Analysis: What drives individuals to have non-ordinary experiences remains an open question and an active area of research
Have you ever felt you are not alone in a room, or that something or someone is controlling your body? Or have you ever felt that you have already been in a place that you never have been in? Or have you even experienced joy at a level far beyond what you'd commonly experience?
Recently, scientists have started to investigate experiences such as these, which they have broadly labelled non-ordinary experiences. Up to now, these experiences were studied by ethnographers or anthropologists interested in cultures foreign to them. However, recent psychological research has focused on understanding these experiences across cultures to try and identify those experiences which are universal in nature.
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From RTÉ Brainstorm, the superstitions and mysteries around Ireland's 'fairy forts'
Some of the foundational figures of psychology in the English-speaking world, such as William James, had a deep interest in this area. In his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, James recorded and analysed accounts which he had collected over the years in which individuals recounted their extraordinary experiences.
"There was not a mere consciousness of something there", one individual recounted, "but fused in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of something ineffably good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of some poem, or scene, or blossom, or music, but the sure knowledge of the close presence of a mighty person, and after it went, the memory persisted as the one perception of reality. Everything else might be a dream, but not that."
This account, which could easily be taken from a modern-day account, was sent to James by an "intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know", probably sometime in the 1890s. Throughout his work James came to a major insight that, for most people, their beliefs are crucially tied to these vivid experiences reaffirming their beliefs, and these beliefs, in turn, provide a framework through which people can make sense of these experiences.
Feeling a presence, being controlled by an unseen force, or feeling that an object is alive are all surprisingly common in our sample, ranging from 15 to 25%
How common are these kinds of experiences?
While research is still ongoing trying to document non-ordinary experiences in a general population, we have recently looked into the frequency of these experiences in a young adult sample in New Zealand.
The most common experiences reported were déjà vu, lucid dreams and moments of outstanding absorption – all have been experienced by more than half of our sample. In contrast, on the really rare end, around 10% of respondents have seen a light or aura surrounding a person, intense devotion to a person or remember a past life.
The kind of experiences many of us would consider unusual - such as feeling a presence, being controlled by an unseen force, or feeling that an object is alive - are all surprisingly common in our sample, ranging from 15 to 25%. In samples from the US and India, déjà vu and lucid dreaming were among the most common experiences, but outstanding absorption is only in place number 12 in India.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's History Show, historian Sean Hogan on the 'supernatural manifestations, accompanied by cures' that attracted thousands of pilgrims to the Tipperary town in 1920
Is there an explanation for these experiences?
What might this mean? First of all, it implies that many non-ordinary experiences are common across cultures and might reflect underlying commonalities in people that have these experiences across contexts.
What drives individuals to have non-ordinary experiences remains an open question and an active area of research. An initial assumption might be that these experiences are the result of hallucinogens, but we and other researchers have found that only a minority of participants report being influenced by drugs during their experience.
Given the frequency of these kinds of experiences within the human population it is also unlikely that these experiences are solely the expression of psychopathologies. More likely, we believe, they reflect individual differences in personality and cognitive processing strategies. This highlights the importance of shared cultural meaning systems used by individuals to make sense of their non-ordinary experiences.
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From RTÉ Archives, Jim Fahy reports for Newsround in 1977 on reports of UFO sightings around Ireland
Imagine, for example, you see an odd light in the sky. What do you think you saw? A light? A will-o'-the-wisp? A UFO? Even within a particular culture we see evidence that these explanations are competing with each other for the attention of the public.
For example, the number of UFO sightings has been falling steadily since 2016, but there is no indication that the underlying phenomena that elicit UFO reports and balls of light have become less common. Instead, it can be expected that non-ordinary experiences will be interpreted differently as cultural concepts such as UFOs cycle in and out of the cultural consciousness as part of media and public folklore.
UFOs and Ireland
Ireland has a long history of storytelling and folklore that explicitly incorporate elements of non-ordinary experiences, but little is known about the frequency of such experiences in the Irish population.
We found a surprisingly low number of personal experiences in Ireland when looking at older studies that sampled some related experiences in the population. For example, 34% of Europeans sampled in a 1984 study reported experiences of telepathy only 19% of Irish respondents did.
Similarly, 30% of Europeans report contact with the dead while only 16% of Irish respondents did. While these numbers are interesting from a historical perspective, a lot has changed socially, economically and spiritually in Ireland since the 1980s. So how common are non-ordinary experiences in Ireland today, and how do people make sense of them? We hope to be able to address this in future research and contribute an Irish perspective to this emerging global discourse.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
