today are becoming paranormal phenomena, in part, by everything that surrounds the phenomenon of Bélmez. I've decided to take advantage of this now, to make a few comments on a phenomenon that always caught my attention, the EVP. This exercise also helps me to put some order in my cluttered brain.
In this strange "demonstration" (the EVP, of course) I have always aroused curiosity 2 innocent details, but in my opinion are full of venom, as they reflect the enormous burden of subjectivity that surrounds the phenomenon: the first one , is that I always was curious what these so-called "voices" to be understood better when I communicated beforehand what was to be heard, the second of the facts is that not everyone who hears a sicofonía to agree on what it says, or even that not everyone can hear.
These two features are much more intriguing to me that the phenomenon itself, and in my opinion, put on the trail of what actually is. Therefore, they will be the cornerstone on which I will build this text. Ignoring
fraudulent cases, which are unfortunately many cases and "investigations" that EVP is not in bad faith, in my view suffer from a double fault: of form and substance. That is, they fail both in method and in concepts.
Then I'll explain that I intend to say with this by first highlighted the problems of method, then go on to ramble on about the lack of conceptual basis.
DISCOURSE ON THE METHOD
The method, or at least one of the methods that better provides for capturing EVP, basically consists in making use of a radio, which are disabled tuning systems for "track" in a high bandwidth, so use white noise as a support for obtaining the voices.
perhaps worth making a stop on the way, and recall some concepts that are interesting.
Noise is the result of overlapping a set of vibrations which are inconsistent with each other, and are concurrent with a useful signal. Has an amplitude and wavelength of irregular but constant frequency. The noises have different causes, and some may be external (fall or fluctuations in voltage, for example), while others may be internal, caused by the device itself (the thermal agitation of electrons, the noise due to resistance, ... .) This applied to sound, meaning that the noise is a superposition of sound vibrations are not harmonic with each other. White noise is a noise characterized by a spectrum in which all frequencies have the same energy density. Comes be something like a white light similar to the audible spectrum (as if made up of all the sounds in the audible band, all with the same "amount" of energy).
Well, this is the support that is used to capture EVP, these fluctuations represent white noise. To register, used a tape recorder whose microphone is placed near the radio speaker.
Here is a first failure of experimental sepsis: a microphone is used, which is a device designed to amplify sounds in a certain frequency. That is, a microphone can capture sounds that we hear and we did not go unnoticed.
Another drawback related to the above, is that when you leave the recorder running without any insulation, you can record sounds that need not necessarily correspond to the noise of the radio, which are allegedly in the EVP evidence. These two faults
method, apparently, some "psychics" more advanced, the correct in some cases, directly connecting the recorder to the radio, so only keep record of noise emitted by the radio, and in other cases, isolated external sound equipment through specially designed boxes.
But still, can not help that radio remains under the influence of waves Hertz, which can be captured by the radio giving the impression that we have captured an anomaly.
If the aim is a rigorous and methodical, the computer should be placed inside a Faraday cage (a hollow conductor, so that its interior is "protected" from the influence of any electric field external).
Moreover, the very design of experiences is incorrect. Not employ any control sample, when studying the EVP does not take any precautions to avoid prejudice, etc ... In science, when doing a study on something that may have preconceived ideas, are designed what is called blind studies, with samples (sample understood the purpose of study) to study, similar samples are introduced but we already know (what are called control samples) and labeled each with a key, so that the author of the study did not know if you are studying a sample of control, or conversely, the study sample. Thus, minimizing the influence of possible bias. This is how we proceed in the pharmaceutical industry to test the efficacy of new drugs in development, was designed to study the dating of the Shroud, etc ...
This is a necessary step if you are looking for objectivity, and however, not carried out when studying EVP.
also draws attention to how to study. Is a person in charge of hearing the recordings, and try to find something "abnormal." And this is subjective in the highest degree. To be precise, which would have to study the spectrum of sound recording, looking for any abnormalities, not relying on the ear of "researcher."
On the other hand, if what is done is that when you find something "abnormal" is "cleaned" of noise to be heard better, and so in successive steps until we have a clean sound, we'll be getting an artificial sound, previously did not exist. We will "make up" a fluctuation in the noise to find what you wanted to find from the beginning. With a kind of "natural selection noise," we will have created a sound.
Another part would be how they report the results of a "study" on EVP. As the sad and ludicrous manner in which this would be for for a long paragraph, I've missed.
far I have explained why I believe that EVP research is wrong in the method. It might be objected, however, that it may simply be a problem of poor experimental design, but the phenomenon itself is real.
Well, that's what we discuss next. In the following paragraphs I will try to explain why I think the study of EVP suffers from an underlying problem, a failure of concepts.
TREE TO THE RADIO
time ago, ElPez (ciberseudónimo Javier Armentia) published an excellent article on his blog "By mouth dies the fish" commented where an event called "pareidolia ". The pareidolia implies that stimuli are perceived poorly organized, very clear, leading to an illusion. This pairedolia is what allows us, for example, recognize shapes in the clouds or the mountains.
And given the fact that our senses, and in particular, our eyes are not perfect.
In psychology of perception has long been known that our brain does not like the images completely chaotic or disorganized. Thus stimuli that are near, the brain tends to group them as a group perceived as a continuing stimulus to have a certain similarity. This will generate visual illusions, perceptions created by our brain.
These illusions are engendered in both the physical part of our sensory devices, as in the abstract. It is a problem both hardware (I referring to the sense organs: eyes, eardrums ...) and software (the brain),
A good example of illusion created by the very nature of the eye is this: let's get a picture of a face, and let's move quickly from left to right, giving the impression of drawing the eyes are moving. This illusion occurs because the retina retains the visual impression of the images for a short space of time.
Examples of optical illusions created by the brain, is as follows. Read the following sentence
up:
THE BOOK OF THE JUNGLE
Probably many people have said "The Jungle Book" omitting the second "the."
In a recent issue of the journal "Research and Science" published an interesting paper appeared on geometrical illusions ("Geometric Illusions" by Jacques Ninio). That article described many of geometric illusions, and the author commented that after the visual perception, hide fine principles of brain processes of perception, and explain these optical illusions.
Well, the same with the vision, applies to other senses. Our bodies
the senses have filters that allow us to select the information that comes to the brain while the brain has its own filters to "modify" the information so that it is comprehensible to us. This leads to a better understanding of what surrounds us, but the price we pay is that occasionally have to experience sensory illusions and paradoxes. In his book
Amalur, the eclectic Juan Luis Arsuaga and Ignacio Martinez, commenting on a study by the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, which stated that the first 3 things that our brain tries to determine the observing a new face are age, gender and ethnicity. That is, when our brains see a new face trying to figure out you see. This also reminds me of a recent study (which I can not remember where I read it) saying that after 5 minutes, I think it was, to see for 1 st time to a person of the opposite sex, our brains already know what kind of relationship we establish with it.
words, our sensory instruments are bias and have filters, and establish hierarchies in information processing.
And that man is an animal, and we have not enough time detached from the influence of nature, as we have canceled all our evolutionary history. STILL
our sense organs are instruments necessary for our survival, to help us to process information from abroad, have been under the influence of natural selection.
The human being is a primate, and primates are primarily social animals, social animals. Man is a social animal ("a single human being is a human being"), and therefore our whole body will be molded to the development under this social nature.
order to develop an active life in a group, the primates have developed strong systems of communication between individuals within a group. Communication among primates is mainly based two types of stimuli: verbal communications (voice), and gestures of the face (much of the communication among primates is based on the interpretation of facial gestures).
To the extent that it depended on the survival, evolution will have made our eyes and our ears have been developed for better refinement in the uptake of these stimuli.
primate's life takes place in the jungle, the jungle is full of noises, bird songs, noises from the trees to move ... To overcome this problem, the evolution of primates has provided a sense of ear, that among all the background noise and annoying, is "trained" to "crawl" the sounds made by their peers. The ear is like an antenna, which captures all the signals that arrive, but the filters, keeping only what interests you: who are the messages sent by a peer group. As we heard him come all the sounds that fall in its frequency band, but the brain as a filter, it ignores the information that is not interested in (the sound of wind, a bird singing in the branches that are stepping, ...) and gets the information that really matters (a fellow carado announcing a fruit tree, is warning that a predator, ...).
Roughly speaking, our brain has very clear ideas from the start: he seeks voices, nothing else will matter.
It's like the lions, that among all the songs of the herd, the mother is able to recognize who belongs to her offspring and calculate distances and go to where the puppy.
With humans the same thing happens. The vowels i, Uya are universal voice, that are present in all languages. They are the sounds that best distinguishes the human being, and the facility to listen is what allows us to be able to hold conversations in environments full of noise, or that we can know that two people talking in another language are talking, even when do not know that language.
With the theme of the hearing goes something like this: our brains have been refined in the search for gestures on the faces, and our babies are born predisposed to recognize faces.
After all this, probably someone already has made a wonder, and rightly so, what does all this with the EVP?
I hope you know me understand the answer.
When we record EVP, there are two conditions: firstly, we use an incoherent noise as a carrier, on the other, we prone to hearing voices.
When we spend some time listening to the noise, our brains, as we have seen not like disorganized stimuli, try to find something they're familiar. We have seen above that our brains are designed to discriminate the noise, looking for human voices, so try to find some fluctuation in the noise and assimilate with one voice. If we add a touch of suggestion, which we all, if we are going in advance predisposed to find a voice, all the "alarm systems" of our brain will "alert" searching for that, a voice.
If once you hear something that looks like a voice, to hear it again, this time we will hear better, but for pure preconditioning. This is repeated until finally we "cheat" and we have just heard very clearly a voice that is not present. If then we present that to someone else, but we tell you beforehand what needs to hear, after hearing it a few times, that person will not cost you hear the EVP.
to all this, we add also a process of cleaning the recording to remove noise and enhance the voice, in the end we will have created an EVP that there was or was not more than one oscillation in the noise.
This I explained to the EVP, also applies to cases of a virgin faces in everyday objects, or water stains with suspected facial shape that have announced few days ago in Bélmez.
Something that I find very striking is that the EVP phenomenon is readily available (anyone who proposes it, it seems, can get them), and that always capture EVP in the same language spoken by " research "that record. Why never capture EVP of dogs barking or birds, or EVP of prehistoric men?
Ultimately, I think after the EVP does not hide anything real, or at least, no reality beyond playing tricks on us sometimes our brain.
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