April 17, 2014 • 48 mins
Do strange shadow people haunt the corners of our existence, or is there a scientific answer within the human brain? Join Robert and guests Ben and Matt of Stuff They Don't Want You To Know as they discuss the answers.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. Julie Douglass, my co host,
is on a well deserved vacation this week. So I thought, Hey,
I wanted to invite the guys from Stuff They Don't
(00:23):
Want You To Know over and we'll talk about some
shadow people. So, hey, guys, how's it going. Hey, it's
going really well. This is Matt and I'm Ben. Uh.
We are thrilled to be here, so thank you for
having us. This is uh one of the shows that
I listened to. Oh, longtime fans, first time co host, Well,
thank you. Well, you know this is uh, this is
(00:44):
weird for me because Julie's had guests on here when
I'm I've been out that this is the first time
that I've been here without Julie, so uh, you know,
she's she's kind of the rock of of the show,
you know, I mean, she's she's she's holding it together
and now it's it's just me and hopefully you guys
helping to uh to keep everything from falling apart. So man,
oh yeah, well, possibly it's not just uh. The four
(01:05):
of us, Robert, They're very well, could be some shadow
people's right, what seriously? Yeah, yeah, yeah, guys, Okay, I'll
roll with it. There are various takes on the on
the idea of just even a shadow, right, I mean
because obviously, um, the shadow has to do with the
(01:25):
with the optics around us. So there's this you know,
dark person shaped figure that is always a siwhere in
our midst that the light is just right, and that
has led to various uh, supernatural interpretations over the ages.
Sometimes the shadow is a separate entity. Sometimes it is.
It's kind of a representation of the immaterial soul. But
(01:47):
what when I say shadow people to you guys who
are steeped in conspiracy thinking and and uh and paranoid delusions.
Not that yourselves are paranoid, but but this is your
meat here, what comes to your when I say shadow people? Well, uh,
if I'll take this one first man book. So uh.
One thing that's funny is that we receive quite a
(02:10):
few emails or contact via Facebook and YouTube from people
who say, uh, please do an episode on shadow people.
We've never actually had the chance. First things that we
think about, first things I think about at least are
things that audience members have reported to us, which might
(02:31):
sound typically have something like this. Somewhere in their house
or at a friend's house. They're asleep or they're dozing
on a couch and all of a sudden, uh, something
is out of the corner of their eye. And it's
sort of like you know, when you have a floater
in your eye and you're looking at the sun, and
you you move your eye attempting to catch this strange
(02:54):
and distinguishable thing, and it always lingers just on the
corner of your vision. And and you know, as you said,
one thing that's fascinating about this is that it's a
very very old idea, you know, and and it it
sort of cuts across cultures. So what I the first
thing I think of are always going to be the
(03:15):
strange stories that audience members have told us, either saying
I believe it's a demon or can you tell me
what's going on? You know. Yeah, it makes me think
about all the things that are just on the outside
of our periphery, and that can be the actual physical
periphery or uh you know, uh deeper metaphysical periphery, something
(03:36):
that we really believe is there but we can't ever
quite catch it. We can't ever quite see it or
grasp it fully. Yeah, I mean, because we're hardwired to
pick up on that stuff. I mean, that's just part
of our survival instinct. If there's something that we can't
quite see, that's kind of hanging out just at the
edge of our vision, of course, that's going to elect
some some some shock or fear, or at least it's
(03:57):
gonna you're you're gonna start asking questions in your head. Now,
these individuals who write in about shadow people, it tends
to be a negative interpretation or a fearful interpretation generally. Yeah,
I haven't seen a positive man hanging out with my
shadow people. Last weekend it was pretty great. We played cards.
Who knows, maybe we'll get that letter via stuff to
blow your minds after this. Maybe we're giving shadow people
(04:20):
a bad name, but but yeah, in general, we we
have the people who do report that kind of stuff
or ask us about it, want to follow up to
figure out some explanation because they are fearful of it,
because it's not a positive experience. Now, one version of
(04:41):
the the shadow person that I found when I was
poking around in some folklore books was the idea of
Mr Nobody. Mr Nobody is an English nursery spirit, never visible,
but can be glimpsed as this diminutive, transient shadow. And
so when something goes wrong in the house, something's broken,
something's out of place, somebody didn't put their underwear back
in the drawer, more than you blame Mr Nobody, which
(05:03):
is you know what, it's a it's a you know,
nur free book. So it's it's it's it's silly. Nobody's
particularly taking Mr Nobody seriously, but it does have tinges
of that, that idea of the of the shadow lurking
at the edge of your perception. And then what is
it up to? Probably nothing good. At least now we
know where South Park got the underwear gnomes idea from
Mr Nobody. Yeah, we've I'm glad we figured that out.
(05:26):
I'm glad we we did that today. Another one I
found that I was really excited to talk to you
guys about um a tulpa from Tibetan mysticism. Pretty much
just a thought form right created by pure will. Uh,
this idea amongst people who have a belief for a
conspiratorial belief, I mean or paranormal belief in shadow people.
(05:49):
The idea of a tulpa frequently pops up for Stephen
King fans in the audience. In the novel It, the
primary villain is heavily applied to be something like a
talpa um. So the way that atalpa works is that
ultimately it is the product of the person observing it right,
(06:11):
which has all sorts of interesting correlations in the in
an age where we have access to more modern interpretations,
a better understanding of psychology and physics and biology. But
it's it's fascinating to think that this belief in some
kind of boogeyman that we create due to our thoughts
(06:33):
could could dovetail so nicely that's the best thing I
can find. Yeah, I remember correctly with the tulpa. It's
it's really it's deeped in this idea that that if
we believe in something, and we believe in it hard enough,
we can actually bring this manifestation, this entity, out of
the thought world, out of the dream world, into the
real world um, which has some interesting connotations with some
(06:54):
stuff we're going to discuss later. But I can definitely
see where if if there are sort of shats to
perceive in the corners of our perception, and if you
are trying to drag something out of the immaterial, out
of the world of dream and thought that you might
easily pick up on those things because you're not only
susceptible to these shadows, but you're you're seeking them out right.
(07:17):
I'm glad you said that, because in our experience, one
thing that is very, very different is that typically people
who believe that share the shadow people phenomenon is paranormal
also think it's different to a ghostly phenomenon. It's somehow
a non human entity called forth froom somewhere often, whereas
(07:43):
you know a ghost would be in in this context,
the ghost would be different. Um, but perhaps the same
phenomenon produced them. I don't know, is a ghost that
told That's interesting you say that, man, because I was.
I was trolling through the above top secret forums trying
to find store reads of people who claimed to have
seen shadow people, and I did notice that most of
(08:04):
them were ascribing it to some other type of being.
A lot of it was an angel or a demon
usually um, but yet I also got aliens, like people
really thought they might be aliens or time travelers. Yeah,
well it's I mean It's interesting you mentioned angels and
aliens as well, because it does seem like one of
the things that really separates a ghost from from those
(08:25):
other entities is that to it with a ghost, we
apply it personhood, even like specific personhood, like that is
Grandpa Rosenberg, or that's that's just the dude who might
have lived in this house a few generations ago. But
an alien is just I mean, they're all alien stuff.
We don't really know these these guys and gals. Likewise, angels, yes,
(08:45):
you do have specific angels in in your religion and mythologies,
but for the most part, we don't really we don't
get to know them. They're unknowable beings and the shadow
of people, the shades or whatever we want to call them,
that that we worry about in the edge of our perception.
They too, don't have a face, they don't have a
they don't have a persona. They're just something dark and
(09:05):
mysterious that has some sort of human esque shape to it. Right. Yeah.
One thing to add to the idea of angels and
demons also would be the idea of gin in Islam.
So ah, yeah, they were and I remember correctly the
gin our creations of fire, whereas humans are creations of
dust I believe, yeah, and I think angels are light
(09:29):
and general smokeless fire. Um. But this this concept when
one thing that's really interesting here is that what we're
finding is a million interpretations. I'm being hyperbolic, but a
bunch of interpretations at the very least of uh, something
(09:51):
that could be could be the same thing, or at
least has a quite a few similarities. Right. We have
all these different scripts we can turn who to try
and understand what the what these shadows are. And today
we have even more scripts to turn to because we
have a lot of a lot of shadows and shadow
people in our in our pop culture, in our fiction.
I mean, Game of Thrones just started up, and of
(10:13):
course I'm not gonna give any spoilers for people catching up,
but a shadow entity plays into a very important plot
point in one of the previous seasons. Uh. You see
shadow creatures all over Dungeons and Dragons. I think that
was probably my first exposure to this, uh, and I
was trying to look him up again. It seems like
the the original shadow has kind of changed into various
(10:35):
other shadowy monsters in the Dungeons and dragons. What is
that they phased it out of the monster manual. Man. Yeah,
like I was finding I think at night Stalker or
something that effect kept showing up. Um, how about some dementors.
I know it's not exactly the same thing, but the
I guess the image of a dementer from J. K.
Rowlings World reminding me of these guys. And I'll tell
(10:56):
you another pop culture reference that I had completely forgotten about.
A little movie called Ghost Most Most Mostly we remember
this for it's awesome pottery scenes, but there was a
whole plot element to where these shadow creatures would come
and drag ghosts away into the nether darkness. Yeah, I
completely forgotten it. There was anything um, quote unquote cool
(11:19):
going on in Ghosts, you know. Yeah, everybody only remembers
that pottery scene. Uh, Robert, I don't know what else
is going to happen in this show, but I want
to personally thank you for making Redeeming Ghost for me.
Well you're welcome. All right, Well we're gonna take a
quick breaking when we come back. We're going to get
into the science of shadow people. Yes, the science of
(11:41):
what is actually going on when you perceive some sort
of shadowy monstrosity creeping out at the edge of your reality.
All right, we're back now. You guys deal with paranormal
experience a lot on your show. Now for for for
(12:03):
new listeners, for people who maybe aren't it's familiar with
uh stuff they don't want you to know. Um. Where
do you guys stand when it comes to skepticism when
it comes to scientific explanations of perceived paranormal events and
the the magic and mystery of paranormal events? Okay? For me,
it's all about the want to believe. Uh. I currently
(12:27):
don't believe in much of it personally, However, I have
a deep desire to not only understand, but to explore
those outer reaches. Like we're talking about earlier, UM, for
paranormal experience, if we're talking about shadow people, I think
as we will find very shortly that we can explain
much of the phenomena. UM. If we go a little
(12:51):
deeper towards alien abductions and some of that stuff, I
tend to lean a little bit more towards the possibilities
of it being true. Um, but I would say two
out of ten. Okay, that's fair. Yes, So Matt and
I often have similar conversations like this. When it comes
(13:15):
to the paranormal specifically, it's very important, I think, to
remember that human understanding is a in a continual state
of progress, and many of the things that once upon
a time were miracles or curses later became, um, something
(13:37):
that we could understand through our current framework of science.
I don't think that makes any of those things any
less terrifying or any more amazing, because um, you know,
it's it's all kind of uh, it's it's all kind
of like a magic trick, or or learning the the
behind the scenes of someone writing your face rich story.
(14:01):
Is Is it possible that we will run into phenomena
that can just never be explained. It's possible. I hope
it doesn't happen. But when we when we look at
things that are on the fringes of mainstream science or
orthodox understanding, we do find things that have no no
(14:28):
physical or quantifiable proof. And those things would be experiences
or anecdotes about ghosts, or you know, the the idea
of alien visitation, which is um mathematically staggering just given
the scale of time and space. But then we also
find things that I think are magical regardless of it,
(14:51):
and I don't mean magical in a sweet Disney way.
I mean freaky man like. The idea of of quantum entanglement,
uh should make everyone really, really really weirded out. No
matter what you're doing. If you're eating a sandwich right now,
think about how that sandwich might be entangled with something
(15:14):
later in the universe, carefully consider your condiments. You know,
there was there was a guy in New York that
for a while, maybe still doing it, who was offering
quantum entanglement marriage ceremonies. Well, and I forget the exact
way the specifics of how this worked, but you know,
two people would would enter and he would somehow quantumly
entangle the two of you so that, you know, no
(15:35):
matter where you go in this universe, there would there
would be that bond between you, a quantum bond. Do
you think it has any effect on there are other
multiplicities of them that exist in the other multiverses. You know.
I don't know how it affects quantum divorce rights either. Yeah,
I'm sure you can. I'm sure you can pay extra
right for service there. But but yeah, so that's that's
(15:57):
that's the point is that typically I think there's often
a false dichotomy um in in some realms of the
conspiracy world, between a conspiracy theorists and a skeptic, because really,
what we should only be talking about this critical thinking.
And the fact of the matter is, with the vast
(16:18):
majority of paranormal phenomenon, the stuff that the stuff that
has been closely examined has often been explained, just not
in a way that is perhaps as exciting or as
sexy as some people would want it to be. But
I don't think that makes it any less amazing, and
I don't think that means that we should stop investigating. Yes, indeed,
(16:42):
and uh. And one of the things too, that I
think is important to point out about paranormal experience is
that you know, we can we can sit around all
day and say, all right, well, you know, mathematically, alien
abductions are not occurring, or the likelihood of a ghost
existing an angel existing theories existing, though you know, we
and we can call that hogwash all day. But but
but ultimately, a paranormal experience is real. People do experience
(17:06):
something that they cannot explain, and in lieu of an
actual explanation, they end up applying other explanations to it.
They draw from existing scripts of folklore, existing scripts of
of religion, existing scripts of science fiction pop culture. Those
end up being, uh, the buckets we turn to to
(17:28):
try and explain things that happened to us that do
not match up with our normal procept perception of reality,
or are our normal experience of life. Yeah. That you know,
when you say that, that makes me anything one of
the one of the perfect, and I don't want to
derail us here, but one of the perfect. Examples of
that would be some of the hallucinations that people take
(17:50):
on spiritual journeys, especially given that that is such a
a long standing tradition across so many cultures. Uh. One
thing that we have always found, we being the human
race entire, is that those experiences, UM, regardless of how
(18:11):
somebody might examine neurochemistry or attempt to you know, quote
unquote debunk the nature of whatever that spirit journey is. Uh,
these people do have legitimate and valid experiences. And I
really appreciate UM you pointing that out, because Matt and
I go out of our way to um be as
(18:33):
respectful to people who genuinely have had an experience as
we can. You know, we don't we don't want to ever,
you know, purposefully irritate or ever. Uh, I guess, denigrate
somebody for telling us honestly about something that they experienced.
(18:53):
We might not agree on the causes, but also we
weren't there. So yeah, anecdotal evidences, it's it is easily discounted. Um,
But like you said, it's it's real or something happened. Now,
one example of certainly paranormal experience, I mean right here
in the room. Uh no, our normal producer is is
(19:16):
that on vacation as well, or something like vacation. I'm
not sure. I'm not getting into his business, but in
his place, candlers here and and Candler's just telling us
about paranormal experiences that he has encountered. And by this,
I mean he does see shadow people when he's sleep deprived,
and he has experienced, um, sleep paralysis. Um. So just
(19:37):
to refresh a sleep paralysis is all about what does
what does our body do when we're dreaming. Ultimately, the
idea is that when the when the body shuts down
for sleep, it's got the muscles are going on kind
of a lockdown. Because in your dream you may be
having a karate battle with a dragon, but you don't
need your limbs to be having that same battle, because
(19:59):
you know, you may have the dogs or cats or
humans laying around you sleeping. You may have lamps that
you don't want destroyed and windows you don't want to
plunge through. So sleep paralysis is just the locking down
of the muscles. Is there to keep things from getting crazy. However,
sometimes things get out of sync a bit and uh,
and in sleep proalysis, what happens is that the is
(20:20):
that you wake up. The conscious mind is waking up
from from slumber and from dream, but the body is
not unlocked yet, So you're waking up into a locked body,
and you're you're not completely awake either as well. We'll
discussing a bit. These phases of moving into and out
of sleep are the perfect zones to see things that
(20:42):
are not there, or apply non rational explanations for things
that are there. Exactly, You've you've been having some pretty
crazy hallucinations for the past few hours. If you're experiencing
sleep paralysis, you're in a completely another world. You're, like
you said, perhaps let's let's use the dragons example. So
(21:05):
you've been fighting a dragon. You wake up, you're in
your bed, but you can't move it all, and you're
still seeing like at least a shadow of this dragon
form that is still trying to attack you while your
body is not functioning. If you if you don't know
what sleep paralysis is, this is the most terrifying moment
in your entire life. And it just made me think
(21:28):
about all of the people that experienced this before we
had the the tool of science and had to be
able to look at this and figure out exactly what
it is. And there were several something that you had
written about before in your Monsters of the Week. Were
several The first one was nightmares about this? Uh, can
you explain that just slightly? Oh? Yeah, I mean the
(21:50):
nightmare the night mara. It's an idea that you just
see in culture after culture after culture, and it's the
idea that you're waking up and there's some oppressive force
pressing down on you that you know, just either setting
on your chest or just just an oppressive force that's
keeping you from moving and uh, and and you just
see it again in culture after culture after culture, different
(22:10):
different explanations, slightly different different shades of what exactly the
the entity is, but it's it's everywhere and a lot
of people who experience sleep paralysis. Fine, see this thing,
it's been called the intruder um, it's been called a
succubus or an incubus, but they have very specific things
that they do. If if it's going to be named
(22:30):
incubus or succubus. But you wrote in your one of
your articles or the blog post about how these creatures
are mimics, and uh, it made me think about what
we're about to go into the science at least from
this one study that we looked at about how these
things are almost a a mimic of ourselves or a
(22:55):
version of ourselves. Yes, not mimicry, Robert, mimicry I Okay,
So clearly Matt and I are big fans of the show. Uh.
One of the one of the things that we find
fascinating about human experience in general, or the way human
beings participate in the outside world, is that the our
(23:15):
entire species has this compulsion to to classify, to anthropomorphize,
to make um, to make a coherent picture from the
raw shack blot, you know. So it's it's strange to
me when we hear when we hear stories of people
saying you know, I saw this mysterious figure, and it's always,
(23:41):
you know, humanoid, or at the very least it's always
in some cultures it's a it's a specific shade of
an animal or something, but it's always a common animal too.
Um And I think it's interesting because it says a
lot about the way our brains deliver this sort of
sensory information to us. Now, just a touch base again
(24:01):
on on sleep paralysis. Researchers are not sure why exactly
normal paralysis happens during conscience for victims of sleep proalysis,
but the studies have confirmed that the attacks are particularly
likely to occur the person enters r e M sleep
quickly after hitting the pillow, bypassing the stages of non
rim sleep that usually happen first. So some of the
(24:22):
factors that are often involved here are drifting off while
lying on your back, if you're feeling stressed, if you're
experiencing a disruption in your normal sleep patterns, such as
you like a weird work schedule, jet lag, you're having
a little bit too much caffeine, a little bit too
much alcohol. But at the end of the day of
the normal adult population has experienced sleep paralysis at least once,
(24:44):
and around five percent of the population has experienced one
or more of other disturbing symptoms associated with the disorder.
And in this we're talking about getting into hallucinations, shadows
and light, human animal figures, auditory hallucinations, hearing voices or footsteps,
and and even that strong sense of a presence something menacing,
(25:06):
or even an esthetic sensation such as the feeling of
being dragged out of bed or vibrating, flying, falling, which again,
all of these things can easily play into a fantastic
interpretation involving of you know, demons soaring through the air
and taking you off to some sabbath on the other
side of the hill, or aliens taking you up and
probing you. And on the probe note, it's also worth
(25:28):
noting that a lot of these sleep browses encounters do
end up having a kind of sexual overtone to them, because,
I mean, sleep itself, the dream world often has shades
obviously of sexual desire in there, and seen as the
human brain in the state of sleep is still relatively
(25:49):
mysterious in some fronts, um it makes sense that we
don't we don't completely understand what triggers this arrhythmic cycle
or synchronous zation between the conscious mind and the human body.
But we also know that the human mind is not
(26:10):
dichotomous when it comes to waking and sleeping. Right, there's
sort of a spectrum and we all kind of slide
along it on our way to sleep and then our
way to hitting the snooze button again. And there's this
really weird sort of twilight zone sweet spot if you will,
where in you can have dreams or hallucinations that are
(26:35):
more vivid even then. You know, any high school comedy
you've seen where someone accidentally takes acid. Yeah, you when
you're drifting into sleep or coming out of it, you
kind of have a leg in both worlds. Now, in
my own experience that, like, the two examples that I
come back to on this are pretty much any night
(26:55):
that I'm I'm sleeping, I'm I'm drifting off the sweep,
but I'm still reading. I don't know if you guys
encount of this. If you reach that point where you're
still reading, but you're not reading the book like you're
somehow reading a made up book off the very real
pages that you're looking at, and and generally that's the
point where you where I'm just kind of think, oh, well,
I'm not reading the real book anymore. Time to go
(27:16):
to sleep. But when you stop and you look back
and you really you know, you end up doing a
double tick on that, Like that is that is a
cue that there is this very weird twilight zone that
you're trouncing through on your way to slumber. Have you
guys evergotten the I don't know a better way to
explain it besides the the blue falling hallucination of it's
(27:39):
just kind of blue light that falls in front of
your eyes. Did do either of you guys wear contacts? Yes? Yes? Okay,
So when I sleep without my contacts, and I've got
extremely close um near sightedness, and sometimes when I wake
up and everything is very blurry, I'm still in somewhat
(28:01):
of a dream state, and I'm just trying to decide
whether or not I want to actually get up or
not I will if I close one eye, I can
see this kind of blue falling light. Um, I guess
in the eye that I have clothes, but it's by
doing so it ends up being transferred onto my left
eye that is open in this case, and I've been
(28:23):
trying to figure out exactly what that is, and and
it has something to do with the this type of hallucination,
hallucination what is it called? These types of hallucinations? All right,
there to two different states, two different hallucinations we're talking
about here. One is the hypnopompic state. Now, this is
a state of consciousness leading out of sleep, and in
(28:44):
the opposite, the state leading into sleep is the hypnogogic state.
And in theory, the hypnogogic state, again, you're going to sleep,
and so the rational waking mind is trying to make
sense of nonlinear dream images and association. Uh so again
you're you're seeing pages that aren't there, and you're trying
to figure out why am I seeing pages that aren't there?
(29:05):
You know that kind of thing. Meanwhile, the hypnopompic state
is the emotional and naive dreaming mind trying to make
sense of real world sights and sounds. So this is
where we get this, this waking dream. So there might
be some sort of weird shadow in the room, the
light is strange on the ceiling, we hear the sound
of the cat scratching on something, and we still have
(29:28):
that crazy open dream mind that's trying to make sense
of it, the same mind that totally buys into whatever fantastic,
crazy dream you're having. Of course, I'm fighting a dragon,
this is what I do. That mind is suddenly trying
to figure out what the cat is doing under the bed.
So maybe it's a dragon, right, Yeah, And then that's
that's perfect because we can make we can make a
(29:49):
few examples here that will be clearly understandable to anyone
who has missed their alarm clock a couple of times.
You guys, So if you're listening, you've probably had this
moment where you're in a dream and then there's a
fire alarm somewhere in the distance, or a car alarm,
(30:09):
or if you use a ring tone on your cell phone,
all of a sudden, your strange dream with uh, your
old high school buddy and I don't know, Vladimir Putin,
what something topical? All of a sudden this ring tone
you love comes on and you and your high school
chum and Vladimir Putin are dancing to every day I'm hustling.
(30:30):
And then you wake up, which I assume is someone's
ring tone, And then you wake up and you realize, oh,
it was all. It was all a dream that these
things happening in the outside world went through this this
internal script that I had that might have been influenced
by historical older scripts, religious scripts, folkloric stuff. And to
(30:54):
me that's fascinating because when I fall asleep with a
ray Deo on or something like that, Um, you know, Robert,
I recently got a dog and the dog makes noises
that my sleeping mind is not used to write because
you're you're a new dog owner, right, the cat person
up upol Now, yeah, yeah, and uh, I've had a lot.
(31:18):
It turns out the dog snores, So I've had I've
actually had a couple of sleeping dragon dreams and waking
up and finding out that thank god, it's just a
puppy and not smell. You know, I have a very
clear memory from when I was like a young kid,
definitely in an age where every toys are everything, you know,
(31:39):
action figures are everything, and and you know, you end
up do you see these pictures in like the serious
catalog and you just you obsessed about it, like I
would love to have that Transformer one day. And I
distinctly remember waking up from a dream of having some
sort of fancy Transformer former toy and seeing it next
to me in the bed for were you know, for
(32:01):
this very small amount of time, but enough time to
make an impact on me as a child. Now, Grant
it's a memory. And we've on this podcast, we've talked
plenty of times about how uh, how how many opportunities
we have to mess up a dream, especially every time
we drag it out of the box. But but it
but it had an impact on me because I saw
how there was this possibility for something in a dream
to sort of follow you out of the dream for
(32:23):
a little bit before it scampers back to the the subconscious. Uh.
That is a beautiful and terrifying thought. Yeah, well that's
the thing. It is that beautiful and terrifying, just like
all these various interpretations of the paranormal. Yeah, and when
we're talking about shadow people, it's it's fairly apparent that
(32:45):
you know, this this falling into waking and sleeping and
and the weird twilight zone between those two points. It's
fairly apparent that this is a very old thing, and
that what we call shadow people today in the age
of the Internet, have been called many other things and
often behaving in some of the same ways. But we
(33:09):
have an advantage, um, an advantage that was one through
bloody centuries of experimentation and breaking ethics, we know a
little bit more about the human brain. Right, and you
sent us some some fascinating information regarding uh kind of
a look behind the curtain explaining that feeling of a presence, right, yeah, yeah,
(33:30):
it's it's a really fascinating study came out in two
thousand six, Uh, Swiss study public in the journal Nature.
And uh no, it was not a study that was
specifically targeting the shadow people, because I guess you tend
to have trouble getting funding for that kind of thing.
But the thing is, this sort of apparition, this kind
of shadow figure, does play into the experiences of psychiatric
(33:54):
and neurological patients. So the researchers made this discovery while
evaluating a perfectly norm twenty two year old woman for
surgical treatment of epilepsy, and when they electronically stimulated her
brains left temper operato junction, or t PJ, they repeatedly
gave her the sensation of a lurking shadow man in
her presence. Uh. She perceived the shadow person is just
(34:18):
behind her. She perceived the figure as interfering with her
attempts to read a book, like trying to snatch it
out of her hands. And when the researchers stimulated her
in a seated position, this is the best part for me.
She perceived herself to be seated in the entity's lap
and he had he she had its arms around her,
and she described this as being an unpleasant feeling. That's
(34:41):
that's really interesting, just the idea of she basically was
having an out of almost this strange out of body
experience in a way where she was I guess her
her feeling of this is hard for me to explain.
I can't explain this. Maybe you guys will be better
at this, but just that I've had feeling before, but
not because my brain was being electrocuted. Well, it's kind
(35:04):
of like some some part of her sensory interpretation got
was hijacked. You know. By this, by this simulation, we
know that in terms of evolution, it's been necessary and
advantageous for people to have that feeling of you know,
a sixth sense or shining or whatever. In short, it's
(35:28):
it's really good for the human race at large. If
a lot of us are paranoid in uh, in strange situations,
but also finding the finding the neurological button or one
of the neurological buttons that can trigger this reminds me
of some some earlier stuff that you guys have done
on this show about finding a specific part of the
(35:51):
brain that is responsible for, you know, experiencing the presence
of God for instance. Right. Um. The the thing about
this is that, um, Matt and I are pretty into
self experimentation, so I would love to figure out a way.
I don't know if you should shock your brain. Do
(36:11):
you have a tDCS or some form of electrical brain
show working on all kinds of stuff? What are you
making it yourself? I would not you like off the
plans off the internet, or you're buying one at a
at a punch shot. Look, Robert, the FDA are trying
to trying to stop the progress of my experimentation, and uh,
(36:37):
you know I've I've tried several different methods. It is
true that there are now finally some commercially available t
DCS devices that do not require you to be a
doctor in charge of a clinical study, But those devices,
uh leave a lot to be desired, and if you
want something done right, you often need to do it
(36:59):
yourself before you go shocking your left temporo parato junction
of t VJ. UH. Let's let's just take it apart
for a second for the listeners here and go through
what the the t PJ does. The TPJ concerns self processing, UH,
self other distinction and multisensory body integration info UH. The
(37:19):
the electrical stimulation in this case of this again UH
perfectly normal otherwise patient, it's thought to have caused her
to attribute her own actions to this alien entity, to
her to her shadow, to something just a few degrees
left of her actual location or a little bit behind
her um and uh. And so the researchers proposed that
(37:40):
electrical stimulation to this area in the patient disturbed again
multisensory but also um sensor motor integration of the information
with respect to her body, leading to the appearance of
a of what what is otherwise the first rank symptom
of schizophrenia in this a person with no psychiatric history.
Along those lines, um, so we're getting we're getting down
(38:02):
to the perception of not only reality, but the perception
of self in reality, which which we often take for Granted,
you know, we think that we know who we are
because we're looking out of this body and we're seeing
the world, and and then a lot of it's based
on site. But clearly it's more complex than that, right,
And we see here the line between our same perceptions
(38:25):
of reality and self and the insane or the magical
being just uh, a far slimmer line than the most
of us assume unders the daily basis. It makes me
wonder if one day we will ascribe a sixth sense
as our sense of just that overall sense of self
that we're describing here, of where we are in reality.
(38:47):
It's not necessarily touched, not necessarily site or any of that.
It's just your own, your brain's own understanding of where
it is in spacetime. Yeah, it's almost like if you're
watching a movie and the film quality blurs, or the
or the boom mic is suddenly in shot, like to
a certain extent, seeing shadow people or experiencing and out
(39:07):
of body experience. That which we'll get into a second here,
is kind of like the boom mic getting in the shot.
But it's like if you saw the film though, and
you didn't say, hey, there's a boom mic. You might
think there is a demon on the ceiling in this room.
What are our characters going to do to survive it? Like,
we don't have the processing, you know, like the brain
you can get in that area with the brain cannot
stand outside of itself and perceive itself. What were you
(39:29):
gonna say about astral travel or out of bodies well,
you know, out of body experiences or O b ees
And apparently somebody calls them um the you know these happen.
People do experience these is It's not just unsolved mystery stuff.
They most commonly happen to people with neurological disorders such
as the chronic migraine strokes, epilepsy, brain tumors. UH. Some
(39:52):
also estimated five of perfectly healthy people also have the
sensation at some point UH. And we can actually a
connect out of body experiences again to that TPJ researchers
have used transparano magnetic stimulation on the t p J
to impair mental transformations of the body in healthy volunteers,
(40:13):
so essentially able to UH to stimulate that part of
the brain to reduce a kind of out of body
experience without the aid of you know, near death experience.
Or astral projection or strain or whatever they did in flatliners.
The funny side note for that, uh, the United States
(40:34):
government actually poured quite a bit of money into ob research.
You there's a there's a film loosely based on that
called The Menu Steric Goats. Uh. They have, but they
they have people who were professional astral travelers, the most
(40:55):
famous of which was a guy named Dingo Swan. I
should go ahead and say, in the interests of fairness,
that this program was, to our knowledge, canceled because it
was not as cost effective as you know they had hoped. Yeah. Well,
and there was remote viewing. I guess that would be
(41:17):
a form of astral travel. Yeah, there are a lot
of interesting things. It was that Project stargates, Project Stargate fascinating. Well,
I mean, if you look at it, I guess from
the government's point of view, if perceivably there might be
a window open there, you don't want to just be
there one day when the Soviets come crawling through that window.
You want to explore that window and make sure that
it is indeed closed or at least maybe I'm I'm
(41:39):
hopeful that that is the mindset that's precisely actually, that's
exactly the reasoning that we That's the closest thing we
could arrive at. So So, Robert, have we found the
explanation behind shadow people? I think so. I think it's
if it's not again you get into shadow people, this
(42:00):
seems to be varying um degrees of it, Like, this
is definitely a case where someone is perceiving a very
near um entity, something that is basically living just a
few degrees away from their own body. Uh. And I
think that we can definitely see with with these experiments
with the t PJ. Now when you get into some
of the other scenarios where someone's viewing a shadow on
(42:23):
the other side of the room, I think maybe we
need to turn more towards that that realm of sleep
paralysis and those waking or plunging into slumber hallucinations. But
but I think we have some strong ammo here to
to explain some of the cases and and throw a
lot of rational thinking at other cases. I don't know, guys,
(42:43):
I'm gonna hold out judgment until Game of Thrones concludes
in like, oh man, if he ever finishes those books,
it's get it's the races early on to see what's
going to happen, not in terms of the storyline just
that one, but t V versus versus the novels which
finished first. Well, I would just like to say it
(43:08):
feels like we're concluding here. I would just like to say, Robert,
thank you again for having us on. It's been a pleasure.
Oh well, thank you guys for joining me. Yeah, we
we just have a few minutes here before the shadowy
entities creep in and drag us away. But uh, we
should probably go ahead and just chill absolutely everything. So
first of all, of you guys have been doing this
awesome video series for a while and your efforts have
(43:30):
just recently expanded. Uh, please share with with our listeners
everything you're working on right now, not the top secret
stuff or the illegal stuff involving brain stimulation, but all
the on the board stuff area. But okay, sure, well
if okay, if you want to learn more about our show,
you can go to the longest r L in history
called stuff they Don't Want You to Know dot com,
(43:54):
or you can find us on YouTube. We are conspiracy
stuff on there. Um. We make shows three shows a week.
There might be more, sometimes it might be less. Who knows.
Who knows. We also make an audio show No True Yeah,
where we reference stuff to blow your mind as well,
and let's see. Oh, we're also on Twitter. Uh, but
(44:18):
I'd like to spend some time, uh talking about some
stuff to blow your mind, things that I think everybody
should check out. If you're listening to this and you
haven't visited Stuff to Blew your Mind dot com, to
check out the amazing blog our our mutual favorite met
is always monster related right. Oh, yes, and there's something
(44:40):
very special coming up. I don't know if have you
been talking about this yet. Yeah, I've been mentioning a
little bit and it should be out at for anyone
listening to h the show right now. But yeah, I
do this Monster of the Week blog series where I
take a take something in the monster's realm, be at
you know, pop culture or movies, X files or something
more chloora myth based and then try and get at
(45:03):
the science of it. For instance, with the Shadow People,
it is a direct study that linked it. Other times
I'm kind of taking something that that that that isn't
about that monster. But if you start bringing the two together,
then you can see, uh, you can see the connections Basically,
the idea is that whatever we attribute to the fantastic
in a made up monster, if you look close enough
(45:24):
in the natural world, you'll find something just as fantastic. Uh.
And and that's ultimately the connection I try and get
out there. And so now we have a video series
based on this. Uh. They we running six episodes off
called Monster Science, where with Dr Anton Jessup who is
a disgraced curator of monster Sciences at the university, and
(45:45):
we were able to get him to do this a
series for us right there in his basement. It's yeah,
well hopefully so and you know, and and if it's
a success, will do more of them. If not, then
the Dr Jessup may may may vanish for a while
and your mysterious circumstances I hope not cool. All right, well, hey,
you know, check it out. You can find it on
our YouTube channel, Mind Stuff Show. It's also all over
(46:06):
stuffable your mind dot com. That's our mothership. That's where
all of the podcasts episode live. That's where the videos are,
that's where the blog posts are, and that's where you
also find links out to these various social media accounts
like Facebook, Tumbler, Twitter, etcetera. Um. Also, I mentioned this
on the Facebook some of you you had asked me
about this, But I also personally have a collection of
(46:29):
short stories out called eight Black Offerings. So if anyone
out there is interested in h some rather bleak, gruesome
horror tales that I wrote previously and had been published previously, Uh,
that book is available. Can search for it on Amazon.
And it's only for grown ups. Oh yeah, live testimonial.
I picked up a copy of this book, and I
(46:49):
don't know if we talked about it, but I really
enjoyed it personally, and the only thing I was gonna
say is that it's probably only for adults. Yeah, yeah,
it's uh, it's some grooms up that It's not the
kind of stuff I would even write today. But anyway,
I bring it out because because I know some of
your listeners had asked about it. H And in the future,
I'm hopefully gonna have some stuff out that is uh,
it's it's more for a general eye Getting dark with
(47:12):
Robert Lamb. Yeah yeah, that's the next and the next
video series. So anyway, Hey, you guys have an email address,
right If people want to reach you on email, where
do they send those uh, those those queries about shadow people.
You can send all of your complaints to conspiracy at
Discovery dot com. Wait wait, you can. You can send
any questions about shadow people to conspiracy at Discovery dot com.
(47:36):
If you have complaints, please do forward them to our
official complaint department, Jonathan Stricklands over back stuff. So that's
Jonathan Strickland at Discovery dot com. Cool and as always,
our email address is blow the Mind at Discovery dot com.
(47:58):
For more on this and thousands of other topic is
it how stuff Works dot com m
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. Julie Douglass, my co host,
is on a well deserved vacation this week. So I thought, Hey,
I wanted to invite the guys from Stuff They Don't
(00:23):
Want You To Know over and we'll talk about some
shadow people. So, hey, guys, how's it going. Hey, it's
going really well. This is Matt and I'm Ben. Uh.
We are thrilled to be here, so thank you for
having us. This is uh one of the shows that
I listened to. Oh, longtime fans, first time co host, Well,
thank you. Well, you know this is uh, this is
(00:44):
weird for me because Julie's had guests on here when
I'm I've been out that this is the first time
that I've been here without Julie, so uh, you know,
she's she's kind of the rock of of the show,
you know, I mean, she's she's she's holding it together
and now it's it's just me and hopefully you guys
helping to uh to keep everything from falling apart. So man,
oh yeah, well, possibly it's not just uh. The four
(01:05):
of us, Robert, They're very well, could be some shadow
people's right, what seriously? Yeah, yeah, yeah, guys, Okay, I'll
roll with it. There are various takes on the on
the idea of just even a shadow, right, I mean
because obviously, um, the shadow has to do with the
(01:25):
with the optics around us. So there's this you know,
dark person shaped figure that is always a siwhere in
our midst that the light is just right, and that
has led to various uh, supernatural interpretations over the ages.
Sometimes the shadow is a separate entity. Sometimes it is.
It's kind of a representation of the immaterial soul. But
(01:47):
what when I say shadow people to you guys who
are steeped in conspiracy thinking and and uh and paranoid delusions.
Not that yourselves are paranoid, but but this is your
meat here, what comes to your when I say shadow people? Well, uh,
if I'll take this one first man book. So uh.
One thing that's funny is that we receive quite a
(02:10):
few emails or contact via Facebook and YouTube from people
who say, uh, please do an episode on shadow people.
We've never actually had the chance. First things that we
think about, first things I think about at least are
things that audience members have reported to us, which might
(02:31):
sound typically have something like this. Somewhere in their house
or at a friend's house. They're asleep or they're dozing
on a couch and all of a sudden, uh, something
is out of the corner of their eye. And it's
sort of like you know, when you have a floater
in your eye and you're looking at the sun, and
you you move your eye attempting to catch this strange
(02:54):
and distinguishable thing, and it always lingers just on the
corner of your vision. And and you know, as you said,
one thing that's fascinating about this is that it's a
very very old idea, you know, and and it it
sort of cuts across cultures. So what I the first
thing I think of are always going to be the
(03:15):
strange stories that audience members have told us, either saying
I believe it's a demon or can you tell me
what's going on? You know. Yeah, it makes me think
about all the things that are just on the outside
of our periphery, and that can be the actual physical
periphery or uh you know, uh deeper metaphysical periphery, something
(03:36):
that we really believe is there but we can't ever
quite catch it. We can't ever quite see it or
grasp it fully. Yeah, I mean, because we're hardwired to
pick up on that stuff. I mean, that's just part
of our survival instinct. If there's something that we can't
quite see, that's kind of hanging out just at the
edge of our vision, of course, that's going to elect
some some some shock or fear, or at least it's
(03:57):
gonna you're you're gonna start asking questions in your head. Now,
these individuals who write in about shadow people, it tends
to be a negative interpretation or a fearful interpretation generally. Yeah,
I haven't seen a positive man hanging out with my
shadow people. Last weekend it was pretty great. We played cards.
Who knows, maybe we'll get that letter via stuff to
blow your minds after this. Maybe we're giving shadow people
(04:20):
a bad name, but but yeah, in general, we we
have the people who do report that kind of stuff
or ask us about it, want to follow up to
figure out some explanation because they are fearful of it,
because it's not a positive experience. Now, one version of
(04:41):
the the shadow person that I found when I was
poking around in some folklore books was the idea of
Mr Nobody. Mr Nobody is an English nursery spirit, never visible,
but can be glimpsed as this diminutive, transient shadow. And
so when something goes wrong in the house, something's broken,
something's out of place, somebody didn't put their underwear back
in the drawer, more than you blame Mr Nobody, which
(05:03):
is you know what, it's a it's a you know,
nur free book. So it's it's it's it's silly. Nobody's
particularly taking Mr Nobody seriously, but it does have tinges
of that, that idea of the of the shadow lurking
at the edge of your perception. And then what is
it up to? Probably nothing good. At least now we
know where South Park got the underwear gnomes idea from
Mr Nobody. Yeah, we've I'm glad we figured that out.
(05:26):
I'm glad we we did that today. Another one I
found that I was really excited to talk to you
guys about um a tulpa from Tibetan mysticism. Pretty much
just a thought form right created by pure will. Uh,
this idea amongst people who have a belief for a
conspiratorial belief, I mean or paranormal belief in shadow people.
(05:49):
The idea of a tulpa frequently pops up for Stephen
King fans in the audience. In the novel It, the
primary villain is heavily applied to be something like a
talpa um. So the way that atalpa works is that
ultimately it is the product of the person observing it right,
(06:11):
which has all sorts of interesting correlations in the in
an age where we have access to more modern interpretations,
a better understanding of psychology and physics and biology. But
it's it's fascinating to think that this belief in some
kind of boogeyman that we create due to our thoughts
(06:33):
could could dovetail so nicely that's the best thing I
can find. Yeah, I remember correctly with the tulpa. It's
it's really it's deeped in this idea that that if
we believe in something, and we believe in it hard enough,
we can actually bring this manifestation, this entity, out of
the thought world, out of the dream world, into the
real world um, which has some interesting connotations with some
(06:54):
stuff we're going to discuss later. But I can definitely
see where if if there are sort of shats to
perceive in the corners of our perception, and if you
are trying to drag something out of the immaterial, out
of the world of dream and thought that you might
easily pick up on those things because you're not only
susceptible to these shadows, but you're you're seeking them out right.
(07:17):
I'm glad you said that, because in our experience, one
thing that is very, very different is that typically people
who believe that share the shadow people phenomenon is paranormal
also think it's different to a ghostly phenomenon. It's somehow
a non human entity called forth froom somewhere often, whereas
(07:43):
you know a ghost would be in in this context,
the ghost would be different. Um, but perhaps the same
phenomenon produced them. I don't know, is a ghost that
told That's interesting you say that, man, because I was.
I was trolling through the above top secret forums trying
to find store reads of people who claimed to have
seen shadow people, and I did notice that most of
(08:04):
them were ascribing it to some other type of being.
A lot of it was an angel or a demon
usually um, but yet I also got aliens, like people
really thought they might be aliens or time travelers. Yeah,
well it's I mean It's interesting you mentioned angels and
aliens as well, because it does seem like one of
the things that really separates a ghost from from those
(08:25):
other entities is that to it with a ghost, we
apply it personhood, even like specific personhood, like that is
Grandpa Rosenberg, or that's that's just the dude who might
have lived in this house a few generations ago. But
an alien is just I mean, they're all alien stuff.
We don't really know these these guys and gals. Likewise, angels, yes,
(08:45):
you do have specific angels in in your religion and mythologies,
but for the most part, we don't really we don't
get to know them. They're unknowable beings and the shadow
of people, the shades or whatever we want to call them,
that that we worry about in the edge of our perception.
They too, don't have a face, they don't have a
they don't have a persona. They're just something dark and
(09:05):
mysterious that has some sort of human esque shape to it. Right. Yeah.
One thing to add to the idea of angels and
demons also would be the idea of gin in Islam.
So ah, yeah, they were and I remember correctly the
gin our creations of fire, whereas humans are creations of
dust I believe, yeah, and I think angels are light
(09:29):
and general smokeless fire. Um. But this this concept when
one thing that's really interesting here is that what we're
finding is a million interpretations. I'm being hyperbolic, but a
bunch of interpretations at the very least of uh, something
(09:51):
that could be could be the same thing, or at
least has a quite a few similarities. Right. We have
all these different scripts we can turn who to try
and understand what the what these shadows are. And today
we have even more scripts to turn to because we
have a lot of a lot of shadows and shadow
people in our in our pop culture, in our fiction.
I mean, Game of Thrones just started up, and of
(10:13):
course I'm not gonna give any spoilers for people catching up,
but a shadow entity plays into a very important plot
point in one of the previous seasons. Uh. You see
shadow creatures all over Dungeons and Dragons. I think that
was probably my first exposure to this, uh, and I
was trying to look him up again. It seems like
the the original shadow has kind of changed into various
(10:35):
other shadowy monsters in the Dungeons and dragons. What is
that they phased it out of the monster manual. Man. Yeah,
like I was finding I think at night Stalker or
something that effect kept showing up. Um, how about some dementors.
I know it's not exactly the same thing, but the
I guess the image of a dementer from J. K.
Rowlings World reminding me of these guys. And I'll tell
(10:56):
you another pop culture reference that I had completely forgotten about.
A little movie called Ghost Most Most Mostly we remember
this for it's awesome pottery scenes, but there was a
whole plot element to where these shadow creatures would come
and drag ghosts away into the nether darkness. Yeah, I
completely forgotten it. There was anything um, quote unquote cool
(11:19):
going on in Ghosts, you know. Yeah, everybody only remembers
that pottery scene. Uh, Robert, I don't know what else
is going to happen in this show, but I want
to personally thank you for making Redeeming Ghost for me.
Well you're welcome. All right, Well we're gonna take a
quick breaking when we come back. We're going to get
into the science of shadow people. Yes, the science of
(11:41):
what is actually going on when you perceive some sort
of shadowy monstrosity creeping out at the edge of your reality.
All right, we're back now. You guys deal with paranormal
experience a lot on your show. Now for for for
(12:03):
new listeners, for people who maybe aren't it's familiar with
uh stuff they don't want you to know. Um. Where
do you guys stand when it comes to skepticism when
it comes to scientific explanations of perceived paranormal events and
the the magic and mystery of paranormal events? Okay? For me,
it's all about the want to believe. Uh. I currently
(12:27):
don't believe in much of it personally, However, I have
a deep desire to not only understand, but to explore
those outer reaches. Like we're talking about earlier, UM, for
paranormal experience, if we're talking about shadow people, I think
as we will find very shortly that we can explain
much of the phenomena. UM. If we go a little
(12:51):
deeper towards alien abductions and some of that stuff, I
tend to lean a little bit more towards the possibilities
of it being true. Um, but I would say two
out of ten. Okay, that's fair. Yes, So Matt and
I often have similar conversations like this. When it comes
(13:15):
to the paranormal specifically, it's very important, I think, to
remember that human understanding is a in a continual state
of progress, and many of the things that once upon
a time were miracles or curses later became, um, something
(13:37):
that we could understand through our current framework of science.
I don't think that makes any of those things any
less terrifying or any more amazing, because um, you know,
it's it's all kind of uh, it's it's all kind
of like a magic trick, or or learning the the
behind the scenes of someone writing your face rich story.
(14:01):
Is Is it possible that we will run into phenomena
that can just never be explained. It's possible. I hope
it doesn't happen. But when we when we look at
things that are on the fringes of mainstream science or
orthodox understanding, we do find things that have no no
(14:28):
physical or quantifiable proof. And those things would be experiences
or anecdotes about ghosts, or you know, the the idea
of alien visitation, which is um mathematically staggering just given
the scale of time and space. But then we also
find things that I think are magical regardless of it,
(14:51):
and I don't mean magical in a sweet Disney way.
I mean freaky man like. The idea of of quantum entanglement,
uh should make everyone really, really really weirded out. No
matter what you're doing. If you're eating a sandwich right now,
think about how that sandwich might be entangled with something
(15:14):
later in the universe, carefully consider your condiments. You know,
there was there was a guy in New York that
for a while, maybe still doing it, who was offering
quantum entanglement marriage ceremonies. Well, and I forget the exact
way the specifics of how this worked, but you know,
two people would would enter and he would somehow quantumly
entangle the two of you so that, you know, no
(15:35):
matter where you go in this universe, there would there
would be that bond between you, a quantum bond. Do
you think it has any effect on there are other
multiplicities of them that exist in the other multiverses. You know.
I don't know how it affects quantum divorce rights either. Yeah,
I'm sure you can. I'm sure you can pay extra
right for service there. But but yeah, so that's that's
(15:57):
that's the point is that typically I think there's often
a false dichotomy um in in some realms of the
conspiracy world, between a conspiracy theorists and a skeptic, because really,
what we should only be talking about this critical thinking.
And the fact of the matter is, with the vast
(16:18):
majority of paranormal phenomenon, the stuff that the stuff that
has been closely examined has often been explained, just not
in a way that is perhaps as exciting or as
sexy as some people would want it to be. But
I don't think that makes it any less amazing, and
I don't think that means that we should stop investigating. Yes, indeed,
(16:42):
and uh. And one of the things too, that I
think is important to point out about paranormal experience is
that you know, we can we can sit around all
day and say, all right, well, you know, mathematically, alien
abductions are not occurring, or the likelihood of a ghost
existing an angel existing theories existing, though you know, we
and we can call that hogwash all day. But but
but ultimately, a paranormal experience is real. People do experience
(17:06):
something that they cannot explain, and in lieu of an
actual explanation, they end up applying other explanations to it.
They draw from existing scripts of folklore, existing scripts of
of religion, existing scripts of science fiction pop culture. Those
end up being, uh, the buckets we turn to to
(17:28):
try and explain things that happened to us that do
not match up with our normal procept perception of reality,
or are our normal experience of life. Yeah. That you know,
when you say that, that makes me anything one of
the one of the perfect, and I don't want to
derail us here, but one of the perfect. Examples of
that would be some of the hallucinations that people take
(17:50):
on spiritual journeys, especially given that that is such a
a long standing tradition across so many cultures. Uh. One
thing that we have always found, we being the human
race entire, is that those experiences, UM, regardless of how
(18:11):
somebody might examine neurochemistry or attempt to you know, quote
unquote debunk the nature of whatever that spirit journey is. Uh,
these people do have legitimate and valid experiences. And I
really appreciate UM you pointing that out, because Matt and
I go out of our way to um be as
(18:33):
respectful to people who genuinely have had an experience as
we can. You know, we don't we don't want to ever,
you know, purposefully irritate or ever. Uh, I guess, denigrate
somebody for telling us honestly about something that they experienced.
(18:53):
We might not agree on the causes, but also we
weren't there. So yeah, anecdotal evidences, it's it is easily discounted. Um,
But like you said, it's it's real or something happened. Now,
one example of certainly paranormal experience, I mean right here
in the room. Uh no, our normal producer is is
(19:16):
that on vacation as well, or something like vacation. I'm
not sure. I'm not getting into his business, but in
his place, candlers here and and Candler's just telling us
about paranormal experiences that he has encountered. And by this,
I mean he does see shadow people when he's sleep deprived,
and he has experienced, um, sleep paralysis. Um. So just
(19:37):
to refresh a sleep paralysis is all about what does
what does our body do when we're dreaming. Ultimately, the
idea is that when the when the body shuts down
for sleep, it's got the muscles are going on kind
of a lockdown. Because in your dream you may be
having a karate battle with a dragon, but you don't
need your limbs to be having that same battle, because
(19:59):
you know, you may have the dogs or cats or
humans laying around you sleeping. You may have lamps that
you don't want destroyed and windows you don't want to
plunge through. So sleep paralysis is just the locking down
of the muscles. Is there to keep things from getting crazy. However,
sometimes things get out of sync a bit and uh,
and in sleep proalysis, what happens is that the is
(20:20):
that you wake up. The conscious mind is waking up
from from slumber and from dream, but the body is
not unlocked yet, So you're waking up into a locked body,
and you're you're not completely awake either as well. We'll
discussing a bit. These phases of moving into and out
of sleep are the perfect zones to see things that
(20:42):
are not there, or apply non rational explanations for things
that are there. Exactly, You've you've been having some pretty
crazy hallucinations for the past few hours. If you're experiencing
sleep paralysis, you're in a completely another world. You're, like
you said, perhaps let's let's use the dragons example. So
(21:05):
you've been fighting a dragon. You wake up, you're in
your bed, but you can't move it all, and you're
still seeing like at least a shadow of this dragon
form that is still trying to attack you while your
body is not functioning. If you if you don't know
what sleep paralysis is, this is the most terrifying moment
in your entire life. And it just made me think
(21:28):
about all of the people that experienced this before we
had the the tool of science and had to be
able to look at this and figure out exactly what
it is. And there were several something that you had
written about before in your Monsters of the Week. Were
several The first one was nightmares about this? Uh, can
you explain that just slightly? Oh? Yeah, I mean the
(21:50):
nightmare the night mara. It's an idea that you just
see in culture after culture after culture, and it's the
idea that you're waking up and there's some oppressive force
pressing down on you that you know, just either setting
on your chest or just just an oppressive force that's
keeping you from moving and uh, and and you just
see it again in culture after culture after culture, different
(22:10):
different explanations, slightly different different shades of what exactly the
the entity is, but it's it's everywhere and a lot
of people who experience sleep paralysis. Fine, see this thing,
it's been called the intruder um, it's been called a
succubus or an incubus, but they have very specific things
that they do. If if it's going to be named
(22:30):
incubus or succubus. But you wrote in your one of
your articles or the blog post about how these creatures
are mimics, and uh, it made me think about what
we're about to go into the science at least from
this one study that we looked at about how these
things are almost a a mimic of ourselves or a
(22:55):
version of ourselves. Yes, not mimicry, Robert, mimicry I Okay,
So clearly Matt and I are big fans of the show. Uh.
One of the one of the things that we find
fascinating about human experience in general, or the way human
beings participate in the outside world, is that the our
(23:15):
entire species has this compulsion to to classify, to anthropomorphize,
to make um, to make a coherent picture from the
raw shack blot, you know. So it's it's strange to
me when we hear when we hear stories of people
saying you know, I saw this mysterious figure, and it's always,
(23:41):
you know, humanoid, or at the very least it's always
in some cultures it's a it's a specific shade of
an animal or something, but it's always a common animal too.
Um And I think it's interesting because it says a
lot about the way our brains deliver this sort of
sensory information to us. Now, just a touch base again
(24:01):
on on sleep paralysis. Researchers are not sure why exactly
normal paralysis happens during conscience for victims of sleep proalysis,
but the studies have confirmed that the attacks are particularly
likely to occur the person enters r e M sleep
quickly after hitting the pillow, bypassing the stages of non
rim sleep that usually happen first. So some of the
(24:22):
factors that are often involved here are drifting off while
lying on your back, if you're feeling stressed, if you're
experiencing a disruption in your normal sleep patterns, such as
you like a weird work schedule, jet lag, you're having
a little bit too much caffeine, a little bit too
much alcohol. But at the end of the day of
the normal adult population has experienced sleep paralysis at least once,
(24:44):
and around five percent of the population has experienced one
or more of other disturbing symptoms associated with the disorder.
And in this we're talking about getting into hallucinations, shadows
and light, human animal figures, auditory hallucinations, hearing voices or footsteps,
and and even that strong sense of a presence something menacing,
(25:06):
or even an esthetic sensation such as the feeling of
being dragged out of bed or vibrating, flying, falling, which again,
all of these things can easily play into a fantastic
interpretation involving of you know, demons soaring through the air
and taking you off to some sabbath on the other
side of the hill, or aliens taking you up and
probing you. And on the probe note, it's also worth
(25:28):
noting that a lot of these sleep browses encounters do
end up having a kind of sexual overtone to them, because,
I mean, sleep itself, the dream world often has shades
obviously of sexual desire in there, and seen as the
human brain in the state of sleep is still relatively
(25:49):
mysterious in some fronts, um it makes sense that we
don't we don't completely understand what triggers this arrhythmic cycle
or synchronous zation between the conscious mind and the human body.
But we also know that the human mind is not
(26:10):
dichotomous when it comes to waking and sleeping. Right, there's
sort of a spectrum and we all kind of slide
along it on our way to sleep and then our
way to hitting the snooze button again. And there's this
really weird sort of twilight zone sweet spot if you will,
where in you can have dreams or hallucinations that are
(26:35):
more vivid even then. You know, any high school comedy
you've seen where someone accidentally takes acid. Yeah, you when
you're drifting into sleep or coming out of it, you
kind of have a leg in both worlds. Now, in
my own experience that, like, the two examples that I
come back to on this are pretty much any night
(26:55):
that I'm I'm sleeping, I'm I'm drifting off the sweep,
but I'm still reading. I don't know if you guys
encount of this. If you reach that point where you're
still reading, but you're not reading the book like you're
somehow reading a made up book off the very real
pages that you're looking at, and and generally that's the
point where you where I'm just kind of think, oh, well,
I'm not reading the real book anymore. Time to go
(27:16):
to sleep. But when you stop and you look back
and you really you know, you end up doing a
double tick on that, Like that is that is a
cue that there is this very weird twilight zone that
you're trouncing through on your way to slumber. Have you
guys evergotten the I don't know a better way to
explain it besides the the blue falling hallucination of it's
(27:39):
just kind of blue light that falls in front of
your eyes. Did do either of you guys wear contacts? Yes? Yes? Okay,
So when I sleep without my contacts, and I've got
extremely close um near sightedness, and sometimes when I wake
up and everything is very blurry, I'm still in somewhat
(28:01):
of a dream state, and I'm just trying to decide
whether or not I want to actually get up or
not I will if I close one eye, I can
see this kind of blue falling light. Um, I guess
in the eye that I have clothes, but it's by
doing so it ends up being transferred onto my left
eye that is open in this case, and I've been
(28:23):
trying to figure out exactly what that is, and and
it has something to do with the this type of hallucination,
hallucination what is it called? These types of hallucinations? All right,
there to two different states, two different hallucinations we're talking
about here. One is the hypnopompic state. Now, this is
a state of consciousness leading out of sleep, and in
(28:44):
the opposite, the state leading into sleep is the hypnogogic state.
And in theory, the hypnogogic state, again, you're going to sleep,
and so the rational waking mind is trying to make
sense of nonlinear dream images and association. Uh so again
you're you're seeing pages that aren't there, and you're trying
to figure out why am I seeing pages that aren't there?
(29:05):
You know that kind of thing. Meanwhile, the hypnopompic state
is the emotional and naive dreaming mind trying to make
sense of real world sights and sounds. So this is
where we get this, this waking dream. So there might
be some sort of weird shadow in the room, the
light is strange on the ceiling, we hear the sound
of the cat scratching on something, and we still have
(29:28):
that crazy open dream mind that's trying to make sense
of it, the same mind that totally buys into whatever fantastic,
crazy dream you're having. Of course, I'm fighting a dragon,
this is what I do. That mind is suddenly trying
to figure out what the cat is doing under the bed.
So maybe it's a dragon, right, Yeah, And then that's
that's perfect because we can make we can make a
(29:49):
few examples here that will be clearly understandable to anyone
who has missed their alarm clock a couple of times.
You guys, So if you're listening, you've probably had this
moment where you're in a dream and then there's a
fire alarm somewhere in the distance, or a car alarm,
(30:09):
or if you use a ring tone on your cell phone,
all of a sudden, your strange dream with uh, your
old high school buddy and I don't know, Vladimir Putin,
what something topical? All of a sudden this ring tone
you love comes on and you and your high school
chum and Vladimir Putin are dancing to every day I'm hustling.
(30:30):
And then you wake up, which I assume is someone's
ring tone, And then you wake up and you realize, oh,
it was all. It was all a dream that these
things happening in the outside world went through this this
internal script that I had that might have been influenced
by historical older scripts, religious scripts, folkloric stuff. And to
(30:54):
me that's fascinating because when I fall asleep with a
ray Deo on or something like that, Um, you know, Robert,
I recently got a dog and the dog makes noises
that my sleeping mind is not used to write because
you're you're a new dog owner, right, the cat person
up upol Now, yeah, yeah, and uh, I've had a lot.
(31:18):
It turns out the dog snores, So I've had I've
actually had a couple of sleeping dragon dreams and waking
up and finding out that thank god, it's just a
puppy and not smell. You know, I have a very
clear memory from when I was like a young kid,
definitely in an age where every toys are everything, you know,
(31:39):
action figures are everything, and and you know, you end
up do you see these pictures in like the serious
catalog and you just you obsessed about it, like I
would love to have that Transformer one day. And I
distinctly remember waking up from a dream of having some
sort of fancy Transformer former toy and seeing it next
to me in the bed for were you know, for
(32:01):
this very small amount of time, but enough time to
make an impact on me as a child. Now, Grant
it's a memory. And we've on this podcast, we've talked
plenty of times about how uh, how how many opportunities
we have to mess up a dream, especially every time
we drag it out of the box. But but it
but it had an impact on me because I saw
how there was this possibility for something in a dream
to sort of follow you out of the dream for
(32:23):
a little bit before it scampers back to the the subconscious. Uh.
That is a beautiful and terrifying thought. Yeah, well that's
the thing. It is that beautiful and terrifying, just like
all these various interpretations of the paranormal. Yeah, and when
we're talking about shadow people, it's it's fairly apparent that
(32:45):
you know, this this falling into waking and sleeping and
and the weird twilight zone between those two points. It's
fairly apparent that this is a very old thing, and
that what we call shadow people today in the age
of the Internet, have been called many other things and
often behaving in some of the same ways. But we
(33:09):
have an advantage, um, an advantage that was one through
bloody centuries of experimentation and breaking ethics, we know a
little bit more about the human brain. Right, and you
sent us some some fascinating information regarding uh kind of
a look behind the curtain explaining that feeling of a presence, right, yeah, yeah,
(33:30):
it's it's a really fascinating study came out in two
thousand six, Uh, Swiss study public in the journal Nature.
And uh no, it was not a study that was
specifically targeting the shadow people, because I guess you tend
to have trouble getting funding for that kind of thing.
But the thing is, this sort of apparition, this kind
of shadow figure, does play into the experiences of psychiatric
(33:54):
and neurological patients. So the researchers made this discovery while
evaluating a perfectly norm twenty two year old woman for
surgical treatment of epilepsy, and when they electronically stimulated her
brains left temper operato junction, or t PJ, they repeatedly
gave her the sensation of a lurking shadow man in
her presence. Uh. She perceived the shadow person is just
(34:18):
behind her. She perceived the figure as interfering with her
attempts to read a book, like trying to snatch it
out of her hands. And when the researchers stimulated her
in a seated position, this is the best part for me.
She perceived herself to be seated in the entity's lap
and he had he she had its arms around her,
and she described this as being an unpleasant feeling. That's
(34:41):
that's really interesting, just the idea of she basically was
having an out of almost this strange out of body
experience in a way where she was I guess her
her feeling of this is hard for me to explain.
I can't explain this. Maybe you guys will be better
at this, but just that I've had feeling before, but
not because my brain was being electrocuted. Well, it's kind
(35:04):
of like some some part of her sensory interpretation got
was hijacked. You know. By this, by this simulation, we
know that in terms of evolution, it's been necessary and
advantageous for people to have that feeling of you know,
a sixth sense or shining or whatever. In short, it's
(35:28):
it's really good for the human race at large. If
a lot of us are paranoid in uh, in strange situations,
but also finding the finding the neurological button or one
of the neurological buttons that can trigger this reminds me
of some some earlier stuff that you guys have done
on this show about finding a specific part of the
(35:51):
brain that is responsible for, you know, experiencing the presence
of God for instance. Right. Um. The the thing about
this is that, um, Matt and I are pretty into
self experimentation, so I would love to figure out a way.
I don't know if you should shock your brain. Do
(36:11):
you have a tDCS or some form of electrical brain
show working on all kinds of stuff? What are you
making it yourself? I would not you like off the
plans off the internet, or you're buying one at a
at a punch shot. Look, Robert, the FDA are trying
to trying to stop the progress of my experimentation, and uh,
(36:37):
you know I've I've tried several different methods. It is
true that there are now finally some commercially available t
DCS devices that do not require you to be a
doctor in charge of a clinical study, But those devices,
uh leave a lot to be desired, and if you
want something done right, you often need to do it
(36:59):
yourself before you go shocking your left temporo parato junction
of t VJ. UH. Let's let's just take it apart
for a second for the listeners here and go through
what the the t PJ does. The TPJ concerns self processing, UH,
self other distinction and multisensory body integration info UH. The
(37:19):
the electrical stimulation in this case of this again UH
perfectly normal otherwise patient, it's thought to have caused her
to attribute her own actions to this alien entity, to
her to her shadow, to something just a few degrees
left of her actual location or a little bit behind
her um and uh. And so the researchers proposed that
(37:40):
electrical stimulation to this area in the patient disturbed again
multisensory but also um sensor motor integration of the information
with respect to her body, leading to the appearance of
a of what what is otherwise the first rank symptom
of schizophrenia in this a person with no psychiatric history.
Along those lines, um, so we're getting we're getting down
(38:02):
to the perception of not only reality, but the perception
of self in reality, which which we often take for Granted,
you know, we think that we know who we are
because we're looking out of this body and we're seeing
the world, and and then a lot of it's based
on site. But clearly it's more complex than that, right,
And we see here the line between our same perceptions
(38:25):
of reality and self and the insane or the magical
being just uh, a far slimmer line than the most
of us assume unders the daily basis. It makes me
wonder if one day we will ascribe a sixth sense
as our sense of just that overall sense of self
that we're describing here, of where we are in reality.
(38:47):
It's not necessarily touched, not necessarily site or any of that.
It's just your own, your brain's own understanding of where
it is in spacetime. Yeah, it's almost like if you're
watching a movie and the film quality blurs, or the
or the boom mic is suddenly in shot, like to
a certain extent, seeing shadow people or experiencing and out
(39:07):
of body experience. That which we'll get into a second here,
is kind of like the boom mic getting in the shot.
But it's like if you saw the film though, and
you didn't say, hey, there's a boom mic. You might
think there is a demon on the ceiling in this room.
What are our characters going to do to survive it? Like,
we don't have the processing, you know, like the brain
you can get in that area with the brain cannot
stand outside of itself and perceive itself. What were you
(39:29):
gonna say about astral travel or out of bodies well,
you know, out of body experiences or O b ees
And apparently somebody calls them um the you know these happen.
People do experience these is It's not just unsolved mystery stuff.
They most commonly happen to people with neurological disorders such
as the chronic migraine strokes, epilepsy, brain tumors. UH. Some
(39:52):
also estimated five of perfectly healthy people also have the
sensation at some point UH. And we can actually a
connect out of body experiences again to that TPJ researchers
have used transparano magnetic stimulation on the t p J
to impair mental transformations of the body in healthy volunteers,
(40:13):
so essentially able to UH to stimulate that part of
the brain to reduce a kind of out of body
experience without the aid of you know, near death experience.
Or astral projection or strain or whatever they did in flatliners.
The funny side note for that, uh, the United States
(40:34):
government actually poured quite a bit of money into ob research.
You there's a there's a film loosely based on that
called The Menu Steric Goats. Uh. They have, but they
they have people who were professional astral travelers, the most
(40:55):
famous of which was a guy named Dingo Swan. I
should go ahead and say, in the interests of fairness,
that this program was, to our knowledge, canceled because it
was not as cost effective as you know they had hoped. Yeah. Well,
and there was remote viewing. I guess that would be
(41:17):
a form of astral travel. Yeah, there are a lot
of interesting things. It was that Project stargates, Project Stargate fascinating. Well,
I mean, if you look at it, I guess from
the government's point of view, if perceivably there might be
a window open there, you don't want to just be
there one day when the Soviets come crawling through that window.
You want to explore that window and make sure that
it is indeed closed or at least maybe I'm I'm
(41:39):
hopeful that that is the mindset that's precisely actually, that's
exactly the reasoning that we That's the closest thing we
could arrive at. So So, Robert, have we found the
explanation behind shadow people? I think so. I think it's
if it's not again you get into shadow people, this
(42:00):
seems to be varying um degrees of it, Like, this
is definitely a case where someone is perceiving a very
near um entity, something that is basically living just a
few degrees away from their own body. Uh. And I
think that we can definitely see with with these experiments
with the t PJ. Now when you get into some
of the other scenarios where someone's viewing a shadow on
(42:23):
the other side of the room, I think maybe we
need to turn more towards that that realm of sleep
paralysis and those waking or plunging into slumber hallucinations. But
but I think we have some strong ammo here to
to explain some of the cases and and throw a
lot of rational thinking at other cases. I don't know, guys,
(42:43):
I'm gonna hold out judgment until Game of Thrones concludes
in like, oh man, if he ever finishes those books,
it's get it's the races early on to see what's
going to happen, not in terms of the storyline just
that one, but t V versus versus the novels which
finished first. Well, I would just like to say it
(43:08):
feels like we're concluding here. I would just like to say, Robert,
thank you again for having us on. It's been a pleasure.
Oh well, thank you guys for joining me. Yeah, we
we just have a few minutes here before the shadowy
entities creep in and drag us away. But uh, we
should probably go ahead and just chill absolutely everything. So
first of all, of you guys have been doing this
awesome video series for a while and your efforts have
(43:30):
just recently expanded. Uh, please share with with our listeners
everything you're working on right now, not the top secret
stuff or the illegal stuff involving brain stimulation, but all
the on the board stuff area. But okay, sure, well
if okay, if you want to learn more about our show,
you can go to the longest r L in history
called stuff they Don't Want You to Know dot com,
(43:54):
or you can find us on YouTube. We are conspiracy
stuff on there. Um. We make shows three shows a week.
There might be more, sometimes it might be less. Who knows.
Who knows. We also make an audio show No True Yeah,
where we reference stuff to blow your mind as well,
and let's see. Oh, we're also on Twitter. Uh, but
(44:18):
I'd like to spend some time, uh talking about some
stuff to blow your mind, things that I think everybody
should check out. If you're listening to this and you
haven't visited Stuff to Blew your Mind dot com, to
check out the amazing blog our our mutual favorite met
is always monster related right. Oh, yes, and there's something
(44:40):
very special coming up. I don't know if have you
been talking about this yet. Yeah, I've been mentioning a
little bit and it should be out at for anyone
listening to h the show right now. But yeah, I
do this Monster of the Week blog series where I
take a take something in the monster's realm, be at
you know, pop culture or movies, X files or something
more chloora myth based and then try and get at
(45:03):
the science of it. For instance, with the Shadow People,
it is a direct study that linked it. Other times
I'm kind of taking something that that that that isn't
about that monster. But if you start bringing the two together,
then you can see, uh, you can see the connections Basically,
the idea is that whatever we attribute to the fantastic
in a made up monster, if you look close enough
(45:24):
in the natural world, you'll find something just as fantastic. Uh.
And and that's ultimately the connection I try and get
out there. And so now we have a video series
based on this. Uh. They we running six episodes off
called Monster Science, where with Dr Anton Jessup who is
a disgraced curator of monster Sciences at the university, and
(45:45):
we were able to get him to do this a
series for us right there in his basement. It's yeah,
well hopefully so and you know, and and if it's
a success, will do more of them. If not, then
the Dr Jessup may may may vanish for a while
and your mysterious circumstances I hope not cool. All right, well, hey,
you know, check it out. You can find it on
our YouTube channel, Mind Stuff Show. It's also all over
(46:06):
stuffable your mind dot com. That's our mothership. That's where
all of the podcasts episode live. That's where the videos are,
that's where the blog posts are, and that's where you
also find links out to these various social media accounts
like Facebook, Tumbler, Twitter, etcetera. Um. Also, I mentioned this
on the Facebook some of you you had asked me
about this, But I also personally have a collection of
(46:29):
short stories out called eight Black Offerings. So if anyone
out there is interested in h some rather bleak, gruesome
horror tales that I wrote previously and had been published previously, Uh,
that book is available. Can search for it on Amazon.
And it's only for grown ups. Oh yeah, live testimonial.
I picked up a copy of this book, and I
(46:49):
don't know if we talked about it, but I really
enjoyed it personally, and the only thing I was gonna
say is that it's probably only for adults. Yeah, yeah,
it's uh, it's some grooms up that It's not the
kind of stuff I would even write today. But anyway,
I bring it out because because I know some of
your listeners had asked about it. H And in the future,
I'm hopefully gonna have some stuff out that is uh,
it's it's more for a general eye Getting dark with
(47:12):
Robert Lamb. Yeah yeah, that's the next and the next
video series. So anyway, Hey, you guys have an email address,
right If people want to reach you on email, where
do they send those uh, those those queries about shadow people.
You can send all of your complaints to conspiracy at
Discovery dot com. Wait wait, you can. You can send
any questions about shadow people to conspiracy at Discovery dot com.
(47:36):
If you have complaints, please do forward them to our
official complaint department, Jonathan Stricklands over back stuff. So that's
Jonathan Strickland at Discovery dot com. Cool and as always,
our email address is blow the Mind at Discovery dot com.
(47:58):
For more on this and thousands of other topic is
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