My 2 y.o. niece sees ghosts

[Jar of Flies]

In what way exactly...

You're quick to dismiss something that's not able to be proven even when others claim to have experienced it. Yet you claim to have experienced something you admittedly know is hard to believe. Just seems like you'd be more open minded to similar beliefs.

 

[TrippleOG]

This isn't being open minded, it's being a joke if you believe in ghosts.

 

[Bay Area]

Lolwut? So naming your imaginary friend is proof now? You are really quick to believe in the supernatural.

I'm saying take it seriously, instead of just brushing it off as a child's wild imagination. Maybe probe a little bit. Ask the child questions about his friend. What does he look like, is he here in the room now, what does he say to you etc.

 

[Drenalin]

We lose certain abilities quite quickly that we have as very young people. The most notable being able to see EM auras on living things. I cant remember how they proved this but I read a credible scientific study about it quite a while ago. Interestingly some people never lose the ability and its one thats possible for everyone with sight to pick up again with certain exercises.
Also a theory I must have read somewhere suggests that so called ghosts and the like are potentially temporal anomalies rather than conscious entities. The
amount of weird shit that can happen in spacetime is something inherently difficult to and not very well researched.
If you think of a ghost as being like an overexposure in a photo, but the photo being the proverbial fabric of spacetime it makes for an entirely different yet plausible explanation.

That sounds good in all, but I don't see how that explains why most sightings happen to be deceased relatives. Seems like the theory you mention would be random.

 

[dildos]

you should get dressed up like this or get like kid sized dolls and style them as such and really mess with her

 

[Drenalin]

Yes I read that theory well not really a theory it is basically proven I just cant back it up right now. Basically it says we might all be 2d btbut due to light reflection we are in a 3d world. S

I'm fairly certain I can debunk that theory. It's simple. The fact that we can feel shapes. Shapes have to be 3D. Not sure how light reflection can give things mass, but then again I'm borderline retarded. So who knows.

 

[Drenalin]

Ive heard stories about people going under anesthesia & then floating out of their body. They claimed to watch the doctors perform surgery on them from just above the operating table. They described everything that took place in the room, which is scientifically impossible. Some people said they moved freely thru the hospital & described what family members were doing in the waiting room. All of this while they were supposed to be unconscious.

I spend a lot of time trying to come up with explanations for these kinds of things. Eventually I just tell myself that we're just humans & we don't know shit. No matter how smart we think we are, there are things we just can't comprehend. Just like animals can't comprehend algebra. Our brains have limits just like everything else. Shit we can't even explain which came first, the chicken or the egg... It's in human nature to wonder though. Hopefully after death we will all be enlightened.

 

[Mr Jay]

She's seeing ghosts you say....

 

[Boomb]

 

[Doughbelly]

I see like an outline of barely visible light. It is sort of watery like you said.

I see them, too.

It's a combination of things. It's mostly just eye jitter combined with the pinhole camera effect of light focusing and after imaging that your eye perceives. Essentially a trick of the light and environmental conditions (humidity, backlight/lighting conditions, etc) as well several oddities in the way that the eye functions.

You can make a pinhole with your hand (this is how Bukowski masturbates)

and look through it to see how looking past edges of objects helps your eye focus by cutting down on scattered light from the object that you're viewing that the object you're looking past is cutting out. If you experiment with the edge of your finger and distant objects with high contrast or especially backlit objects (more on this later), you will perceived the edges of objects bending around your the edges of your finger. This isn't light bending, but scattered light that the lens of your eye didn't quite catch/focus properly that the back of your eye isn't getting anymore.

I'm not going to explain afterimage between two high contrast objects - I assume everyone is familiar with them.

Your eye is constantly moving around and jittering, even when it is looking at a single, stationary object. Normally, this eye jitter is not consciously perceivable. Here is a demonstration to detect gross eye jitter (your eye actually has more high frequency microjitters as well, but it's not perceivable in this demo):



Your eyes are constantly moving around and are constantly receiving slightly different sets of images. Look at of your computer screen, then slightly nod and shake your head at the same time. Notice that along the edges of the screen, there is new info popping in and out behind it. Your eye jitter is doing that on it's own, only on a much smaller scale. Eye jitter is actually a good thing and improves perception, but between the constantly shifting images and the afterimages, the "aura" around objects in certain lighting conditions is one of the side effects.

I was going to get into lighting conditions as well how humans arrange objects (such as furniture and taller, sightline obstructing objects tending to be along walls and while humans tend to be away from and backlit by walls) and how and why the human tendency to focus on other humans makes this aura stuff more perceptible in other humans but this post is getting too long. Basically, if you stared at a dark colored La Z Boy in a very light colored room, you'd notice a "aura" around it, too.

Also, here's a simple question - if humans actually had a living aura and certain people could perceive it, then why can't you see that shit in the dark?

 

[Flemmy Stardust]

you should get dressed up like this or get like kid sized dolls and style them as such and really mess with her

Lol. My nieces and nephews all love me to death, except her. One day when she was maybe 4 months old i scared her. She hated me for like a year. Wanted nothing to do with me, cried at the sight of me. She's finally at the point where she's warned up to me and gives me hugs/kisses so i won't be scaring her any time soon.

 

[Doughbelly]

My mom tells my she woke up at 2:30 and my niece was standing at the bedroom door just staring.

This is not at all unusual and is a very common thing among kids. Very common experience among parents with kids this age when a lot of parents expect kids to start sleeping alone and/or took them out of c̶a̶g̶e̶s̶ cribs and put them in real beds. This is about when kids start figuring out doorknobs and are tall enough to reach them.

I used to stay for extended weekends at my sister's house whenever I was in town, which was pretty much every other week so I got to see my niece go through the same phase. Her parents thought it was a little freaky to find their little girl standing in the door staring at them in the middle of the night or standing on top of the stairs staring, but in reality, it's just a little kid who is expected to sleep alone (which is a wholly unnatural thing in the human experience, from childhood development and evolutionary perspectives - more on this later) but realizes that they are in for trouble if they wake their parents or are found wandering around past bedtime. I go to bed later than everyone else, so I'd often find her standing in the dark holding her stuffed turtle, having an internal struggle about what to do. She'd come up with some pretty wild stories to cover for why she was awake and out of bed, too - need to check on Uncle Dough; Sea Turtle needs water; etc.

Notably, kids who share bedrooms tend not to do this because when they wake up in the middle of the night, they see another human sleeping next to them, which has been the general human experience since humans became humans. Your lizard brain is telling you that it's dangerous to sleep alone, which in the wild, it is. Kids haven't been habituated to accept that it's considered normal to sleep alone.

 

[dildos]

Lol. My nieces and nephews all love me to death, except her. One day when she was maybe 4 months old i scared her. She hated me for like a year. Wanted nothing to do with me, cried at the sight of me. She's finally at the point where she's warned up to me and gives me hugs/kisses so i won't be scaring her any time soon.

rofl, kids being angry over funny things such as being scared is the best. they do not understand how truly fucking hilarious it is.

2 of my favorite things to watch is like kids being pranked by their parents or kids falling over.

oh man that reminds me one time waiting for the bus after school- i was in year 12 and this little girl, like young real young year 3 maybe was yelling to her sister and friends, cmon were going to miss the bus lets go! and like this is just when the bus got there, it was going no where in a hurry. so the kid starts running down the hill to her bus and stacks it ! i had never laughed so much ever, the teachers from my school on bus duty were looking at me like i was a wierdo for finding it so funny ! this is one thing i still chuckle about from time to time and i will never forget it.

 

[Flemmy Stardust]

This is not at all unusual and is a very common thing among kids. Very common experience among parents with kids this age when a lot of parents expect kids to start sleeping alone and/or took them out of c̶a̶g̶e̶s̶ cribs and put them in real beds. This is about when kids start figuring out doorknobs and are tall enough to reach them.

I used to stay for extended weekends at my sister's house whenever I was in town, which was pretty much every other week so I got to see my niece go through the same phase. Her parents thought it was a little freaky to find their little girl standing in the door staring at them in the middle of the night or standing on top of the stairs staring, but in reality, it's just a little kid who is expected to sleep alone (which is a wholly unnatural thing in the human experience, from childhood development and evolutionary perspectives - more on this later) but realizes that they are in for trouble if they wake their parents or are found wandering around past bedtime. I go to bed later than everyone else, so I'd often find her standing in the dark holding her stuffed turtle, having an internal struggle about what to do. She'd come up with some pretty wild stories to cover for why she was awake and out of bed, too - need to check on Uncle Dough; Sea Turtle needs water; etc.

Notably, kids who share bedrooms tend not to do this because when they wake up in the middle of the night, they see another human sleeping next to them, which has been the general human experience since humans became humans. Your lizard brain is telling you that it's dangerous to sleep alone, which in the wild, it is. Kids haven't been habituated to accept that it's considered normal to sleep alone.

Makes sense, but like your sister thought, it looks freaky as hell.

The only hiccup with my niece in particular is that she is very difficult. She wouldn't have that internal struggle to avoid getting yelled at. She would just go for it and deal with the consequences.

 

[Doughbelly]

Yeah probably something from a dream carrying over.

Not only do kids have a hard time telling the difference between fantasy (dreams) and reality (a lot of adults have a hard time doing this, too) but they actually see things that aren't there.

Brains are pattern recognition machines and kids brains aren't nearly as well attuned to sort out background noise as adults' are. They see more patterns and more images in every day things that we don't. Kids see things in clouds and shadows and every day objects that we don't.

Adults are bad enough at seeing patterns in things that aren't there enough to form superstitions and entire religions, yet when kids whose sum total experience at being alive is less than a couple years, can barely form coherent sentences and whose neurons are still forming and actively cross and shorting out all the time think they see ghosts, it's, "Oh, it's because kids are more attuned to the natural/supernatural world" or some shit.

Kids don't see ghosts and shit we can't see because they're more innocent. Kids see ghosts and shit we can't see because they're basically incomplete, defective humans.

 

[Slobodan]

I

You can make a pinhole with your hand (this is how Bukowski masturbates)

I lol'd way, way too hard at this.

 

[Slobodan]

Kids don't see ghosts and shit we can't see because they're more innocent. Kids see ghosts and shit we can't see because they're basically incomplete, defective humans.

So basically they're still a bunch of cans?

 

[Mike]

Not only do kids have a hard time telling the difference between fantasy (dreams) and reality (a lot of adults have a hard time doing this, too) but they actually see things that aren't there.

Brains are pattern recognition machines and kids brains aren't nearly as well attuned to sort out background noise as adults' are. They see more patterns and more images in every day things that we don't. Kids see things in clouds and shadows and every day objects that we don't.

Adults are bad enough at seeing patterns in things that aren't there enough to form superstitions and entire religions, yet when kids whose sum total experience at being alive is less than a couple years, can barely form coherent sentences and whose neurons are still forming and actively cross and shorting out all the time think they see ghosts, it's, "Oh, it's because kids are more attuned to the natural/supernatural world" or some shit.

Kids don't see ghosts and shit we can't see because they're more innocent. Kids see ghosts and shit we can't see because they're basically incomplete, defective humans.

Yeah I always thought the logic "oh kids are like still innocent and stuff, so they're more tied to the spiritual realm OoOOoOOhh" was pretty dumb as well. As you said their brains are still developing and they're basically half retarded. Little kids don't fully grasp what's reality and what isn't yet, why would anyone assume they have extra knowledge or perception about the world.

 

[Flemmy Stardust]

Yeah I always thought the logic "oh kids are like still innocent and stuff, so they're more tied to the spiritual realm OoOOoOOhh" was pretty dumb as well. As you said their brains are still developing and they're basically half retarded. Little kids don't fully grasp what's reality and what isn't yet, why would anyone assume they have extra knowledge or perception about the world.

A lot of that comes from the fact that they don't have a discernable filter with what they say.

It's the whole "if a kid calls you fat, you're fat" thing.

 

[Mike]

A lot of that comes from the fact that they don't have a discernable filter with what they say.

It's the whole "if a kid calls you fat, you're fat" thing.

Yeah kids are cool and whatever, it's just funny to me when people attribute supernatural powers to them. People are gullible as fuck. Your belief system should be based on what you can prove and how logical things are. Not ,like, how cool something sounds