Children who see dead people

This is a good article on The Daily Mail about young children who have seen apparitions. The comments are also mostly positive.


[/url][url=https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6422933/These-children-invisible-friends-really-existed.html]Mummy, I see dead people! These children all have invisible friends who really existed - and can give details about them that they would have no way of finding out for themselves

This is a good article on The Daily Mail about young children who have seen apparitions. The comments are also mostly positive.


[/url][url=https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6422933/These-children-invisible-friends-really-existed.html]Mummy, I see dead people! These children all have invisible friends who really existed - and can give details about them that they would have no way of finding out for themselves

It's really not too different to writing a note to yourself, to remind you to pick up some clothes from the dry cleaners. You can write a note, to pass information forward in time, so that you can access the information again in the future. It's probably how memory really works. In this case though, the house (or environment) is acting as the note on the paper.

Children and adolescents experience enormous spontaneous bursts of network formation in their brains as they develop, and they actually learn through the erosion of these complex networks, and not the creation of new networks. It seems possible that these spontaneous bursts of network creation allow them to access to information very quickly and easily, so that they can learn quickly. The networks which are useful are reinforced, whilst the unused networks are slowly eroded away over time, and access is lost.

It seems reasonable that these early networks might stumble upon information that can be accessed by the child, which is so obviously so out of place, that as adults, we take some notice of it. As the relevant networks are reinforced, and the unused networks are eroded away, access is lost.

That is a fascinating article, and the comments also report potential instances of reincarnation.

Then we heard from: Dr Stephen Westgarth, a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a consultant child psychiatrist and medical director of Child Psychiatry UK, says such behaviour is normal for a young child.

‘Children’s imaginative worlds are limitless, and don’t contain the same social and physical rules of the adult world.

Such a response seems utterly pathetic - you can't explain veridical observations - even in a young child - by an appeal to imagination - unless perhaps imagination is something rather more like remote viewing!

If 'experts' think this behaviour is 'normal', it explains why to little research is done on this fascinating subject.

@Max_B I can't see what the language of neural nets can usefully contribute to this discussion. Tell me how to design a Neural Net that can access the names and faces of dead people!

That is a fascinating article, and the comments also report potential instances of reincarnation.

Then we heard from: Dr Stephen Westgarth, a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a consultant child psychiatrist and medical director of Child Psychiatry UK, says such behaviour is normal for a young child.


Such a response seems utterly pathetic - you can't explain veridical observations - even in a young child - by an appeal to imagination - unless perhaps imagination is something rather more like remote viewing!

If 'experts' think this behaviour is 'normal', it explains why to little research is done on this fascinating subject.

@Max_B I can't see what the language of neural nets can usefully contribute to this discussion. Tell me how to design a Neural Net that can access the names and faces of dead people!

You're missing my suggestion that there is probably an extra non-classical mechanism within the networks, that can add up spatio-temporal patterns that intersect them.... doing something like weighting the pattern with constructive and destructive interference.

Probably best to look at a particular case that we can both agree appears solid. But it's not really any different to Harry Martindale seeing Roman Ghosts, or you writing a note to your self to remind you to collect the dry cleaning, or a negative hallucination that delays you finding your car keys. They are all demonstrating the ability to access past information, even if, in the case of some children, or Harry, this information cannot have been your own experience.