Overview
Feeling a presence in an empty room, hearing a voice when no one is there, or suddenly seeing a vivid vision can be unsettling — or deeply meaningful. A new study led by social psychologists at Brazil’s D’Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR) suggests these “uncanny” experiences are far more common than many people assume, and that how people interpret them depends heavily on context, belief, and personal circumstances. Published in PLOS One, the research examines not just which unusual experiences people report, but also how they explain them and what they do afterward.
The work arrives at a time when public interest in unexplained experiences remains high. Surveys have found that a large share of Americans say they have encountered something they could not explain, yet scientific research on the aftermath of such moments has been relatively sparse. That gap is what the Brazilian team set out to address.
How the study worked
To map these experiences, the researchers built on an earlier tool called the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE), a questionnaire that asks whether participants have ever experienced one of 38 unusual phenomena and, if so, what happened next. The new survey expanded that approach into a 47-question instrument and was administered to 5,117 people in Brazil. Researchers then analyzed the responses statistically to identify patterns in frequency, context, and interpretation.
The questionnaire covered a wide range of experiences, including sensing a presence, hearing voices, seeing visions, out-of-body experiences, déjà vu, extrasensory perception, lucid dreams, near-death experiences, and feelings of contact with the deceased or with extraordinary forces. Participants were also asked about the circumstances in which the event occurred — for example, whether they were awake, dreaming, falling asleep, waking up, or under the influence of alcohol or drugs. They were further asked how long the experience lasted, how often it occurred, and at what age it first appeared.
What the researchers found
According to senior author Ronald Fischer, a psychologist at IDOR, the findings challenge the idea that these events are necessarily signs of illness. “Experiences like sensing a presence, having a vision, or feeling as though you are observing yourself from outside your own body are far more common in the general population than clinical diagnosis rates would suggest,” he said. “We observed that most people in our sample of over 5,000 participants who report them are not unwell, and most describe them as neutral or positive – both at the time they occur and also when looking back and reflecting on that experience.”
That distinction matters. While some people described experiences as frightening or medically concerning, others reported comfort, awe, or a stronger sense of spirituality. In some cases, participants associated the event with a deceased loved one or interpreted it through religious or supernatural frameworks.
Why context matters
The study underscores a central point in contemporary research on unusual perception: the experience itself is only part of the story. The same event can be interpreted as a warning, a spiritual sign, a symptom, or simply a strange but harmless episode depending on the person’s beliefs, mental state, and surroundings. That is why the researchers also asked participants who or what they believed was responsible — including gods, angels, demons, spirits, or other entities.
This broader approach is part of an emerging scientific effort to understand how physiology, perception, and personal context interact. Some researchers are now asking whether the body’s own signals — including the heart’s electromagnetic pulses — may influence how people perceive presence, vision-like states, or other uncanny sensations. While that line of inquiry remains early, it points to a growing recognition that unusual experiences may emerge from a complex interplay between brain, body, and environment.
Broader implications
Rather than reducing these episodes to either superstition or pathology, the Brazilian study suggests a more nuanced reality: uncanny experiences are common, often meaningful, and not automatically a sign of mental illness. For clinicians, that may help distinguish between benign experiences and those that warrant medical attention. For researchers, it opens a broader question about how humans make sense of events that resist easy explanation — and why such moments can feel so deeply real.
