Researchers have studied what characterizes clairaudience in people who say they can hear the voices of the dead. Mediumship is a movement whose followers believe that the spirits of deceased people continue to live after physical death. Mediums claim that they have the ability to communicate with spirits by seeing them (“clairvoyant”), smelling them (“clairsenti”) or hearing them (“clairaudient”). Studies from the universities of Cardiff, Northampton and Lancaster (UK) have argued that religious and spiritual experiences (ESRs), such as clairaudience, can be useful in comparing auditory hallucinations of people with certain mental disorders.
The experience of “clairaudience”
A study, published in the journal Mental Health, Religion & Culture, examined the links between auditory spiritual communications experienced by mediums, beliefs and personality. This study is part of the Hearing the Voice project. Dr Adam J. Powell of the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University in the UK and Dr Peter Moseley of the Department of Psychology at Northumbria University also in UK carried out this study.
“Psychics tend to report unusual hearing experiences that are positive. They start early in life and they are often able to control, ”says Dr Moseley. Moseley. “It’s important to understand how these experiences develop, as it could help us better understand the painful or uncontrollable experiences of hearing voices.”
How to assess the clairaudience experience
The researchers recruited 65 medium participants, along with 143 other participants to serve as a control group for the general population. Most came from the UK, North America, Australasia and Europe. The team asked participants to complete customized versions of online questionnaires that are known to assess various characteristics in a consistent manner.
These questionnaires were:
– The Absorption Scale: This scale uses yes / no questions to measure the likelihood that a person is totally immersed in internal and external stimuli such as movies, mental images, music or thoughts. This is also called the tendency to absorption.
– The Revised Launay-Slade Hallucination Scale: This scale assesses a participant’s tendency to experience auditory and visual hallucinations.
– The Revised Paranormal Beliefs Scale: It assesses participants’ perceptions of traditional religious beliefs, psi (extrasensory perception and ability to influence physical entities without interaction), witchcraft, superstition, extraordinary life forms, precognition (ability to see the future) and spiritualism.
– Questionnaire IV on aspects of identity: it assesses the importance that the participants themselves gave to personal identity, relational identity, social identity and collective identity.
Participants in the medium group also completed a questionnaire about the frequency, context and duration of their experiences.
Frequency, context and location of clairaudience experiences
The average age at which the medium participants had their first clairaudience experience was 21.7 years. But most people experienced it either before the age of 20 or around 40. No less than 44.6% of those questioned declared having had a daily clairaudière experience. And 33.8% said they had had such an experience the day before.
Regarding where these experiences took place, 79% of participants said they had experienced them both in spiritual settings (such as in a church) and outside of these settings. A total of 12.9% of participants said their experiences only took place outside of spiritual contexts. While 8.1% said they had experienced clairaudience only in spiritual contexts. In addition, according to reports, 65.1% of clairaudience experiences occurred in the medium’s head, 31.7% occurred both indoors and outdoors, and 3.2% were allegedly external experiences only.
As for the first occurrence of a clairaudience experience, on all the participants:
– 44.8% said they had experienced clairaudience before encountering mediumship
– 29.3% said they had encountered mediumship before experiencing clairaudience.
– 25.9% said their first clairaudience experience happened at the same time as their first encounter with mediumship
Better self-awareness than the general population
People in the medium group were more prone to spiritual and non-spiritual absorption and auditory hallucinations than the general population group.
Also, the higher the frequency of the clairaudience experience, the stronger the tendency for absorption in the medium group.
Research suggests an association within the general population group between spiritual beliefs and absorption. In this group, the association between spiritual beliefs and the propensity to hallucinate was not significant. The study also confirmed previous findings which suggest that people are more likely to become interested in the paranormal because of an unusual sensory experience, and not the other way around.
For our participants, the principles of mediumship seem to make sense both for the extraordinary experiences of childhood and for the frequent auditory phenomena they experience as practicing mediums. But all of these experiences may result more from having certain early tendencies or abilities than from the mere belief that you can contact the dead if enough effort is put in, ”says Dr. Adam Powell.
Surprisingly, the researchers found that psychics were no more dependent than the rest of the population on the views and perspectives of others to form a self-image. In fact, the psychic group scored higher on personal identity than the control group. Participants in the medium group had significantly fewer years of formal education. However, since no questionnaire measure was significantly associated with education, this characteristic cannot explain the differences between the two groups.
Can psychics really hear the dead?
This is a centuries old question. But this study did not examine the veracity of mediumship experiences. Instead, she compared the auditory hallucinations, beliefs and identity traits of those who call themselves psychics with those of the general population. In the end, the mediums who control their clairaudience experience are not victims of hallucinations in the medical sense of the term. This is already an important point, mediums and clairaudients are not “crazy”.
Sources
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13674676.2014.894007
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/abs/relationship-between-trauma-and-beliefs-about-hearing-voices-a-study-of-psychiatric-and-
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13674676.2011.577411
https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fh0036681
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810011001954?via%3Dihub
https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fcns0000047
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