Vorkosigan

Uh...problems here. By mid 1858 over fifty people had claimed to see the Virgin, according to Zimdars-Schwarz. It hardly matters whether the crowd accepted them or not.

Phil's original point was that such visions are individual. Clearly, six is more than one.

Note that I was talking about visions, not mass hallucinations.

Vorkosigan

rlogan

There is a self-selection bias in the sorts of things we're talking about.

A common side show act at fairs is the "hypnotist" who asks for volunteers from the crowd to come up for a mass hypnosis. These guys can get a couple of dozen people to go up on stage and do the most foolish things. If you take people at random in a controlled environment, you get completely different results.

People who want to see visions are much more likely to see them. People selling you snake oil have definitely been cured by it, 100% guaranteed.

Amaleq13

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the possibility of mass hysteria, Peter. Given the proper mindset (and gathering with an expectation of a miracle certainly qualifies), a single individual claiming to see something odd about the sun can trigger an effect that courses through a crowd like a wave. Everybody starts looking at the sun and their perceptions start conforming to expectations and are further conformed by comments from those around them.

Even with that tendency to conform, the reports clearly vary and do not appear to describe the same exact display. I am particularly amused by the fellow on the left side of the picture in the article leonarde linked. He is so stunned by the miraculous display everyone else is allegedly watching that he is looking at the ground.

More recent examples are several incidents during the height of fear of terrorist attacks by way of toxins, etc. The general fear established the necessary mindset and a single person claiming an odd smell combined with a single suggestion that it might be a terrorist attack has resulted in building being cleared, folks swooning, and experiencing all sorts of "symptoms". I'll see if I can find any specific references but I recall reading the stories within a year or so of 9/11.

People are more open to suggestion than they think and even more so under emotionally charged circumstances. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that at least some of the more imaginative people reading this sentence will experience an itch simply because the sentence suggests it.

A friend of mine attended a tent revival (trying to impress a girl) and was amazed to find himself being "slain in the spirit" even though he actually felt nothing and continued to doubt even after the event. Didn't stop him from falling down with the rest of the crowd, though.

I think it is even more probable that the "optical effect" was the resut of staring at the sun and that this behavior was initially inspired by the "amazing" appearance of the sun subsequent to the "amazing" stoppage of the rain.

The only serious challenge to the notion of mass hysteria would be establishing that the distant reports were truly independent of the original reports. As it stands, the reports of folks claiming the same experience elsewhere are too vague to be accepted as anything but later embellishments after hearing the stories of the original "event".

Diogenes the Cynic

Don't undersell the power of suggestion as well as the desire to conform.

I had a high school German teacher who had grown up in Cologne Germany during WWII. The Cologne Cathedral in that city is one of the tallest cathedrals in the world. This teacher of mine once told us that as a teenager, she and her friends once pulled a practical joke which started with a small group of them staring up at the tower of the cathedral and pointing from the street. Passers by asked what they were looking at and they pointed and said there was a man up there who was going to jump. people looked up where they were pointing and some of them began to excitedly exclaim that they could see him too. A little while longer and they had attracted a moderate crowd of people staring up at the tower many of them pointing, yelling at the guy not to jump, etc.

If you get a mob of self-selected, credulous, religous believers out in the sun and fully prepped to see something, it surprises me not in the least that they all think they see the sun moving. There is, of course, no way to verify precisely what each person saw and whether they all saw exactly the same thing, but it's no trick to suggest to such an amenable crowd that sun is moving and get the result that was gotten.

I don't think it matters as to the Jesus appearance, though, because we have no evidence that any such event ever occurred in the first place.

Asha'man

The human eye is constantly moving back and forth. Against a sky with no background features for reference, it is unable to tell if an object is stationary or moving. I experience this quite often, in a field of astronomers looking for the first star of the evening. In the slowly darkening sky, a single bright star will quite convincingly appear to be wobbling around. As soon as the sky darkens a bit more and other stars appear, the illusion disappears.

To actually tell if the sun was moving around, I would turn around and look at my shadow against the ground. Any movement would then be obvious. However, I bet none of the observers of this ‘miracle’ thought to perform this simple check.

Tharmas

One objection that I would mention that you didn’t, Vork, is #6, where part of Phil’s argument rests on the (to me) rather bizarre claim that “surprising and unexpected things� do not happen in dreams. I know I’m not the only one who has commented on the fact that one of the most noticeable characteristic of dreams is precisely their often surprising and unexpected nature.

As for mass hallucinations, yet another aspect of modern psychology that goes a long way towards explaining them, at least in my view, is the selective and creative adaptiveness of memory. It is now well known that people will reshape or even create memories ex post facto to fit suggestions.

That phenomenon could explain a great deal of the apparent conformity of the visions people describe in situations like the Fatima “miracle.�

Furthermore, we know that people will endow unusual or unexpected phenomena with preconceived expected features. Thus, in some cases of UFO reports, where we are almost certain that we know what it was that was being seen and reported, nevertheless observers agree on having seen a typically “Hollywood� flying saucer, even mentioning rows of windows etc. This is a case of projection of an expected image onto an unfamiliar experience.

Peter Kirby

Amaleq and Diogenes, you make some cogent points. Very agreeable to me, as it goes. The element of some kind of phenomenon with light in the atmosphere would work as a trigger to set off the claims and co-claims about the sun "dancing." But I agree that it is not essential, only not improbable (as far as I know!). I did want to suggest the idea of a crowd built up by "expectation" as an important thing. You use the term "mass hysteria." That is undoubtedly what happened, or at least part of what happened. (Which is why your comments are agreeable.)

What would not make sense to me would be "mass hallucination." This is a different thing from being tricked by staring at the sun, pumped up expectations, and the claims of people around you (as I would use the phrase).

Of course the problem here is establishing that there was the case of 500 people actually having Jesus' post-mortem visage in their vision at the same time... we've had threads on this before...

best,
Peter Kirby

exile

Why does Mary never appear to atheists or Protestants? Why do UFO reports only date from when science fiction magazines and movies started? Why do we hear about alien abductions for sexual purposes, when a few centuries ago we heard about incubuses and succubuses? Why do we not read about witchcraft after the mid 18th C - did the witches go on strike?

This suggests at the very least that you see what you expect to see - that is, an unusual phenomenon is interpreted according to your own expectations.

And of course, fraud, self-deception and so on DO exist. Any non-Mormons on here believe Smith really saw the angel Moroni?

Carl Sagan goes into this - without coming to a conclusion. However, to accept that one type of "vision" is real - Marian visions - shouldn't we then accept the reality of other phenomena and take the interpretation put on these experiences by those who have them at face value, and thus accept the reality of Krishna, Buddha, spirits, ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster.

I saw my deceased father last night. Now - should I accept that that was a dream? Or that my father's spirit actually visited me?

leonarde

It DOES if the proposition is that the fame of Lourdes is based upon 'mass hallucinations' (see the OP). Lourdes' reputation is based upon visions that Bernadette had in 1858, NOT those of anyone else. The crowds that accompanied Bernadette at her later visions overall did NOT report seeing what she saw. That someone cites a figure of '50' persons reporting the same visions, when the crowds were already in the many thousands by mid-1858 CONFIRMS that it was not a 'mass hallucination'.

No. You've pulled the old switcheroo here. Phil isn't saying (necessarily) that ANY 'vision' is an hallucination. He's denying the existence of 'mass hallucinations' as an accepted psychological phenomenon ("Hallucinations are private, individual, subjective.'). Six children, claiming to see the same thing, aren't NECESSARILY 'hallucinating' (even if we rule out a priori VALID 'visions', there's also the possibility of a pre-arranged hoax).

It seems to me that you were implying that the 'mass hallucination' phenomenon 'explained' things like Lourdes and Medjugorje. How else can one uunderstand this exchange?:If that's not an equation (visions=hallucinations) I don't know what is......