WHY WE SEE GHOSTS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 72, 26 March 1928, Page 6

WHY WE SEE GHOSTS.

In the Victorian Christinas the ghost played an important role, both in the magazines and round the fireside as the wind moaned in the chimney and the snowflakes silted against the window. Many a timid youngster climbed the stairs with "goose-flesh" and a sneaking dread of the dark. Every deserted mansion was haunted by mysterious lights, clanking chains, and bloodcurdling moans, writes Dr. Frederick Graves in the "Daily Mail."

Alas! to-day the ghost is out of fashion. Science has exploded many a bogey, and the modern youth, who reads natural science and thinks he knows all about psychology, is not to be imposed upon. He knows that "miracles" that puzzled other ages have to-day a commonplace explanation.

We know now that ghosts arc mostly figments of the subconscious mind that gives us dreams. Certain abnormal states, as when effete and toxic matters linger in the system, produce visions readily; even from errors of diet a person may have startling revelations.

That unconscious element that slumbers not, and, when unfettered by the will of the conscious mind, can act by itself, as in hypnotism, somnambulism, automatic walking and writing, accounts for many queer things. Those myriad cells on the verge of the grey matter of the cerebrum are always storing impressions, and now and then they throw the surplus out, often jumbled together and wildly distorted, as in nightmare. There are two sides to the brain, and there have been many Jekylls and Hydes in real life.

But ghosts? Perhaps the only specimen of these unsubstantial figments that can be laid by the heels and tested is that known to the physiologist as Purkinje's Spectre.

This image is a tiny phantom that flickers for a moment, like a pale scarecrow, on the retina of the eye under certain conditions. It is not easy to see, but may be got by going along a dark passage with a lighted candle held at an angle, and is produced by the reflection of a tiny branching vein to the rods and cones of the retina. It has accounted for many a "ghost." There are other Purkinje images and figures produced in a similar manner—a series of receding candle flames caused by reflections and refractions from the various lens surfaces of the eye. It is the Purkinje phenomena also that give the queer visions of figures going upstairs and disappearing into rooms seen by some very sensitive people (as when depressed and agitated by recent deaths) who also hear ghostly following footsteps on stairs and in corridors—from the vibrations of arterial bruits on the tympanum of the ear in moments of apprehension and nervousness. Purkinje has modi to answer fori