How can I know whether someone truly sees something?

January 18, 2016 9:18 AM

I am an anthropologist-in-training who spends time in living with a community with a strong medicine-man institution. The medicine-men claim to see various sorts of spirits, and often in very casual settings, like during walks in the forest or while sitting in the house. They'll say stuff like, "there's one sitting right there. It's red with hair on top." I want to know - is there a scientifically compelling way to investigate whether they actually "see" spirits?

Two quick notes:

1. The spirit-seeing doesn't come from consuming any substances and doesn't seem to otherwise be related to ecstatic or psychedelic experiences.

2. I don't believe that there are actually spirits (or at least am incredibly skeptical and would need compelling evidence), but I think it's plausible that they hallucinate them because they have a motivation to do so.

Any kind of methodological suggestions are welcome! E.g., ask them three times over three weeks what the spirits look like, do eye scanning/pupil following, give them visual illusions and ask them to identify them. Although I'm ultimately limited by cost and by the amount of equipment I can lug to the field, out-of-the-box musings are still appreciated.

Thanks!

posted by mrmanvir to Science & Nature (22 answers total)

The answer to your question, as asked "... is there a scientifically compelling way to investigate whether they actually "see" spirits?...", is no...

I think the question you need to ask is "...is there a scientifically compelling way to investigate whether they BELIEVE they actually "see" spirits?"

In which case, lie detector (and even this isn't that reliable)... But even then you're only testing the truth of their belief... Is that what you want to test for?
posted by HuronBob at 9:27 AM on January 18, 2016

I think this is a question you need to ask your research supervisor. Because, among other concerns (such as the fact that you're asking for a way to challenge whether people who have been kind enough to welcome you into their community are lying), any scientific testing you're going to do on human subjects will likely have to be run by your university's Institutional Review Board.
posted by decathecting at 9:28 AM on January 18, 2016 [51 favorites]

Basically, you want to collect corroboration from independent observers, and ideally you'd like to do that in a way that prevents contamination from the interview process. And verifying the independence of the observers is pretty hard, because they could be repeating commonalities of myth or lore in reporting their observations.

Because the only way this information is actionable (in a "whoah! Evil spirits, I better avoid that area!") is if the same phenomena impacts multiple independent observers.
posted by straw at 9:35 AM on January 18, 2016

One notes that as an anthropologist (cultural, biological, archaeology, some other subfield?), your job isn't to investigate whether or not the visions are 'actually' there - you're there to study people's beliefs and their culture and how the beliefs influence the culture, vice versa, how culture has changed over time and they all interact with each other and all that. Which I know you know, but I'm saying - I can understand the curiosity and even skepticism, but proving or disproving someone's core the actuality of someone's core beliefs isn't why we're there as social scientists, and it's easy to forget that sometimes the longer we're in the field.

Also, I can't favor decathecting's comment enough.
posted by joycehealy at 9:37 AM on January 18, 2016 [21 favorites]

you can track someone's eyes to see what they look at, but it takes rather a lot of equipment to do either one

I'm not well read-up on it but quick googling makes it sound like many different companies and projects are working on eye-tracking enhancements for the off-the-shelf virtual reality systems available now. So that caliber of eye-tracking equipment may soon be something you can just walk into a store and buy.
posted by XMLicious at 9:44 AM on January 18, 2016

I don't know a lot about anthropology, but from what I do know (a handful of undergrad-level courses) the sort of problem you're describing touches on one of the central conundrums of participant observation. Namely, how do you, the researcher, evaluate the truth value of what your informants are reporting to you? Relatedly, how do you know they aren't deliberately lying to you?

Definitely talk to your advisor about this. There have got to be absolute mountains of scholarly thought around this problem, and guiding you through them is part of the core duties of your mentor.

You might also want to do some premise-questioning around your problem here. Is the central issue really whether or not these spirits "really" exist, or does it have more to do with how reality as perceived by your informants affects the way they live in the world? Your advisor should be able to offer you some guidance here as well.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 9:46 AM on January 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

You may be interested in some of the brain imaging work that's been done on glossolalia. It's not directly relevant to your research situation, but it's one example of using some objective measure to "confirm" reports of a highly subjective spiritual experience. (Note though that the "confirmation" they get is fairly weak: something along the lines of "It's plausible that they're not lying when they talk about how they feel when they're speaking in tongues.")

But also, yes, like everyone else says, talk to your supervisor about ethics and laws — and about whether this is research that he has any interest in supervising — before preceding.
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:48 AM on January 18, 2016

I am an anthropologist-in-training... is there a scientifically compelling way to investigate whether they actually "see" spirits?

I'm just some internet guy who took anthro undergrad, but that is a really strange frame to bring to ethnographic fieldwork. If nothing else, it's an anachronism.

Consider the emic/etic distinction. Why do you care about this? Do other members of the culture care if the visions are verifiable? What does 'actually see' even mean to them?
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:49 AM on January 18, 2016 [26 favorites]

I don't think the OP actually wants to conduct such testing, I think they're just curious about the limits of science. I am not a doctor, biologist or neurologist, but I think *maybe*. If they could see a spirit while in a lab hooked up to machines, it might be possible to know if they are actually having what I would call a visual hallucination, for lack of a better term. I say this based on things I've seen on TV where they can hook things up to your visual cortex, and then somehow unscramble them into a fuzzy image on a tv screen. Your visual cortex also does your visual memory and I'm sure would be active in hallucination (said the non-MD, non-neurologist). There was an episode of house where they did this for some purpose. In that case, the image was of a man swinging a baseball bat, I remember. But I'm sure I've seen similar things on documentary type shows.

So I think it might be possible assuming the spirits aren't just in the woods or that the necessary equipment could be taken to the forest. Obviously it's not a good idea for the OP to do this, but I don't think they want to.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:51 AM on January 18, 2016

It seems no one has stated the obious. Define what "seeing" means for you first, then think of a method to investigate it according to accepted scientific guidelines.

Btw I disagree about this generally being a question that would need supervision. You can still fully respect the test subject while and after conducting a scientific experiment on them. I would think that someone whose life doesn't follow scientific reasoning couldn't care less about them failing an scientific evaluation. Don't tell them they idiots based on the result, though.
posted by oxit at 9:56 AM on January 18, 2016

Short answer: No.

Long answer: No, and I think you need to check in and clarify with your advisor about what you are doing in the field. To me this sounds like a fundamental misapprehension of what cultural anthropology is and does. This is not a problem, as you are there to learn, after all; but I'd advise you to calibrate what you are doing with your advisor, before you set off on a long and ultimately unfruitful detour.

Who would you say are your main anthropological theoretical influences here? How would they answer your question?

If I was going to suggest anything, I would possibly point you to the cog psych literature, and methods such as MRIs; but (obviously) you are not going to go there.
posted by carter at 10:13 AM on January 18, 2016 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Hi all,

Thanks for all the responses so far! I appreciate people's comments both about the ethics or relevance of a question of this sort to anthropology and about plausible methodologies.

To briefly respond to some points that people have brought up, my primary research doesn't revolve around this question (it's instead about the cultural variation of taboos and the processes by which supernaturally-enforced rules emerge). But, that being said, the question of how cognition and perception relate is one that is currently hotly debated in the cognitive sciences - especially, can and do cognitive states like beliefs, motivations, and emotions affect perception? (e.g., check out this paper that's about to come out in BBS.) My interest in this question is thus less as an anthropologist and more as a curious academic.

I agree very much with comments regarding IRB approval, data-sharing with participants, respecting trust, etc. At the moment, my interest in this question is purely - is it possible?

Thanks again!
posted by mrmanvir at 10:39 AM on January 18, 2016

Well, look. You're getting at the fundamental question that anthropology addresses about cultural experience and subjective realities.

Does this guy experience reality in such a way that he can accurately report to you with language that he "sees spirits?" Apparently so, right? But this doesn't exist in your world. So, from your frame of reference, this cannot be real, but from his frame of reference, it's as real to him as your college degree is to you.

So, no. As a fundamental property of reality and cognition, you can't know. Ever. About anything.
posted by cmoj at 10:57 AM on January 18, 2016 [10 favorites]

You might be able to have the several subjects draw what they see and compare the drawings. Get a Pantone book and ask them exactly what color red it is. Ask the drawing or color question of the same individual on separate occasions. Does that give you any ideas?
posted by irisclara at 1:10 PM on January 18, 2016

I think that any request to the 'medicine-men' to draw what they see pre-supposes that they understand what 'draw what you see' means, as well as the purpose of representational art.
posted by carter at 1:20 PM on January 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

The way they test whether people with grapheme-color synesthesia are actually seeing colored letters is to do a semantic priming test, a Stroop task, measuring reaction time to various color/word pairings that match or don't match. There could be principles related to that that you could use to test this. Though the difficulty with synesthesia, as you may find with this, is that perception isn't always about physically seeing or hearing something. I perceive persistent color associations with every letter, number, and word written in the Latin alphabet and Arabic or Roman numerals, but at least as far as has been shown in limited semantic-priming testing, I don't necessarily see these colors to the extent that it interferes with my reaction time in the way the test measures. It's more just like a hovering semantic meaning associated with the symbols and words, and while it does interfere with my typing sometimes when I'm tired (e.g., typing R for 5 and vice versa, or 2 for S), most tests aren't going to pick up on that. The problem, of course, is that every synaesthete has different grapheme-color associations, so it's hard to get reproducible results, since RED in blue and BLUE in red doesn't necessarily correspond to one's stated grapheme-color associations in any useful way.
posted by limeonaire at 1:46 PM on January 18, 2016

Well, you have a lot of terms to define here. What you mean by 'really' and what you mean by 'see'? This is kind of like asking if you can record someone's dreams to verify if they dreamed of a certain thing the way they describe it. We don't have the technology to do that yet, as far as I know.

I have taken many shamanistic journeys before, in the jungle, facilitated by natives who have been working with these medicines for generations. I saw things, as did they. Were we seeing into the spirit world? Where do you draw the line between 'seeing something from the spirit world' and 'hallucinations / visions'? Is one real and the other is not? The way our culture interprets these things. . . it's not the same for them.
posted by ananci at 3:03 PM on January 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

If you are asking this as a curious academic, I recommend two readings that you may benefit from, one is Donna Haraway's "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." In addition, I would also read Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples that would give you a better perspective on how your question came about, and some critiques of it. Both of these readings and scholars are wonderful for questioning even how we go around doing our research, and I appreciate their brilliance in sharing and articulating this so well.
posted by yueliang at 3:36 PM on January 18, 2016 [9 favorites]

My two cents: Stop investigating whether he literally or figuratively sees things.

Start looking into what his claims of seeing things does for him, with regard to tangible benefits, his happiness levels, life outlook, social standing, etc. Those are things that can be measured by surveys and observation.

The guy that says he sees things and gets nothing may just be a happy (or unhappy) kook. Or a failure as a liar. Or anything, really.

The guy that says he sees things and get treated by his fellows as something special because of it ... now that's something to write about.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 6:58 PM on January 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

It strikes me that pupil scanning or other technological interventions regarding these visions seriously risk being examples of what Michael Taussig terms "frontier rituals of technological supremacy" rather than neutral scientific instruments.

Yueliang is right on in recommending the Donna Haraway article.
posted by umbú at 8:00 PM on January 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

It seems to me a fair question, if not the first one would expect a cultural anthropologist to be asking. It's also a broad question that can be sharpened in various ways. The medicine man is reporting having a visual experience. One could ask about the object of that experience -- the spirits he reports to see in it. He says he sees these spirits: are there really spirits there that cause his visual experience? Or one could ask about the quality of his visual experience. Whatever the answer is regarding the reality of these spirits, we can be curious as to whether the visual experience he reports having is like other visual experiences he has -- of people and material objects, etc. -- involving shapes and colors in a visual field, or whether it is markedly different, even if in some way still a perceptual experience.

I kind of think your itch here may be better scratched with the addition some philosophy about perception to your conceptual mix. If you haven't read the classic treatises by Descartes and Berkeley in which the question of the reliability of perception as source of knowledge of the 'real' world is raised, you may find them fruitful for expanding what your question is. More directly related to your specific topic is William James' Varieties of Religious Experience.
posted by bertran at 2:09 AM on January 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

I just want to add for clarification to my immediately above post that when the modern Westerner ventures out into the world religions -- great or small -- he or she may well find that the veracity of his or her own perceptions of the everyday world and the reality of that world is called into doubt. Even if, or perhaps especially because, it's a world that seems to be confirmed by Western science. But such skepticism about the reality of our perceptual world -- analogous to your skepticism about the reality of the medicine man's world -- can also be found within the Western philosophical tradition, and it might be useful to come to terms with it on home ground, so to speak, so as not to confuse overmuch metaphysical and epistemological questions with questions arising out of the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter.

The philosopher Anthony Appaiah is good in Cosmopolitanism at stressing that in meetings between cultures things go better in the long run if all involved allow themselves to be vulnerable to skepticism and criticism from their interlocutors about what they hold to be true and good.
posted by bertran at 7:31 PM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]