A colleague recently told me about when a close family member died, he had a feeling that something was wrong but only learnt several hours later about the death
This is not the first time I've heard a similar story. This got me thinking, maybe there is something in this. But being the ultimate skpetic I looked for a rational explanation.
The idea that I came up with involved psychology rather than any sort of paranormal phenomenon.
Say person A is sitting reading the newspaper when a loved one passes away unexpectedly, he/she has no idea of the death and carries on reading the newspaper completely unaware. A few hours later he/she gets a phone call delivering the sad news that person B passed away at 3pm that day.
Person A, either consciously or unconsciously, thinks back to what he/she was doing at 3pm (reading the newspaper in this case) and the memory of sitting there reading the newspaper becomes permanently linked in their mind with the feeling of loss and sadness that they experienced when they learnt the news. When they think back on the events of the day, in their state of emotional turmoil and vulnerability, the memory of feeling loss and sadness at the time when they were actually happily sitting reading the paper, seems absolutely real.
Please don't think i'm belittling anyones emotions or feelings on the death of a loved one, that is certainly not my intention.
I've come up with this theory independently but it's certainly possible that others have suggested this before, I'd be interested to hear if anyone has heard similar theories about this phemonenon.
So, do you think this theory is a plausible explantation?
Monday, 13 August 2007
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2 comments:
I think there may be links between people that are not necessarily supernatural. There is a lot about the brain that we simply don't know about. I have heard a lot of this kind of phenomenon happening between parents and children (more often mothers and children).
It actually happened to my mother and brother once as well when I was young. She showed up at our summer camp (which was about an hour away from her workplace) in the middle of the day because she said she got a "bad feeling" about my brother. It turned out that he had been in a very, very high state of stress (I believe he was 6 or 7 at the time) for a few hours because a camp counselor (who disliked him for whatever reason and treated him horribly) told him that she didn't believe that he had an allergy to peanuts and thought he was just trying to get out of eating his lunch and was making him sit at a table alone for hours until he agreed to eat the sandwich. My mother came out of nowhere and raised hell. I don't know if my brother was about to break down and eat the sandwich (he was little and probably so stressed out by the situation) so ... I don't know. My mother obviously felt something to drive an hour from her job to check up on him. Not necessarily a supernatural phenomenon but perhaps we make connections to people (mother to child would make sense) that we are just unaware of. It wouldn't surprise me at all.
Here's another possible explanation: People often do worry about things in general, or particularly about people they love. If that person dies unexpectedly, there's a pretty good chance -- at least one in twenty, I'd say as a conservative guess -- that people who care about him have worried about him that day. When they hear about the death, they may draw a connection even if there isn't one. We remember the cases where people talk about such associations, even though there are many more cases where there isn't one.
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