Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. Old creepy houses are a horror cliche. But why? Why do old abandoned houses freak us out? My next guest has a theory, and it has to do with a rumble that you cannot hear, but is very real.
Chapter 2: Why do old creepy houses freak us out?
Dr. Rodney Schmaltz, professor of psychology at McEwen University in Edmonton, Alberta, is here to tell us about his new research. Rodney, welcome to the show.
Happy to be here.
Do you think of yourself as a ghostbuster?
I do not. I am an educator. But I teach a class on scientific skepticism, and we do, in fact, go ghost hunting to debunk the tools you see online and on TV. But I would say what I do is a little bit different than ghostbusting.
Do you have an interest in spooky things, spooky houses?
No.
I'm interested in why people have these experiences. So I haven't seen any good evidence for the paranormal or for ghosts, but I do believe that people are genuinely experiencing something. And that's what I'm interested in. What's that something? Why do people feel like they've had these experiences?
Well, let's get into your study because you had a hypothesis that people are feeling something. What were you testing?
We were looking at the impact of infrasound and infrasound is a low frequency sound below 20 hertz. We can't consciously hear it, but we can feel it.
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Chapter 3: What is the role of infrasound in our experiences?
The way I like to describe it is imagine you're at a concert and there's a lot of bass and you kind of feel that tension in your chest and the hair on the back of your neck might go up, but you know what it's from, it's from the music. But imagine a lower level experience like that, maybe not quite as intense, but you can't hear anything.
And infrasound is caused by things like in old buildings, there's low rumbling pipes or could be old boilers as well. It's caused by heavy machinery traffic. So it's kind of all around us. So in our research, what we did is we brought people into the lab and we exposed them to infrasound or not.
And we did that in the presence of relaxing music or more ambient spooky sounds, the kind of thing you'd hear in the background of a horror movie. We took a number of measures, including cortisol. And cortisol is a hormone associated with stress. And what we found was that regardless of the type of music you're listening to, be it creepy or relaxing, cortisol levels went up.
On top of that, across both conditions, so across both types of music, people rated the music as sadder. And they found it less interesting as well. They reported just generally feeling more irritated in the presence of infrasound.
So it's having an effect on us, whether we're cognizant that it's happening or not.
Exactly. And I think it could at least partially explain some hauntings in that sense. So as you said, if you walk into an old building and you don't know what infrasound is, which most people don't, you're feeling something. Especially if you're going to the basement, there's a really good chance that there's some little rumbling pipes down there or an old boiler. Yeah.
And if the setting is right, so it's dark, it's creepy, you feel something, it's quite reasonable for someone to believe that they've experienced a haunting when in fact what they have experienced is an old boiler.
Did you measure infrasound in old houses?
That's actually our follow-up study. So we are looking at that now. We are going to different supposedly haunted locations here in Alberta. And we have control buildings that are not supposedly haunted. And we're looking to see if the infrasound levels are higher in these supposedly haunted places than places that aren't. So we just got started on that.
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Chapter 4: How does infrasound affect our physiological responses?
And once people believe something, we know it's really hard to change their minds. And part of the reason is that when you tell someone that something is false, say that ghosts don't exist, you've created this cognitive gap. So they've experienced something, it felt ghost-like, and then somebody comes along and says, there's no evidence for ghosts. It's like, well, then what did I experience?
So I hope research like this will give people at least some pause, like, okay, maybe what I experienced is an old... low rumbling pipe or an old boiler. So what we're doing then is helping fill in that cognitive gap. So my colleagues are more interested in kind of in the noise pollution side.
I'm more interested in kind of the education side and giving people explanations for supposedly paranormal events.
Yeah, and taking people's experiences of the world seriously enough to investigate them.
Absolutely. Like I said, people are experiencing something. It's a genuine feeling. And we know from past research that expectation is a huge driver of experiencing anomalous or paranormal things. So if you've been told a house is haunted and you go into the basement and you feel something, it's very reasonable to think that it is ghostly.
When again, it could just be a factor of the environment in an old building.
Really interesting, Rodney. Thank you for taking us through it.
Oh, happy to do it.
Dr. Rodney Schmaltz, professor of psychology at McEwen University. After the break, looking for infrasound in nature from volcanoes, earthquakes, even asteroids. Do not go away. On Science Friday, we talk about the science, tech, and health stories changing our world. From a pancreatic cancer vaccine, to data centers in space, to AI in art, to the real science behind cold plunges.
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Chapter 5: What were the findings of the infrasound study?
You first perceive it in your heartbeat of your mother, you know. If you're sitting there breathing, even walking, a lot of our biorhythms are infrasonic in nature. But we kind of, we're just used to them, right? Even at deeper level, you know, the sound of the ocean, it contains massive amounts of infrasound, right? The air moving around us. And what we've done as a species is...
Our ear does not respond very well to those sounds because there's so much of them. So we are immersed in this inaudible sound field all the time.
We're immersed in this audible sound field. So we can't hear it, but can we sense it?
Oh, yes, we can. Consciously? We can when it exceeds our threshold of comfort. We're finely tuned species, right? As soon as infrasound gets a little louder, we perceive it through vibration of our body. And usually when infrasound is loud enough, it leaks into the audio range. So you start hearing as a bass tone, right?
And so that's when we begin to sense that as soon as it increases past our threshold of comfort, there's like, oh, there's something happening. And it can be very unnerving because what generates infrasound is usually bigger and stronger than us, right? We're talking about the forces of nature, right?
A volcano. Yes. A hurricane. An elephant. Yeah, okay.
Big things. Often moving fast, right? An asteroid doesn't have to be big, but if it's moving really fast, it has a lot of power and it will generate infrasound, right? So all these things that are like big, hot, or fast can radiate infrasound. And when you hear those coming, it's fair warning, right?
Yeah.
Well, I wanted to ask, is that part of the interest in studying it? Can you use infrasound to predict that a volcano is going to erupt? Or can it tell us about these phenomena in a different way?
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Chapter 6: How is infrasound measured in supposedly haunted locations?
When I arrived in Hawaii before the turn of the century, I was already an infrasound specialist. I was doing infrasound before it was cool, right? So I was like, oh, there's a volcano here. This is awesome. Does it produce infrasound? Everybody told me, no, Kilauea does not produce infrasound. It's like, hmm, that's unlikely. So...
We made the first basically polished paper of infrasound from Kīlauea volcano. And what you're hearing there is Kīlauea in one of its many incarnations because it's a dynamic system. And this is what it does all the time. At the time of that recording, it was an open vent. It had been in an eruption for over 20 years. And that's what it was radiating all the time.
All the time.
All the time. Now, I don't know if you've seen the activity, the most predictable is
ever been like every week now it erupts and it's really cool to observe that so then opens up and fire fountains and what you hear is a variant of that and it's echoic because it's in a giant caldera right so everything rings so you get this cathedral effect if you listen to it correctly right it takes a lot of effort to insonify something as grandiose as a volcanic eruption into our
A very limited response. So the best I can do is stick into the bass range, you know, like the standoff bass range, and try to make something that conveys that feeling of strength, you know, that comes from the sound field.
Wait, why? Is there some creative license in there? Why is it difficult to insanify it? I would think you just like, I don't know, type a number in and say, move it on up.
You would think so, but pitch shifting past a few octaves doesn't map very well. You have a lot of artifacts. So the other way you can do is transpose, which is basically of a sound compression. And you have to do it in a way that doesn't speed up too much because then it's very short. So there is a lot of, there's some thoughts that have to go into that. Nature gives us what it gives us.
And sometimes these raw sounds sound very raw. So you have to capture the elements of that sound that make it really special.
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