How do ghosts work?

There’s a funny thing about ghost stories. We kind of take it for granted that a house is haunted or the spirit of the wronged party comes back to avenge their death as a given because of a few millennia of cultural beliefs in metaphysics and religion.

That is, we’re kind of raised with an implicit certainty that the body and brain are just matter and that the ‘I’ you can feel is the ghost in the machine.

But what if the mechanists are right and there’s no soul or other etheral part of you, that everything you think, want and fear is actually an emergent property in the squishy wet meat? If they’re right, there must still be an explanation for ghosts and hauntings that doesn’t involve disembodied souls. To say ‘it’s Grandma’s spirit trying to tell me where the real will is hidden’, or ‘it’s a demon from another dimension’ means nothing to a physicist or a biologist. It must be – as everything in nature is – the manifestation of forces on the environment that human senses (and machinery) can perceive. But why these manifestations of energy? Why do they behave in this way? What – to apply inappropriately human motivations on natural forces – do they want?

I wanted Falling to be a ghost story with a difference. I didn’t want psychics or spirit mediums helping the souls of the people who’ve died pass over. The above are the questions the characters – embodied in the parapsychologist Tim Hacker – want answered.

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Here’s the thing about nature. Drill down as deep as we can measure or hypothesise with all the scientific enquiry we can apply and it’s all just waves and particles moving in a medium according to four fundamental forces – the weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity and electromagnetism.

Everything – everything – is an electromagnetic field. You are, I am, trains and cars are, TV and satellite signals are. All matter and motion takes place on the substrate of an electromagnetic field.

All discussion of disembodied soul and personality and our most cherished beliefs about what makes us who we are aside, everything that goes on in our brains is part of that vast electromagnetic field known as The Universe.

Every thought, dream, fear, idea, your subconscious, your memories and experience, the constant narrative stream of your life is a series of electrical sparks in your brain as neurons connect and disconnect across synapses using tiny electrical signals.

It’s an awful thought to many people (including me), but your entire life and everything you’ll ever know, forget or love can be boiled down to a constant miniature lightning storm going on in a kilogram-and-a-half sac of pulpy flesh in your head.

Know what else is comprised entirely of electromagnetic impulses in a given field? Everything in the universe we can’t account for – including ghosts, spirits and the supernatural.

If they manifest as apparitions moving through walls, that’s visible light, which is an emission of energy along the electromagnetic spectrum. If they turn lights on or off, that’s an effect on electrical currents, which is child’s play for electromagnetic impulses.

If they appear to you as Grandma telling you to go and look in the locked chest in the attic for the real copy of her will, that’s not only a visual manifestation of electromagnetism, it’s something particular to you. Where do the memories and knowledge of your long dead grandmother live? In your head, among the tiny electrical sparks in your brain.

From there it wasn’t too big a leap for Falling to make to imagine that the electromagnetism of a haunting or ghostly presence can interact across the electromagnetic medium with the electrical impulses in our brains, make us see ghosts and monsters and more importantly, make us see ghosts and monsters that mean something to us.

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Why would they do that? Simple – doesn’t some stupid movie monster you saw as a kid still frighten you if you’re in the right frame of mind, like the dumb werewolf costume from a movie as remembered by Donald, the university metallurgist?

Even if we’re not frightened anymore as such, we can still remember how much it used to scare us. We remember how aspects of it (the monster’s shaggy pelt, its Cro-Magnon lope as it chases a screaming victim through the dark streets, the sound of its angry growl) are ingrained in our memories of it, the specifics outsized after remembering it as many times as we have and far more frightening than the visuals that scared us so badly to begin with.

The secret I made up is found in the amygdala, one of the brain regions they say synthesises the fight or flight response. We’ve all seen those textbook cross sections of brains with dotted lines, section A devoted to sensory information, section B to emotion, etc. Even with our current understanding of neurology and cognition those diagrams are woefully inadequate – no brain region is as functionally cut and dried as we think, and they’re certainly not so segmented as those high school biology textbook diagrams have led you to believe.

So I’m the first to admit it’s not nearly as simple as saying the amygdala is the ‘fear’ centre of the brain, but it’s certainly a handy and very large cheat I recruited to make sense in the story.

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Something else most of us don’t realise about the brain is how perfectly insulated it is. If a thunderstorm prompts a wave of static over an old transistor radio or that rhythmic, repetitive two-beat buzzing sound rings out from PC speakers when there’s an old mobile phone nearby, why doesn’t electromagnetism interfere with the electrical signals in your brain?

If you stand too close to a magnet revolving around a coil in a power plant, why don’t you suddenly think of a green car when you try to conjure up an image of your mother?

We have technology that does an okay job of watching brain activity like fMRI and EEG machines, but individual electric sparks across synapses are far too small to detect – there are billions of them every split second that are too low powered and take place in too small an area.

There’s not much that can impact those electrical signals except in very overarching and crude ways. One is the historical practice of electroconvulsive therapy (which is like using a wrecking ball to tap a thumbtack into a corkboard), but a recent technique with a bit more finesse is called ‘transcranial magnetic stimulation’ – look that up and prepare to be horrified at the implication for your immutable sense of self.

So I needed to come up with a way of the electromagnetism out in the world interacting with and even changing the electromagnetic fields in our brains – which manifests as quite literal changes in our conscious experience.

The theory, you see, is that there was a huge and very strong field surrounding the nearby electromagnetic medium (buildings, cars, even the very air – which is after all part of the electromagnetic substrate because it’s made of the same protons and electrons as everything else) after the collapse of the first bridge.

It came from brains. As so many people died or watched on in terror as others died, it prompted a giant spike in bioelectrical activity in countless brains as they all responded to such fear and threat, amygdalae across square miles of space firing furiously and collectively pumping out huge amounts of energy that would remain there, locked into the very fabric of spacetime.

That’s one part of the theory I can’t take credit for. As long ago as 1925, British physicist and spiritualist Oliver Lodge wrote in his book Man and the Universe that;

‘Occasionally, a person appears to be able to respond to stimuli embedded … among psycho-physical surroundings in a manner at present ill-understood and almost incredible;- as if strong emotions could be unconsciously recorded in matter, so that the deposit shall thereafter affect a sufficiently sensitive organism and cause similar emotions to reproduce the
mselves in his sub-consciousness, in a matter analogous to the customary conscious interpretation of photograph or phonographic records.

‘Take, for example, a haunted house … wherein some one room is the scene of a ghostly representation of some long past tragedy. On a psychometric hypothesis the original tragedy has been literally photographed on its material surroundings, nay, even on the ether itself, by reason of the intensity of the emotion of those who enacted it and thenceforth in certain persons an hallucinatory effect is experienced corresponding to such an impression.’

Hack away at the archaic language and Lodge is suggesting that past events experienced under emotional duress are somehow ‘recorded’ upon the surrounding matter where they happened. Scientists had come up with the bare bones of electromagnetic theory as far back as the 1870s, but with Lodge’s use of the outdated term ‘ether’ it seems they didn’t understand the full extent of its presence in nature even 50 years later.

As a scientific theory – and however flawed – it rests upon some pretty exciting bedrock. Extrapolate out from Lodge’s idea and in Falling the site of the old Sydney Harbour Bridge is just such a haunted room. The long-past tragedy is the death of hundreds of people and the terror of the millions who watched, and the ether is the electromagnetosphere – a field which comprises the surrounding city, the water, the air – even us.

Of course, the residents of Sydney for decades afterward went about their daily lives with perfectly insulated synaptic activity, so they would have had no idea of the electromagnetic thunderstorm raging over their heads and beneath their feet, manifestations of all that energy waiting to turn from potential to kinetic (active).

Something had to come along to unleash it…