**TL;DR: There are scientific reasons to explain 'paranormal' activity** I'm not saying that weird things don't happen, but I don't think that this is due to ghosts or paranormal activity. For example, [Science News For Students] (https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/science-ghosts) argue that there are a lot of scientific reasons for people's supposed ghost sightings. Examples include things such as [sleep paralysis] (https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/sleep-paralysis#:~:text=Sleep%20paralysis%20is%20a%20feeling,or%20a%20sense%20of%20choking.), which happens when the brain 'messes up' the process of falling asleep or waking, which causes you to have vivid hallucinations that are very realistic. Other examples include misperceptions, such as seeing things that aren't there, such as seeing a face in the shadow. Psychologists say that this happens to everyone at some point, but some turn to ghosts for explanations. [Professor Brian Cox] (https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1042786/brian-cox-do-ghosts-exist-lorraine-kelly-large-hadron-collider-lhc) further argued that the Standard Model of Physics does not allow for the substance that can carry information after death that would not be detected by the Large Hadron Collider. The Standard Model of Physics states that if energy is lost it requires energy to move or emit light, so by this reasoning, ghosts cannot exist. So whilst I think that ghost stories and horror movies are very enjoyable to watch and fun to theorize about, I don't think that they are actually real.

**Finding evidence for ghosts is somewhat problematic. There are, though, recent end-of-life cognitive lucidity studies that are causing some to suspect that consciousness can survive death, which would leave open the possibility for ghosts.** - There seems to be a problem at the heart of the search for ghosts: As writer Benjamin Radford puts it for an [article](https://www.livescience.com/26697-are-ghosts-real.html) on Live Science, "Either ghosts exist and appear in our ordinary physical world (and can therefore be detected and recorded in photographs, film, video and audio recordings), or they don't. If ghosts exist and can be scientifically detected or recorded, then we should find hard evidence of that — yet we don't. If ghosts exist but cannot be scientifically detected or recorded, then all the photos, videos, audio and other recordings claimed to be evidence of ghosts cannot be ghosts." - [Recent studies](https://med.nyu.edu/research/parnia-lab/scientific-presentations) on end-of-life cognitive lucidity have revealed that consciousness, at least in some cases, appears to continue after biological death. Dr. Sam Parnia tells Robert Lawrence Kuhn on [Closer To Truth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz_4FGdWVF8) that patients who were resuscitated hours after their deaths---after their brains ceased functioning---have provided scientific evidence that consciousness continues during those few hours, in the form of oftentimes-corroborated-evidence of conscious experience during their time being biologically dead. Whether it continues after three, four, five, and so on hours is not at this time knowable, but Parnia (and others) believe that the evidence for continued consciousness during the first few hours after someone would normally be declared dead is there. - Personally, I spot at least two potential problems with this: 1. Maybe the resuscitated patients are remembering something that happened prior to their death, and thinking, once they've been resuscitated, that that experience happened when they were dead. Or 2. Maybe we just can't detect that there still is activity in the physical brain during these hours of death, but it's nonetheless there. - Regardless, Parnia's research on resuscitation and cognitive lucidity in death is fascinating. I recommend reading this [article/interivew](https://www.nyas.org/news-articles/academy-news/is-there-life-after-death/), from which I have pulled the following three paragraphs: "Recently some researchers have started to raise the question that maybe your mind, your consciousness, your psyche, the thing that makes you, may not be produced by the brain. The brain might be acting more like an intermediary. It's not a brand new idea. They have argued that we have no evidence to show how brain cells or connections of brain cells could produce your thoughts, mind or consciousness. The fact that people seem to have full consciousness, with lucid well-structured thought processes and memory formation from a time when their brains are highly dysfunctional or even nonfunctional is perplexing and paradoxical. I do agree that this raises the possibility that the entity we call the mind or consciousness may not be produced by the brain. It’s certainly possible that maybe there's another layer of reality that we haven't yet discovered that's essentially beyond what we know of the brain, and which determines our reality. So, I believe it is possible for consciousness to be an as of yet undiscovered scientific entity that may not necessarily be produced by synaptic activity in the brain." --Dr. Sam Parnia - Note: The second paragraph of the above quote is where I personally find there could be issues for scientific certainty, namely the 2 problems I mentioned above: Perhaps what we think is "nonfunctional" in terms of brain activity is actually lowly active in a way that defies current (or potentially ever possible) forms of measurement. And, second, maybe the "memory formation" from that time of death is not actually a memory formation _from that time death_, but instead a brief, dream-like experience people had before they _fully_ died, which they then, after they're resuscitated, imagined to have occurred during those next hours after their death and prior to their resuscitation (the "full" death.) Dreams can, after all, feel quite long, even if they're in reality fairly short. And it seems possible that a resuscitated brain could be confused about the timeframes of events, considering it was potentially literally gone out of them, excluded from these timeframes in the heaviest way it ostensibly can be, for a period of time. - Nevertheless, any evidence for continued consciousness after death is, of course, quite intriguing.

**Ghosts who look like a white phantom figure and say BOO most likely don't exist, but as paranormal sightings go up we should be careful about saying that there are no such thing as ghosts or paranormal activity.** - In 2020 a UK poll claimed that [three in five] (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwj9k_jHjPzxAhVGa8AKHSE6AgEQFjAHegQIDRAD&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fuk%2Fhome-news%2Fghost-halloween-supernatural-experience-majority-people-survey-groupon-a8581156.html&usg=AOvVaw0Ej1RkfHQdMSuCTQ_ftmlA) people had witnessed paranormal activity. Of course this statistic varies, some articles claim that only [34%](https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2014/10/31/ghosts-exist-say-1-3-brits) of people believe in ghosts, and [9%](https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2014/10/31/ghosts-exist-say-1-3-brits) actually communicate with them. I think when witnessing paranormal activity becomes as frequent as it is here, there must be some truth to it. - This doesn't mean that they are communicating with their dead relatives or getting haunted by a ghost, but a certain 'presence' may have been witnessed. I feel that the image of ghosts that we imagine has adapted to our modern society. We expect ghosts to be white wash figures who jump out of a cupboard and say boo. This seems unlikely. - However, there could be some supernatural presence that is created after death. This after-all has been speculated for thousands of years. This does not necessarily need to be a ghost, but some sort of presence or being that allows your consciousness to carry on living after your mortal body dies. - I would like to believe in ghosts, mainly because it suggests that life is not as finite as it may seem.

**ghosts don't exist like they do on TV, but this does not mean we should rule out the possibility.** - the idea of ghosts has become so prevalent that it has made them real in a sense. whether there is truth to their existence or not, they have come to symbolise more than a white sheet drawn on with sharpies. they can bring comfort to those who are afraid of what comes after life and those who wish to believe they are still able to reunite with loved ones. - [nearly one-in-five U.S. adults (18%) say they’ve seen or been in the presence of a ghost.](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/30/18-of-americans-say-theyve-seen-a-ghost/%3famp=1) it can be easy to dismiss every single experience as a coincidence or easily explained away, but after a point it does become intriguing how so many different experiences have taken place where at least one must have had some truth to it. - different cultures will also have different takes on the phenomenon, meaning ghosts are not pictured the same way universally. this makes it even harder to actually prove if they exist or not, since what a ghost actually is can vary. thus, everyone should believe what they want since it harms no one to have a different take on the matter. no one can possibly be right or wrong on the situation as there is no way to tell. - similarly to aliens, it would be arrogant to assume we are all there is in this world and the best that it can do. they may exist in a completely different form than we believe they do. the universe is full of endless possibilities and we can never fully know it or explore it in its entirety.