Category: Life Experiences

Gefilte fish and chicken and being Jewish in Australia

personby Gillian Polack
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I am currently adding recipes to my Patreon page, and thought that this little piece might be of interest to everyone here.

Growing up as an Orthodox Jew (Modern Orthodox, Australian Orthodox – more interested in learning, community and food than in matters religious, unless we could argue about them – my favourite argument will always be how kangaroo can be seen as potentially kosher) in Australia is a most extraordinary thing. For one thing, it doesn’t matter how many generations your family has been in the country, too many people assume that you are a recent arrival, simply because you are Jewish. Some even try to spot an Israeli accent. In my case, this is very imaginative of them.

The classic case of this was at a New Year’s Eve party in Canberra. I was in a group of people, one of whom had recently taken out citizenship. We were talking about where our folks came from, and when, as one so often does. We were all very open about our origins, religions and background. We also had a lengthy discussion about date of arrival. Of the group, my family was the earliest arrival by at least one generation, and the new citizen’s was the most recent. My family started coming here about 150 years earlier than hers. After a bit (conversations can be very long on New Year’s Eve) we turned to weddings. The new citizen turned to me and asked intently, “What would your parents do if you married an Australian?”

A nasty reminder (well before the present thrum of hate) that Jews are somehow considered different, even in a very tolerant country was when I was nine years old, and was personally accused of killing Christ. At the time I was very bewildered, because I knew who he was and when he lived, and I also knew that I was nine years old. I could not reconcile the contradictions, so I nursed the puzzle until I had antisemitism sorted out sufficiently that I could deal with it. What I asked at the time was “Does this mean I invent time travel?”

What has this to do with cooking? Well, one thing that regular hints of prejudice does is to drive one to reconsider. I have friends who, when discriminated against, or subtly insulted, reject their past and tried to “fit in”. That is a legitimate decision, but has never been a road I have followed. Nor has it been a road my parents followed. What we do when faced with “not belonging” is to strongly reassert our complex cultural identity. That is to say we share it. And the easiest way to convince someone that to be Jewish is still to be human is to feed everyone in sight. After all, everyone eats, even if our religions are a bit different.

If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, then a way to a person’s cultural appreciation follows the same route. People around me are forcibly introduced to Judaism. You know the method. It is stark and awful. Eat this chicken soup! Have a kosher chocolate! Try one of my Mum’s famous biscuits, after all, it is Passover next week!

That is the skeleton in the closet, the dread reason for me handing out food to everyone in my vicinity. It’s sort of nice to be thought a human being, and food definitely helps smooth the way. Mind you, the food can end up taking over your life. I no longer feed people to convince them I’m human. I feed people because I’ve fallen in love with feeding people. And the great thing is that many friends return the favour.

That’s the skeleton in the closet and explains why one whole tier of my Patreon contains recipes and food stories. It also explains why I was once a pro blogger. The skeleton under the bed is a different matter. As well as studying history at university, I studied some archaeology, so Mum let me have her old skeleton (not the one inside her, but the one she used before she dropped out of medicine). I called it George and I called it Yorick, depending on which head I was using. A skeleton with two skulls is very useful for understanding mandibular articulation. And, since my bedroom at this time was 5’3” by 7’, the only storage place was under the bed.

To get back to food (which neither George nor Yorick was/were, not having been kosher at any stage in his/their spotted past – the spots were some sort of mould, Mum suggested, but dissuaded me from running tests) my family demonstrates that minor prejudice can lead to the most wonderful, food-based friendships. That’s a good reason for a whole chapter on it in this book. This is the food that led to the friendships which make up the rest of the book. Isn’t there a children’s rhyme that goes something like that?

My father’s mother’s cooking was very Anglo-Australian. Mum says that her favourite desserts were blancmange, jelly, icecream or stewed fruit. Her standard Sunday dinner was soup (mostly “Jewish penicillin” ie chicken soup), a roast of lamb plus three vegetables, salad, with fruit and icecream for dessert. As you can see by the dairy product at the end, she did not keep kosher. She also followed the Anglo at the expense of the Jewish – I was brought up with Friday night dinners of the same menu (sometimes the lamb was replaced by chicken or beef, and the icecream was always replaced by a non-dairy dessert) with the leftovers for Saturday lunch. This was the natural compromise between Dad’s Anglo upbringing and Mum’s strong Continental Jewish tradition.

Mum was in tears when Dad proposed to her and said, magnanimously, that he was prepared to tolerate a kosher kitchen, as long as it was “done properly”. He was very good at keeping the rules once he started, even though he wickedly told people about an atheist friend who “knew he was Jewish because he could not bear to drink a glass of milk after his ham sandwich”.

This post would be lost without recipes. Let me share my family gelfilte fish recipe, and its very important alternate.

 

GEFILTE FISH

I have, alas, been unable to try out or even taste test this recipe. I am also told I’d be a lot nicer as a person if only I had been able to eat gefilte fish when I was young.  How I obtained it was by asking my grandmother. She explained it in detail, went away, made gefilte fish, then updated her explanation.

Ingredients

minced fish (use three different types of white fish – Grandma’s standard varieties are Murray Perch, garfish and mullet – she says to avoid anything pink. My suggestion is that if you get tuna or something then just put frills around the plate holding the pale rose gefilte fish and serve it as the Barbara Cartland variation)

eggs

fine matzah meal (made of ground-up matzo – unleavened bread – a yeast free bread that tastes like very bland dried biscuits, but is brilliant to cook with.)

 

Method

Mix minced fish with eggs and matzah meal and knead until firm. For proportions, what you want is a firm-ish mixture that holds its shape when you knead it. Start with the fish, then add eggs and matzah meal until it is a smooth, heavy paste (a damp, dumpling like consistency). Let stand a while.

Mince again, and mould into balls. Flour hands with fine matzah meal between each shaping.

In a big saucepan, place fish bones, topped by sliced onions and carrots. Add water. Bring to the boil. Add the fish balls, one at a time (use a spoon and be very gentle). Keep the broth on a slow boil until the fish is cooked through. Season to taste.

 

What does a good Aussie Jewish family do at Passover when several loud-voiced members have nasty fish allergies? Grandma makes them gefilte chicken, and everyone prods me under the table and asks “Where do you think Grandma got her three types of chicken from, eh?” My ribs were fragile the first night she served this delicacy, as almost every family member had the same idea and dug me in the ribs to emphasise their pungent wit. Gefilte chicken goes excellently with pickles and a bit of salad.

GEFILTE CHICKEN

Ingredients

take 2 chicken breasts and mince (if you don’t want this to look traditional and white, you can just use chicken mince – but the fat content may make them shrink; if you are using mince, I suggest 400 g and medium sized egg)

2 large eggs

salt

pepper

chicken stock

 

Method

Mix all dry ingredients and let stand a while. If the mixture is at all liquid add fine matzo meal to stiffen it. Make into balls using at least a tbs of mixture at a time (coat your hands with matzo meal to stop the mixture sticking).

Bring chicken stock to the boil, then lower the heat and place balls gently in the broth. Let cook gently, with the saucepan covered. Test to see when cooked (should take around 45 minutes).

Jewish in Australia – a brief update

personby Gillian Polack
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This week the Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is a mixed bag, but it’s all very close to home. The Royal Commission is talking about learning and educational resources today, for example, so I have to watch. I need to know how what I do (or did when I had lots of teaching and do on the rare instance I’m back teaching) fits into good practice. I also need to be critical of what everyone else is doing. Not bad-critical, but aware-critical. Today then, is an in-service for education outside the tertiary sector.

Then there are three days of things I know but need to understand better. Learning and education require this, and just because I’ve been excluded from much of the education I used to give, doesn’t absolve me from learning and updating. It’s ironic that I’m updating my understanding of why I’ve been excluded, but that’s only a small slice of a vast pie about education in Australia and how it fits with being Jewish in Australian.

Friday, as I told everyone on Facebook, is my personal hellscape, because it’s about antisemitism in the Arts and Creative sector. It’s not my once-life and hope-to-be life: it’s my current everyday. I say “hope-to-be” but the silencing and how Jewish creatives now live in a different world to most others hasn’t yet been tackled and may not be tackled. The focus here is on the hate, not the side effects of hate. The introduction for this week (by counsel assisting) has already noted how many of us are isolated and drifting thanks to the antisemitism, which is a big advance.

Outside the Royal Commission, people are blaming Jews for all kinds of things still. The new thing they (those who hate) have is an assessment of the Royal Commission while not paying any attention to what everyone says in it. The investigation into antisemitism itself becomes an excuse for antisemitism. I read something that suggests that people who do this enjoy hating. I wish they were wrong.

I asked my Facebook followers to consider. “Anyone who has political opinions on these subjects, listen to the evidence at the RC first and maybe think on how things affect me and other Australian Jews in your vicinity. Is your opinion on my page more important than my safety or emotional stability? Your choice, of course, but I’d rather you made it an educated choice.”

None of this was going to be today’s post. I had completely different ideas. But in the background, I’m hearing a rabbi talking about healing the staff at Bankstown Hospital, which is known to be antisemitic. So many people are taking their religion off their hospital record, for their own safety. There was discussion in Sydney about even finding alternates to hospitals because of safety. The State government is now talking about what to do. Healing is going to take a long time. Safety is still an issue. At least, however, more people are now talking about this.

If you want to learn more about our Royal Commission, you can find it here: Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion

Ranting

personby Gillian Polack
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I wrote a rant on Facebook. I want to copy it here because the cause of it affects so many people and I think it would be good to find it again. Let me explain first, though.

My ethnohistorian self looks at what happens in the world around us as evidence of human lives. I’m always looking for patterns. Right now, finding patterns and interpreting them well is more important than it’s ever been for me, because of the level and nature of antisemitism in Australia. I keep an eye on what our Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is doing, and I find it has its own patterns and, at this point, it doesn’t see the rest of Australia clearly. It only sees what it’s shown, and some of the interpretation is done through the lens of groups who are part of the problem. Cross-questioning should not be up to 66% led by groups that are known for their antisemitism, but on some days it is. That affects the picture we all see. I make my own analyses, then, to keep what the RC does in perspective. I keep my own analysis in perspective using a truckload of tools. I watch some of the top ten shows on TV so that I’m in tune with the stories others see and hear. I keep an eye on social media. I make sure I’m part of events when I can. Last Saturday I was on a stall at Geek Expo. I wore nothing to indicate I’m Jewish (I don’t like tempting fate) but I watched and listened and I talked to many people. I’m beginning to learn the pattern and shape of antisemitism in this country.
What I wrote on FB just now was about one of the trails of hate spread so liberally across social media. I used several search terms to bring up people talking specifically about that topic, and I also looked at the new and at commentaries on the news, on the timelines of people who are known to be Jewish (eg a certain film director), and also with some of the major figures who talk politics in Australia. One thing I didn’t do this time was look at commentary by noted Jewish social media folks, so this doesn’t include the comments on their posts.
As much as anything, today’s post is about how I see the world, which is always as a writer (everything contains stories) and as an historian (everything contains evidence). it’s also an insight into what it’s like being a Jewish Australian at the place where 5 different branches of Australian antisemitism hit, but that’s not something to talk about today.

 

There is a pattern. If it’s Monday evening in east coast Australia, then the new wave of antisemitism hits social media. Sometimes it lasts until the weekend and sometimes it fades in a couple of days. Today’s wave is fairly precise. It’s an old one, revisited, and it riffs on one of last week’s waves.
That wave said, “If Israel was only completely obliterated, there would be no problems in the Middle East.” None of those pushing this line asked what would happen to Jews in Israel, but I asked a couple of people (who do not know to block me yet, obviously) and they explained that, since no-one in the Arab world hates Jews or has ever killed a Jew, they do not know why it’s even a question.
Some of them also say that there’s no antisemitism in Australia. I followed a little thread where someone asked how Bondi fitted into the ‘no antisemitism in Australia’ notion, and the person who asked was blocked, but the ‘no antisemitism’ person took that same thought elsewhere. They know there is antisemitism, but they’re in denial for their own reasons. Others (who I didn’t talk to because… not so safe) said that the world would be better with no Jews. That’s the old thread. It is not simple and it is unkind.
The new one (which is also an old one, but present in so many places this evening) is more polite. The new wave of hate says that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism. It’s an evil thing that touts supremacy and includes murder. The actual history of Zionism is irrelevant here (though the history of carefully cultivated antisemitism is not) – and if you want to see the range of definitions of Zionism from a snapshot I did a while back, let me know and I’ll share the links again.
The big thing is that I don’t know anyone Jewish who uses this definition. I know a couple of people who might, but they’re not people who talk to me. Those couple of people are both quite far left.
Why is the use by Jews so important? Because the same people who have this curious definition of Zionism also have a potted definition of Judaism. We’re a religion, simply, with no links to the ancient Levant and only modern culture. Excuse me while I take a break to sing Shir Ha’Maalot, which is appropriate at this point for so many reasons.
I’m finished singing.
How do most of these people use those definitions? They find comments made by obvious Jews (especially famous ones) and correct their self descriptions.
It’s very Orwellian. Reshape everyone’s thoughts on a subject by using the same words and phrases and correcting people over and over again. It’s Jewsplaining, but with intent to create 1984.
I am going to strongly suggest that if you don’t know how a Jewish friend sees themselves and describes themselves, you ask them. You’ll get our answers, not a single standard ‘this is the only way of saying it’ except from those of us who like shaping the world with straightforward constructions. This comes down to how a person sees themselves in the world, so that is what you should put ahead of most other things if you want to actually talk to Jews and defend our right to exist as Jews. You don’t have to like any given person’s self-definition. But you do need to accept it as their self-definition ahead of the carefully crafted definitions applied by bigots.
Within Jewish culture, each self-definition plays a part. There are concepts we share, and concepts we craft by creating a complex composition. We’re all voices in a choir. Some choirs walk a little bit to the side and create their own mix, but they’re still part of Am Yisrael.
The thing about Judaism is that it doesn’t force one simple view. We argue and discuss and even have an approved rabbinic method of shelving impossible arguments so that we can move on to possible ones.
Redefinition by someone imbued with Jew hate is not just going to change the public way others see Jews, it’s going to chip at who we are by not letting us be ourselves outside closed communities. The choir is being pelted with rocks for not singing the right song in the right way… and that song and that right way may not have anything to do with what the choir was singing or why the choir was singing or who the choir was singing for.
This is an old trick. It shuts down Jewish voices. Every time someone tells someone else who they are without checking with them first, to find out how they see themselves, they’re saying “Who you are is unimportant. You are a lesser human being than I am.”

An addendum:
Miss Manners needs to intervene. If you’ve been shouting politics, your politics might have made your Jewish friends aware that you are not safe to speak with about certain subjects. Check with them before you ask them questions. They may not want to answer because they may not be as trusting (or as safe) as they were a few years ago.
I understand that everyone’s politics is important, but left wing politics in Australia have led to a lot of Jew hate. Otherwise good people are being treated with caution, even if they don’t know it, because they shouted “Globalise the intifada” but never asked Aussie Jewish friends whether we were OK after Bondi. I dropped many hints about ‘talking to your friends’ in the last 3 years, but most people didn’t. If you didn’t (thought nice thoughts but never called or had a cuppa) then think twice before suddenly invading a friend’s life with “How do you self-define.” Explain why you didn’t talk to them, perhaps, then ask if it’s possible to talk?

The Importance of Fruit Cake

personby Gillian Polack
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I keep forgetting to introduce my books to you! Let me remedy this.

This week, someone (a very generous someone) posted about The Year of the Fruit Cake. They said lovely things about it and about my writing. While I ought to simply share the post, or at least repeat the words, this week I am terribly, terribly Australian. Just saying that someone said nice things is blowing my own trumpet in Oz. Tall poppy syndrome is one of our big cultural babies and so I cannot repeat things without feeling as if I need to be cut down. This is, of course, a really bad way of letting you know about my book.

The Year of the Fruit Cake won me a nice trophy and mentions in many places. I will never understand this, because it’s not that easy to read. It’s at the literary end of SF. I wanted to write about a difficult set of subjects (including perimenopause) and I wanted to do it with science fiction and I used so many of the things women experience at that time of life in Australia to shape the novel. Not just as the subjects dealt with in the novel, but in the storytelling itself.

When I went through perimenopause my body was unreliable, so the narrators are unreliable. Everything is personal.

My memory had blips, so my main character has major memory issues.

So many friendships had to be renegotiated, especially those with men and with younger women, who mostly had not idea of the magnitude of the changes and that hot flushes were not just an excuse to wield a pretty fan. Our society lacks story that explains these changes, so I turned one of my perimenoapusal women into an alien.

Eventually I discovered that one of the issues I and my cohort faced was gentle shifts along gender spectra. OK, not so gentle. Now I’m past it, my body doesn’t want to declare how very female it is one minute and that it’s increasing in testosterone the next. I have settled into being female, but not into being female in the same way I once was. The aliens in the novel with their twelve genders are closer to my physical reality than I like to admit. I gave them at least one shift that was delightful. I wish I could do the same for human women. Perimenopause was a nightmare for me, so I made those physical changes a nightmare for my alien-in-human-body.

Also, I wanted to write about othering. Australia is not good to older women, so I wrote about the process of becoming an older woman and having to find new ways of living in society. I had no idea the same thing (in a more extreme version) would apply to me right now as an Australian Jew. I had no idea that this year I would live in a year of Fruit Cake, with an uncertain future and a society I thought was stable turned chancy.

I entirely thought chocolate would remain important and I was totally correct about that, thankfully.

The novel is a slow read and I will never write one as difficult again… but I got some things far too right. I’m glad that one of them was chocolate.

A Roundup of Zentao Senryu

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’ve been on a road trip helping my partner deal with some family matters, which included carting home boxes of things that families tend to treasure. While I’m almost finished reading a book that I think will resonate with other writers in particular, I am way too wiped out to summon the intellectual process necessary to do it justice.

So I’m sharing some of the senryu I call “Zentao” that I write every morning. Since I’ve been driving through Oregon, I’ll start with this one:

Oh, a volcano!
Ahead. Now behind. Three more!
Must be Oregon.

We drove home down the eastern side of the Cascades, so I think at one point we actually saw five at once.

A senryu about volcanos needs a picture of one. I didn’t take many pictures this trip, but here’s a picture of Mt. St. Helen’s I took some years back after we stumbled onto a ranger lecture on the history of its 1980 eruption. (It’s a Washington volcano, but you can see it from Oregon as well.)

Mt. St. Helens, a volcano in Washington state.

My original reason to do a daily senryu was to capture how I was feeling each morning. For obvious reasons, a lot of them have turned out to be political:

Daily things to check:
weather, fires, air quality,
threats to democracy.

Wars. Stupid tech. Grift.
A pretense that it’s all normal.
Not civilized yet.

People came together
to watch them scrape off his name.
Build on that action.

Or about broligarchs:

They think they’re so smart
since they’ve made so much money.
Not civilized yet.

Don’t take any advice
from broligarchs who think that we
are just NPCs.

Those developing tech
should be required to study
Donna Haraway’s work.

Some days I strive for philosophical insight:

Simple feels good,
but it leaves out way too much.
Learn to think in depth.

Play well with others,
but stand up for what’s right, and
ask the hard questions.

“The world not yet lost.”
Maybe nothing’s lost yet,
just being found anew.

And since I’ve just been on a road trip across a couple of states, which reminds me of both how beautiful our country is and how much destruction of both people and places we’ve wrought, a couple on those contradictions:

Traveling the U.S.
So many trucks and chain stores.
So much great beauty.

Ocean, hills (still green), palm trees.
Freeways, cars, so many buildings.
Complex paradise.

And, of course, cats. After giving ourselves a year to mourn the loss of our last elderly cat, we got two young cats. It might have been the best decision of the last several years.

Here’s Shadow:

a gray cat sleeping, with one front leg dangling over the edge of a box.

Cats are wonderful.
Cats create abundant chaos.
Not contradictory.

And here’s her brother, Piper:

a tabby cat standing on his hind legs, exploring a loft.

And finally, a bit of self-evaluation:

I contradict myself.
I went to church with the space program.
What would you expect?

Australia – again

personby Gillian Polack
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I am late! I am late and want to talk about Jewish matters.

The Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has just released the total number of submissions and it’s a lot higher than anyone expected. I predicted 10,000 submissions and everyone around me said that 5,000 would be a lot and would reflect what was happening in our country a lot more. Even 10,000 was considered an overprediction because of the way most people saw antisemitism in Australia, in other words. So what does 20,000 mean? That things matter. That people have things to say.

What the submissions give us is something amazing, especially given that this is a census year and that we can fit those submissions into a snapshot of Australia in 2026 (the last census was in 2021, and you can see what it shows about jewish Australia here: The-Jewish-Population-of-Australia-Report_2021-Census-1.pdf . There are issues with the way data was collected and how unsafe the collection made Jews, and that Judaism was not listed as a religious or cultural option ie people had to write it in manually, but it still gives some indication of who we are in Jewish Australia. We have a surprising number of old people, for instance, and an unsurprisingly high average level of education.

Put these 20,000 submissions into analysis the way that Mass Obersvation Project has done for the UK, and it becomes an enormous data base for research into one aspect of Australian life: how people see Jewish Australia and how Jewish Australia sees itself. What we are. Who we are. How we deal with hate. This will lead to insights into how Australia sees other cultural and religious groups in the country. It has the capacity to change Australia’s self-knowledge.

What’s really interesting is how silent the far left is about the number of submissions. We don’t yet know if those submissions reflect their views as leading or typical. I strongly suspect that their views are bigoted and hateful, but I’m willing to wait and see how the data presents itself. And I want to know what Australia does with all this information about how we think and feel.

Given that the trigger was the Bondi murders and there is a very strong likelihood that those murders were caused by links to certain terrorist groups, we can’t exclude the outside world. But we can take a close look at ourselves and find out who we are and what we want to be.

Australia is in a strange place politically. Everything’s changing. I suspect those 20,000 submissions are part of that change. Who we are and how safe we are and the paths we take are all up for grabs in this very interesting year.

Reprint: Is My Brain Wired To Never See a Ghost?

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Is my brain wired to never see a ghost? A psychologist on three factors that make a paranormal experience more likely

When you experience something that can’t easily be explained, do you think of the supernatural?
Zeferli/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Melissa Maffeo, Wake Forest University

Around 1 in 5 Americans say they’ve seen a ghost. I’m not one of them, and I probably never will be. I blame my brain.

Let me explain. No one can say definitively that ghosts exist, but many people believe they do. Roughly three-quarters of Americans believe in some form of paranormal activity – not only ghosts, but psychic abilities, precognitive dreams, mediums and anything else that conventional explanations can’t account for.

As a psychology professor, I often think about the subjectivity people use when interpreting experiences. I wonder, then, if there are perfectly ordinary explanations for seemingly extraordinary experiences. Maybe a perfect storm of everyday factors can converge and trigger the sensation of a paranormal experience.

In my new book, “Science of the Supernatural,” I explore the idea that the human brain might be creating an experience of the supernatural by misinterpreting the external world. Here are three factors that might trick your brain into creating a fake ghost:

Haunted factor #1: Environmental stimuli

Anyone who’s ever watched a ghost hunting show has seen the paranormal investigator mutter something like “The EMF’s going crazy” when there’s purported supernatural activity afoot. Electromagnetic fields, or EMFs, are invisible areas of energy created by electrically charged particles.

At present, there is no direct evidence that humans can consciously sense EMF the same way we can touch, see or hear things in our environment. But with a handheld device purchased at a local hardware store, you can measure them anywhere. An EMF detector picks up electrical or magnetic activity, whether human-made or otherworldly. But do EMF fluctuations relate to paranormal activity?

The scientific method might help answer this question. In one study, conducted in the South Street vaults underneath Edinburgh, Scotland, EMFs fluctuated more in areas with a history of ghostly happenings. Another study found greater variability of EMFs in the more “haunted” areas of Hampton Court Palace in England.

People might unknowingly be detecting changes in environmental stimuli, like electromagnetic fields. The question then becomes: Did the ghost cause the EMF, or did the EMF cause the ghost?

To date, only one research group has attempted to experimentally manipulate environmental factors, including complex EMF, and measure subsequent perceptions of the paranormal.

Participants did report many peculiarities, ranging from feeling dizzy to feeling like they were detached from their bodies and even sensing a presence – but these experiences didn’t correspond to how the researchers varied environmental conditions, like EMF intensity. Interestingly, the people who described anomalous experiences were the same people who believed more strongly in the paranormal.

Do environmental factors like EMF lead to perceptions of the paranormal? On the one hand, there is a correlation between reportedly haunted places and EMF variability. And there are some indications that humans can detect magnetism. On the other hand, experimental manipulation of EMF did not relate to weird perceptions in a lab setting.

I think we need to look into other haunted factors.

Haunted factor #2: Neurological mix-ups

By applying a small electrical current to the side of the head, usually to evaluate a patient for a clinical procedure, researchers have observed some strange effects. One case study described a patient who experienced an “illusory shadow figure” that was mimicking, and even interfering, with their movements. Other people have reported out-of-body experiences.

diagram of brain with lobes labeled and TPJ region circled in the middle
The temporoparietal junction is on each side of the brain; this region helps you feel that you are within your own body.
John A Beal/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Experimental evidence suggests that this brain area, the temporoparietal junction, is probably crucial for the feeling of embodiment – that you inhabit your own body. Disrupting this brain area seems to trigger a sensation of disembodiment.

Neuroscientists aren’t completely sure how the sense of embodiment is built in the brain. The brain probably integrates bodily senses, like balance and position, with other internal processes, like a sense of self and agency. When this integration is altered, a person will experience very strange sensations.

Sometimes, misinterpretation of sensations from the body can happen during sleep, when your brain shuts out the external world. During rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, when most vivid dreams occur, the brain sends messages that prevent movement of skeletal muscles. This inhibition causes complete paralysis during REM sleep. It is a neurological safeguard; without it, you would be likely to act out your dreams.

woman lying in bed with transparent image of woman rising away from her reclined body
Mixed-up sensory input during sleep paralysis can lead to the perception of an out-of-body experience.
Ralf Nau/The Image Bank via Getty Images

Some people, though, wake up during REM sleep and find that they cannot move. They may simultaneously experience rich hallucinations – the remnants of their dream. This experience passes quickly. But in that moment of sleep paralysis, the neural signals that control skeletal muscle movement are inhibited, resulting in a mismatch of feedback from the body to the brain. Most people respond to the missing sensory information with fear, which makes them more likely to experience the sights and sounds from their dreams as reality.

Haunted factor #3: Personality traits

Living through a paranormal encounter requires that a person label their experience as such. If a believer were exposed to fluctuating EMFs, for example, they might be quick to categorize the strange sensation as paranormal. A skeptic might note they felt weird or off, but probably not point to a paranormal explanation.

There’s a growing body of research that suggests people with certain personality traits are more likely to believe in the paranormal.

For instance, some people are hyperaware of unconscious perceptions and ideas, which then permeate their consciousness. Often, these traits are associated with magical thinking, distorted or unusual thoughts, disorganized behavior and, sometimes, trouble forming close relationships.

Psychologists refer to this set of traits as schizotypy. They’re related to schizophrenia, although being high in schizotypy doesn’t mean you will be diagnosed with the disorder of schizophrenia. People with high levels of schizotypy are more likely to believe in the paranormal. They’re also more likely to experience disembodiment and spontaneous sensory perceptions and have trouble discriminating between self and others.

All of these traits relate to the function of the temporoparietal junction – the brain area that helps you know you’re located within your own body.

transparent outline of a girl in a creepy hallway
A perfect storm of factors can make a ghost seem like the only explanation.
urbazon/E+ via Getty Images

When haunted factors add up to a ghost

While I cannot say for sure whether ghosts exist, I can propose a plausible explanation for why some people might be more prone to apparent paranormal experiences than others.

Consider a person who believes in paranormal phenomena who experiences a natural change in electromagnetic fields or an episode of sleep paralysis. Those experiences induce unusual sensations that this person cannot explain. Searching for meaning in ambiguity, this person distorts their distinction between internally and externally generated sensations. They settle on the only explanation that makes sense to them – that this strange feeling they experienced was a ghost.

My guess is that belief in the paranormal is the glue that holds the haunted factors together to create the (mis)perception of a ghost.

One experiment asked participants to walk through a disused theater in Decatur, Illinois. Some were told that the theater was haunted, and some were not. Several participants noted weird sensations that they attributed to paranormal activity – but only those who believed that the theater was haunted reported these sensations.

Belief alone might not create a ghost, but belief combined with at least one haunted factor – environmental stimuli, neurological hiccups or psychological conditions – might be enough to make a ghost real.

This becomes a chicken-or-the-egg riddle – or in this case, the ghost or the EMF. Someone who is more likely to be sensitive to environmental factors or who experiences sleep paralysis might create belief from their experiences. When someone cannot explain these experiences with any “natural” explanation, a supernatural explanation might be the only one that makes sense.

I’ve never noticed EMF. I’ve never experienced sleep paralysis. I’m pretty sure I don’t have personality traits like schizotypy. I don’t believe in the paranormal. And I don’t think I’ll ever see a ghost.The Conversation

Melissa Maffeo, Teaching Professor of Psychology, Wake Forest University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Reprint: Is My Brain Wired To Never See a Ghost?”…

Decisions, decisions

personby Gillian Polack
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It’s really hard to decide on what I should post about today. I have diversions.

The first is that I’m in the final throes of revising my thesis to meet the examiners’ comments. I thought it would be a much bigger task than it was. I’ve sent my revisions and comments to my supervisors and then I send the final in and, hopefully, by the end of the week it will be done and dusted save for graduation. I submitted the thesis over a year ago – even for Australia this is slow. I don’t know why it was so slow, but career-wise it doesn’t matter to me (this is not my first PhD and I’m in my sixties) so it’s better the admin slowness doesn’t apply to young students than it does apply to me. Also, between submission and graduation, my first PhD took 3 years. It was not my fault, but it cost me my first career. By me a drink and I’ll tell you the story.

It’s rather nice that lateness doesn’t always carry such costs.

The second is that the submission period for the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion closed yesterday. Many of us are a bit overwhelmed. On 4 June (10 days before submissions closed) there were over 14,000 submissions, which was a record for Royal Commissions. No-one knows the final number yet.

The staff serving the Royal Commissioner is obligated to read every single one of them. And those of us keeping track are wondering what this means. That Jewish Australia matters? That haters have put in many thoughts? We know that haters have oput in some thoughts. We also know that Palestinian Australia put in a 259 page submission. I’ve seen the outline and need to read it because I cannot make sense of it. Or rather, I can make sense of it in and of itself, but not how it helps Australia handle antisemitism. It seems to be arguing that we’re making things up. This is why I have to check. I’ve been told by quite a few people this last week that antisemitism is fictional, but there are so many incidents right now that this is not a claim so much as a misdirection. I need to know why APAN feels the need to spend 259 pages backing that misdirection if that is, indeed what they’re doing.

What I’m supposed to be doing is writing fiction. I lay in bed last night working out things that needed working out, but today have only written a couple of hundred words. We’re in a weather trap and my bones hurt and I keep procrastinating and worrying about Jewish Australia and other groups being confined by wagon trains circling hate.

Let me leave you and go back to my big writing decision for this week: Lincoln or London in the twelfth century for a section of the novel. I want both, but I don’t think both will fit. I also want Cologne and Speyer. Both! Actually, writing this out has made me think: people travelled in the Middle Ages. Why don’t I have someone travelling to Cologne from Speyer? That would give me the words for Lincoln and London. I just need to check concepts and characters and plot and… all the things… except the history. I have most of the research for that at my fingertips because of the non-fiction I was working on recently and that still has no home. All this research pays.

Submissions

personby Gillian Polack
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I have emerged (finally) from government documents.

Australia is an interesting place and how Australia handles being in interesting places is through calling for submissions from the public. I’ve written two on matters of antisemitism and hate (one of which being 22 pages long and still too short, and containing far too many typos because I had to do it in a time of physical pain) and one on cultural policy. My cultural policy one was for the government consideration of what Australia’s cultural policy should look like in the future. Last time I wrote on this, I pointed out how impossible our policies are towards writers. They’re still not generous. There is an opera company that gets as much money from the Federal government in a year as all writers and writing organisations and festivals. Or there used to be. I haven’t looked it up this year because, while it’s still a major concern, a bigger one is the direction our Arts are heading. Erasure, hate, purity tests… federal spending that supports hate is unwise. I wrote 1300 words explaining this (a short submission!) and using examples from close to home.

What have I emerged to? I’m so glad you asked.

I’m at Balticon online. And then at Swancon in person. When I return from both… I will have news.

 

Australian and Jewish… again

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m sorry I missed last week. Jewish Australia is a bit… different. There’s a Royal Commission into antisemitism and social cohesion. I’ve submitted 22 pages to it and keep thinking I missed critical things. Last week was the first of the public hearings, and by Monday morning 9,400 submissions had been made. There are so very many that the open period for submissions was extended by two weeks. This is a vast number, for the whole population of Australia and all its territories is significantly less than the population of California. We fit somewhere between the population of Florida and Texas. If you printed the submissions and handed them out to random Jewish Australians (using the Monday morning numbers, weeks before submissions close), one in eleven would receive an interesting document to read.

Antisemitism is pretty bad here, and whatever the Royal Commission decides will determine our future in many ways. In equally many ways, our future rests on how the rest of Australia feels on hearing just how difficult life has been for Australian Jews.

Even checking up on what is said in the first lot of public hearings was exhausting. So many reports had me nodding alongside, think, “Yep, that’s happened, and oh yes, that too.” I am still annoyed by the people who accuse Jews of complaining too much or of clutching pearls or of being perpetual victims, or of being guilty by dint of being Jewish. In a perfect world, they would stop and listen. They would also not tell me, when I quietly let them know some of the worst incidents, “But what about Gaza?” So many are saying, “If every Australian Jew disassociated themselves from Israel, then there would be no antisemitism.” This is oddly funny, because other times and other places when there have been hate we’ve been told the same thing. Convert to Catholicism was the argument in 15th century Spain. And then came the definitions of impure blood and Judaicising. Some of those who had done the denial as asked were burned alive as Christians because their denials weren’t believed.

It’s a very strange month.