floor. Really neat stuff, actually.
A very small number of instruments in the world have a 64' pitch. The Washington National Cathedral has one. The Atlantic City Convention Hall has another. http://www.acchos.org/ for more info on that one.
--Thad
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Much like a newborn puppy...