Prologue:

Why Do We Demolish Evil Houses?

The house at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, England, is no longer there. In October 1996, the city council ordered the removal of all physical traces of the Wests’ home where young girls were raped, tortured and murdered by Fred and Rosemary during the 1970s. Fred had used his builder’s skills to conceal the bodies at the three-story family home. First he buried them under the basement floor but when he ran out of space, he turned to the garden. His own sixteen-year-old daughter, Heather, was entombed under the newly laid patio. During the investigation, there was a rumor that some of the paving stones had been stolen from the crime scene. Unscrupulous locals had salvaged the slabs and an unwitting resident was now the proud owner of a barbecue made from the stones used to hide the horrors at Cromwell Street.¹ Nick, a fifties-something landlord who owned other houses in the street, told me this rumor was a myth. He was there. The council had removed every last brick. These were crushed into dust and then scattered across a landfill site in unmarked locations.

In the brilliant sunshine of Holy Thursday, April 2007, I stood on the exact spot where many of the bodies had been buried. Nick helped me locate this. It’s now a passageway between the remaining row of houses and a Seventh-Day Adventist Church. I did not know about this oddity of street planning and was shocked by the closeness of heaven to hell on earth. Could the congregation ever have imagined what was going on next door as they prayed? Did this proximity to the church heighten the Wests’ sense of depravity?

I watched for half an hour as Gloucester’s youngsters used the convenient walkway to get to wherever they were going. Most were heading to the nearby park. The unseasonably hot April day had brought out loose summer clothing, carefree laughter, and a spring in the step of the youth. Very unusual for this grim, English city, well past its prime. As they sauntered past the over-dressed psychology professor who seemed to be oddly preoccupied with a passageway, they were oblivious to the human suffering and atrocities committed at this spot thirty years earlier. And why not? It was simply an empty space.

Why do we demolish and remove houses associated with appalling murders? The same happened to the Oxford Apartments in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Jeffrey Dahmer lived, and the house where Ian Huntley murdered the two little girls in Soham, England. Dahmer’s place is now a parking lot and 5 College Close has been laid to turf. Houses associated with notorious murders are difficult to resell. The Colorado home where the body of the child beauty star JonBenét Ramsey was found has been on and off the market, always selling below its true value. U.S. realtors call these properties “stigmatized homes” and they present a considerable marketing challenge. Disclosure laws vary from state to state. In Massachusetts, if you don’t ask, they don’t need to tell. In Oregon, vendors don’t have to reveal anything. Hawaiian realtors are legally bound to reveal everything that might affect the value of a property, including ghosts.² In the United Kingdom, you have to declare whether you have fallen out with the neighbors in a dispute. But there is no legal requirement to tell prospective buyers about the murderous history of a house. Deception is common, since most people would prefer to see these places obliterated from existence and memory.

Could you live in a house where a murder was once committed? Are you someone who would cross the street to avoid standing on the spot where evil took place or would you relish the thrill? Why do we feel the need to replace something with nothing?

A physical building is a powerful reminder that can trigger painful memories and emotions. Maybe I was no better than the trail of ghoulish sightseers to Cromwell Street that Nick had witnessed over the years. If there is nothing to look at, then shouldn’t this keep the weirdos away? At least removing the visible reminder makes it easier for a community to heal and forget. But demolishing the building, crushing the rubble into dust and taking it away to secret locations with demolishers under oath not to reveal the final whereabouts seems a bit excessive.³

FIG. 1: The passageway at 25 Cromwell Street where the Wests buried many of their victims. AUTHOR’S IMAGE.

What would motivate a souvenir hunter to want to own a brick or some physical thing associated with a murderer? The same goes for objects such as Nazi memorabilia. The world’s largest auction website, eBay, has banned the sale of these items and anything that glorifies hatred, violence, or intolerance. But what attracts people to them in the first place? Maybe it’s the excitement of being subversive. Any parent with a rebellious teenager knows that the macabre is a source of fascination for these fledgling adults. Part of growing up is the need to express individuality through statements of rebellion. By their nature, taboo topics intrigue the young who want to be outrageous in an effort to shock.

What about collectors of less insidious memorabilia? Mature adults will pay good money for personal items that once belonged to famous people. Some are just common objects, but collectors covet them because of their connection with celebrities. Why else would someone bid on eBay for a fragment of bed linen that was once slept on by Elvis Presley? Why pay $2000 for a swatch of cloth taken from Princess Diana’s wedding dress? ⁴ The charity website www.clothesoffourback.com, started by “Malcolm in the Middle” mom Jane Kaczmarek and “West Wing” actor Bradley Whitford, auctions clothes worn by celebrities for the benefit of children’s charities. Many of these items were worn at award ceremonies such as the Oscars or Emmys. These events take place under the glare of the media spotlight, and even the stars most likely to win must sweat a little in anticipation as that envelope is opened. However, their tainted tuxedoes and grubby gowns are highly desirable to the general public. The charity used to offer a dry-cleaning option to successful auction bidders but eventually dropped the service as no one wanted the clothing washed. Maybe the bidders thought they could get the clothes cleaned more cheaply themselves. This seems unlikely, however, if the money was for charity. Why not clean secondhand clothes? After all, we usually wash our own clothes when they get sweaty. I think the real answer could be that collectors did not necessarily want to wear them. They wanted to own something intimate and personal to their idols and the more connection, the better. It’s a fetish in the original use of the word: a belief that an object has supernatural powers.⁵

Memorabilia collectors and those with object fetishism are behaving in a very peculiar way. They are attributing to physical objects invisible properties that make them unique and irreplaceable. This kind of thinking is misguided. For one thing, significant objects can be faked. That brick, that tuxedo or that bed linen may be a forgery. In the Middle Ages, there was a roaring trade in Christian relics to cater to the legions of pilgrims traipsing across Europe from one holy shrine to the next. Relics could be any objects connected intimately with religious celebrities. Bones belonging to saints and martyrs were particularly popular as were any items connected with Jesus. Bits of the cross or shreds of the shroud were easy to fake and trade was brisk. If all the fragments of the crucifixion cross were put back together, there would probably be enough to build an ark. The professional skeptic James Randi recounts how, as a boy growing up in Montreal, he visited the St. Joseph’s Oratory shrine where the beatified monk Brother André Bessette once lived. Brother Andre’ was known as the miracle-worker of Mount Royal. Pilgrims would flock to the shrine seeking supernatural healing for all manner of ills and could reach in to touch the jar containing the preserved heart of the monk housed behind a metal grill in an ornate cabinet. Randi recalls how his father and godfather were asked one day by the proprietors of St. Joseph’s Oratory to cut up a roll of black gabardine fabric purchased from a local store into small squares. These were then sold in the gift shop as pieces of Brother Andrés actual robes worn on his deathbed. Maybe this early experience had a profound influence on Randi becoming a skeptic.⁶

Even if an object is inauthentic, many people treat such items as if they possess some property inherited from the previous owner. A property that defies scientific measure. Some believe such objects harbor an inner reality or essence that makes them unique and irreplaceable. Yes, these houses and objects have a history and yes, they may remind us of events and people, but many believe or more importantly act as if these essences are physical, tangible realities. Something to touch or something to avoid. But, of course, they are not. Sweat and blood may have DNA but not bricks and mortar from a house. Rather there is something else that we sense in these objects. Something supernatural.

SUPERSENSE

This book is about the origins of supernatural beliefs, why they are so common, and why they may be so difficult to get rid of. I believe the answer to each of these questions can be found in human nature and, in particular, the developing mind of the child.

Humans are naturally inclined towards supernatural beliefs. Many highly educated and intelligent individuals experience a powerful sense that there are patterns, forces, energies, and entities operating in the world that are denied by science because they go beyond the boundaries of natural phenomena we currently understand. More importantly, such experiences are not substantiated by a body of reliable evidence, which is why they are supernatural and unscientific. The inclination or sense that they may be real is our supersense.

Why are humans so willing to entertain the possibility of the supernatural? As we will see, most people believe because they think they have experienced supernatural events personally, or they have heard reliable testimony about the supernatural from those they trust. I would argue that we interpret our experiences and other peoples’ reports within a supernatural framework because that framework is one that is intuitively appealing. It resonates with the way we think the world operates with all manner of hidden structures and mechanisms. If this is true, we have to ask where does this supersense come from?

Some argue that the most obvious origins for supernatural beliefs come from the different forms of religion—from traditional organized ideologies to various types of New Age mysticism that appeal to gods, angels, demons, ghosts, or spirits. Each of the world’s established religions extol beliefs about entities that have supernatural powers. Whether it is priests preaching in pulpits or pagans prancing on the prairies, all religions include some form of supernatural belief. ⁷ But you don’t have to be religious or spiritual to hold a supersense. For the nonreligious, it can be beliefs about paranormal abilities, psychic powers, telepathy, or any phenomena that defy natural laws. Those who do not pray in temples or churches may prefer to tune into one of the many cable television channels dedicated to paranormal investigation, or call one of the multitude of psychic telephone networks looking for answers. Even beliefs about plain old luck, fate, and destiny are supported by our supersense. Why else would newspapers print horoscopes if their readers did not pay attention to them? Religion, paranormal activity, and wishful thinking are three points on a continuum of supernatural thinking. You may just entertain one or possibly all three different realms of belief, but they all depend on a supersense that they are real.

The supersense is also behind the strange behaviors or superstitions in which we try to control outcomes through supernatural influence. When a group acts upon these superstitions, we call them ceremonial rituals. When they are personal, we call them individual quirks. Religions are full of rituals to appease the gods, but outside of the church or temple, there are all sorts of secular rituals that people use to exert control over their lives. These range from the simple superstitions handed down through cultures such as knocking on wood to bizarre idiosyncratic personal rituals we engage in to bring us luck. For example, one of former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s superstitious quirks was to always wear the same pair of shoes when standing up in Parliament to answer politicians’ questions.⁸ In the United States, Senator John McCain is openly honest about his catalog of superstitions, always carrying a lucky feather and a lucky compass. He also carries a lucky penny, a lucky nickel, and a lucky quarter. When you start to scratch the surface, you find that many of us, including our national leaders, have a supersense. In the case of John McCain, it amounts to 31 “super cents” in his pockets.⁹ On the other hand, President Barack Obama relied on playing basketball on election days to get him to the White House.

Sometimes our supersense is not even obvious. It can lurk away in the back of our minds whispering doubt and warning us to be careful. It can be that uncomfortable feeling we experience when we enter a room, or the conviction that we are being watched by unseen eyes when no one is there. It can be our unease at touching certain objects or entering certain places that we feel have a connection with somebody bad. It can be the foods and potions we ingest that we think will alter our bodies and minds through magical powers. It can be the simple sentimental value we place on a worthless object that makes it unique and irreplaceable.

SuperSense is about all of the above and more. In this book I expose a wide range of human beliefs and behavior that go beyond traditional notions of the supernatural. This book is not just about ghosts and ghouls. Rather it is about supernatural thinking and behavior in everyday human activity. In this way, I hope to show you that we often infer the presence of hidden aspects of reality and base our behavior on assumptions that would have to be supernatural to be true. Whenever our beliefs appeal to mechanisms and phenomena that go beyond natural understanding, we are entering the territory of supernatural belief. Of course, there are many things we cannot explain, but not understanding them does not make them supernatural. For example, consider a problem we experience every waking moment. How does our mind control our bodies? How can something that has no physical dimensions influence something physical like the body? This is the body-mind problem that we will discuss in chapter 5. Science may not yet understand the mind-body issue and it may never, but that does not make it supernatural because we can investigate the mind with scientific studies to test if the results fit with the predictions.

In contrast, evidence for the supernatural is elusive. When you try to gather evidence for the supernatural, it vanishes into thin air. It is almost always anecdotal, piecemeal, or so weak it barely registers as being really there. Experiments on the supernatural invariably amount to nothing. Otherwise, we would be rewriting the science textbooks with new laws and observations. That’s why most conventional scientists do not bother to conduct research on the supernatural. But lack of scientific credibility does little to dent the belief—most of us have a supersense telling us that the evidence is really there and that we should simply ignore the science and keep an open mind. The problem with open minds is that everything falls out—including our reason.

This book is about the science behind our beliefs—not whether these beliefs are true or not. It should change the way you judge other people. When you understand the supersense, you will better understand both your own beliefs and more importantly, why others hold supernatural beliefs. It should give you insight. It may even make you look at religion and atheism in a new way and realize that everyone is susceptible to supernatural beliefs. I will show that common supernatural beliefs operate in everyday reasoning, no matter how rational and reasoned you think you are. Maybe I should claim that this book will change your life and attitudes towards beliefs but I am not so sure. Because whatever I am about to tell you will go in one ear and out the other. That’s the nature of belief. It’s really difficult to change with reason. Where does such stubborn thinking come from in the first place?

As part of human culture, we are so immersed in storytelling that it is easy to assume that all beliefs come from other people telling us what to think. This is especially true when it comes to things that we cannot directly see for ourselves. We believe what we are told on the basis of trust. However, this book offers another possible explanation for why we believe in the unbelievable and I think we need to look to children for the answer.

The alternative view for the origin of supernatural beliefs I want to propose is a natural, scientific one based on mind design. By design, I mean a structured organized way of interpreting the world because of the way our brains work. Yes, culture feeds each child with stories but there is more to belief than simply spreading ideas. As the forefather of modern science Francis Bacon said, we prefer to believe what we prefer to be true. I would add that what we believe to be true might come from our way of seeing the world as a child. In other words, the frame of mind within every child leads him or her to believe in the supernatural.

If a supersense is part of our natural way of understanding the world, it will continue to reappear in every child born with this frame of mind. If so, then it seems unlikely that any effort to get rid of supernaturalism will be successful. At the very least, it is going to be a very hard battle to win. It will always be there lingering away in our minds. Even those with a scientific education may still continue to harbor deep-seated childish notions that lie dormant in their adult minds. Should we even try to get rid of them?

SACRED VALUES

The human species may actually need a supersense—not simply because it promises something more than is available in this life, like a security blanket of reassurance for what happens to us when we die, but rather because the supersense enables us to appreciate sacred values while we are still alive.¹⁰ We all need sacred values in our lives. Our sacred values can reside in an object, a place, or even a person. We may find the sacred in a word or an act. If you are religious, your world is full of the sacred—places you must go, objects you must revere, individuals you must worship, words you must say, and acts that must follow sacred rituals. But what if you are not religious? Are you immune from sacred values? I am not so sure.

Humans are social animals, and to participate in society we have to share conventions: things that we all agree have some common value. These are the things that can hold a group together. Some conventions are everyday and mundane, such as the money convention of exchanging pieces of paper or lumps of metal for goods. Others are more profound. Certain documents, like the U.S. Declaration of Independence or the Magna Carta, are more than just pieces of paper. They are sacred objects. They represent important points in civilization, but we revere them as objects in themselves. There’s something more to them than simply the words written on them. Or a sacred item could be a book or a painting. A Mozart manuscript or an original Vermeer. Both can be copied and duplicated but it’s the originals we value the most. In the same way, a building or location can be sacred. Shrines and churches are obviously holy to the religiously devout, but we can all share in a deeper sense of the value of a place. If you are a Chicago Cubs baseball fan, it’s Wrigley Field. If you support Manchester United, it’s Old Trafford. These stadiums are more than just sports arenas. To the fan they are hallowed grounds, imbued with as much sacred value as a temple.¹¹

Society needs sacred values—anything that we hold to be special and unique beyond any given sum. You can’t put a price on a sacred value, or at least you should not willingly do so. Because they cannot be reduced to any scientific or rational analysis, sacred values represent a common set of beliefs that bind together all the members of a group and apply to all of them. Without sacred values, society would deteriorate into a free-for-all in which individuals are only out for themselves. When our societies have sacred values, we are all bound to acknowledge and conform to the group consensus that there are some things that simply should not be bought, owned, or controlled by another group member. Sacred values confirm our willingness to be part of the group and share beliefs even when such beliefs lack good evidence.

Over the coming chapters I hope to show you how our supernatural beliefs can make sense of our sacred values. Don’t take my word for it. That would be storytelling. Rather you, the reader, need to come up with your own opinion based on the evidence presented in the following pages. So that you can navigate the path ahead more clearly, let me show you the roadmap.

In the opening chapter, I begin with the notion of “mind design”—something organized in the way we interpret the world around us—and how it produces some surprising beliefs. Most of us willingly accept that our minds can make mistakes, but we all think we can overcome these errors if given the right information. That’s because we all think that we are reasonable. Have you ever heard anyone admit that he or she is unreasonable? Despite our confidence in our own reason, sometimes our capacity to be reasonable is undermined by our gut reactions, which can kick in so fast that it’s hard to rein them in with reason. Take the example of evil and our belief that it can be physically real. If you don’t believe me, consider how you would feel if you had to shake hands with a mass murderer such as I discuss in chapter 2. Why do we recoil at the thought? Why do we treat their evil as something contagious?

I then want to turn your attention to origins. Tracing the first evidence of supernatural beliefs to the beginnings of culture, I show that, while science has made considerable strides over the last four hundred years, supernaturalism is still very common. Then I want you to consider origins within the individual and the development of belief in the growing child. One of the main points I want to make in the book is that children naturally reason about the unseen aspects of their world, and doing so sometimes leads them to beliefs that form the basis of later adult supernatural notions. In particular, the ways in which young children reason about living things and about what the mind is and can do clearly show the beginnings of ideas that become the basis for adult supernatural beliefs. These are emerging long before children are told what to think, which brings me back to one of the major themes of the book: supernatural beliefs are a product of natural thinking.

Over the next couple of chapters, I examine this natural thinking and how children organize the world into different kinds of categories. In doing so, they must be thinking that the physical world is inhabited by invisible stuff or essences. Science may be able to teach children about real stuff that makes up the world, such as DNA and atoms, but our childish essential reasoning continues to influence the way we reason and behave as adults. This is no more obvious than in the case of our attitudes toward sacred objects. Sacred objects are deemed to be special by virtue of their unique essence, which people believe connects them to significant other people. These can be parents, lovers, pop stars, athletes, kings, or saints—anyone with whom we feel a need to make a connection.

The remaining chapters of the book focus on sentimentality and the irrational fears that we can so easily detect in others but often fail to recognize in our own reasoning. Before concluding the book, I examine the latest thoughts about a brain basis for individual differences in the supersense. Some people are much more willing to entertain supernatural beliefs even when they are highly educated. How can we understand this? Here we consider the brain mechanisms that may be responsible for generating and controlling beliefs and how these can change over the course of a lifetime or during an illness.

By the time you get to the end of this book, I hope you will appreciate that the development of a child’s mind into that of an adult is not simply a case of learning more facts about the world. It also involves learning to ignore childish beliefs, which requires mental effort. Education helps, but it’s not the whole story. We need to learn to control our childish beliefs. I also briefly consider why there may be a connection between the supersense and creativity. Maybe creativity depends on our capacity to leap over logic and generate the new ways of looking at old problems. In which case, creativity and the supersense may be stronger in those of us who are less anchored to reality and more inclined to sense patterns and connections that the rest of us miss or simply dismiss. They are always there in the background of our minds, pushing us toward the supernatural.

In the final pages, I bring these issues together and return to the supersense and the notion of sacred values with an explanation for why human society needs to believe that there are some things in life that must be considered unique and profound. Not only is there room for such beliefs in the modern mind, but they may be unavoidable.

What people choose to do with their beliefs is another matter. Whether religions are good or bad is a heated debate that I will leave to others. I just think that supernatural beliefs are inevitable. At least knowing where they come from and why we have them makes it easier to understand belief in the supernatural as part of being human.

So let’s begin that scientific search for the supersense.