# Is EVP for real? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 4, 2006, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evp-for-real/338370 "2006-01-04T07:16:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Sequent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/dbc845/32.png) [@Sequent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sequent)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2006, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evp-for-real/338370/21 "2006-01-06T01:28:12Z")
> [@Princhester](#): > > I know what vibrate means. I known what higher level means. I have no idea what you mean by this sentence though. Do you mean that we humans shake (ie vibrate) and that spirits shake at a higher frequency? Or that they shake with a bigger amplitude? Or that they do it whilst standing on a box? Or what? Exactly? And how do you know? Oh but I don’t know…I’m simply offering an alternate explanation for the phenonmena. Alternate to the one that says they’re either hearing things or they’re just wacked. You can use your own Occam’s Razor accordingly. The concept of vibration is found widely throughout New Age literature: it’s a pseudo-scientific term used to describe conciousness or even physical systems that co-exist with our reality yet are not accessible to most living humans. You can’t see or hear spirits because, as **Mangetout** put it, they’re twangin’ on a higher note. _The Celestine Prophecy_ popularized this idea, but it’s been around for a long time. Because the concept’s so vaguely defined, you can apply it to all kinds of valid scientific phenonmena much less complicated than string theory: everything from breathing to Brownian motion. The idea is that our entire world is composed of energy. Rocks even have their own vibrational level. Sentient beings can transcend their vibrational level and thereby transcend their reality. The lower the vibration, the lower the state of conciousness, the less “alive” something is (think absolute zero). At higher vibrations, conciousness is expanded into higher “dimensions” and transcends our world and its rules, such as gravity and time. Again, I’m not claiming to know anything for certain, I’m just representin’ for all my New Age homies out there. ---
**Author:** ![Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hilarity_n.suze/32/6223_2.png) [@Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hilarity_N.Suze)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2006, 7:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evp-for-real/338370/22 "2006-01-06T07:59:31Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > … > There’s also a guy out there who claims that _pretty much every spoken phrase_, when played backwards, contains another audible phrase revealing the true mind of the speaker; this (and much of the original fuss over backmasking in the music industry) is (IMO) just another case of pattern-finding where there is no actual pattern to be found. Not at all the same thing, but there does seem to be a kind of phenomena where, when someone says something that they either don’t absolutely know to be true (but are claiming it is) or something that they don’t want to be true, they speak it in such a way that the thing they _do_ believe (or want to believe) is evident. I spent months transcribing verbatim tapes of interviews with insurance claimants and, quite aside from the difficulty of making sure you’ve done it verbatim with all the “ums” and “ers,” a lot of times I had to listen, rewind, listen, rewind, asking myself all the while, “Did he say this? Or its opposite?” For instance once a guy was taking about whether his aunt or his uncle had taken his car. Now there are two words that are pretty hard to confuse, yet every single time I had to listen to make sure which one he’d said. I ended up thinking that the _other_ one had been the one driving. I remember this one because I mentioned my difficulties to the investigator and it turned out that one of them, let’s say the aunt, had no driver’s license–which would invalidate the claim. But it could never be proven. Eh, just a theory. ---
**Author:** ![Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hilarity_n.suze/32/6223_2.png) [@Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hilarity_N.Suze)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2006, 8:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evp-for-real/338370/23 "2006-01-06T08:03:46Z")
> [@Robert Emmett](#): > > … > Take the face of Mary on the cheese sandwich. Chances are, it was some random burn mark that people changed into the face of Mary. There have been innumerable accounts of this throughout history. You want a face of Mary on a cheese sandwich? Here’s how: Melt some butter. Paint the face of Mary onto the bread with the melted butter, nice and thick. Plop it butter-side-down in a skillet. Cook until the butter is nice and brown. This also works on tortillas. For authenticity you might want to use lard here. For pancakes, you paint the face in batter directly onto the griddle, let it cook about three minutes, then pour the rest of the pancake batter on top of it as usual. The hard part is finding a photo to work with. I don’t have a clue how to do it in dryer lint though. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2006, 8:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evp-for-real/338370/24 "2006-01-06T08:55:36Z")
> [@Hilarity N. Suze](#): > > Not at all the same thing, but there does seem to be a kind of phenomena where, when someone says something that they either don’t absolutely know to be true (but are claiming it is) or something that they don’t want to be true, they speak it in such a way that the thing they _do_ believe (or want to believe) is evident. I spent months transcribing verbatim tapes of interviews with insurance claimants and, quite aside from the difficulty of making sure you’ve done it verbatim with all the “ums” and “ers,” a lot of times I had to listen, rewind, listen, rewind, asking myself all the while, “Did he say this? Or its opposite?” For instance once a guy was taking about whether his aunt or his uncle had taken his car. Now there are two words that are pretty hard to confuse, yet every single time I had to listen to make sure which one he’d said. I ended up thinking that the _other_ one had been the one driving. I remember this one because I mentioned my difficulties to the investigator and it turned out that one of them, let’s say the aunt, had no driver’s license–which would invalidate the claim. But it could never be proven. Eh, just a theory. I’m sure the stuff you’re describing here (which also includes a body language thing called ‘microgestures’) is not entirely quackery - There’s no reason at all why it shouldn’t contain a portion of truth; all we’d really be saying is that some of the processing that the brain is trying to keep hidden is showing through - no problem with that. What is preposterous (as I’m sure you realise and agree) is the idea that the brain betrays its true motives in the form of reversed utterances - why on earth _should_ it; from an evolutionary perspective, how the heck could this be a selectable advantage? ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2006, 11:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evp-for-real/338370/25 "2006-01-06T11:42:27Z")
> [@Sequent](#): > > Oh but I don’t know…I’m simply offering an alternate explanation for the phenonmena. Alternate to the one that says they’re either hearing things or they’re just wacked. You can use your own Occam’s Razor accordingly. > > The concept of vibration is found widely throughout New Age literature: it’s a pseudo-scientific term… > > [snip] > > Again, I’m not claiming to know anything for certain, I’m just representin’ for all my New Age homies out there. I know all that, but I was putting you on the spot. This is GQ. If you don’t actually think this drivel is true, then don’t post it. If you do, defend it based on cites to empirical and/or rational evidence. But what is the point (in GQ) of “answering” a question asking if a particular phenomenon is true by saying “new agers believe X”? New agers are not a source of factual information. ---
**Author:** ![Nature\_s\_Call](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nature_s_call/32/19006_2.png) [@Nature\_s\_Call](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nature_s_Call)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2006, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evp-for-real/338370/26 "2006-01-06T14:00:52Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > What’s particularly amusing about the reverse speech guy is how incoherent or irrelevant are the phrases he claims to hear; a Frank Zappa song contains the phrase “There’s no-one except the sheik that remembered we had the mumps”. WOW!; Queen’s _We Will Rock You_ contains the hidden message “Bring us here to put on ash”. oooOOoo spooky! Reminds me of the Bloom County cartoon where a fundie “back-masking” combatant plays a Black Sabbath (I think) record backwards while making his case… only to be surprised that the message revealed is, “Go to church. Say your prayers.” Oh, and the irony of someone looking for _hidden_ satanic messages on a Black Sabbath record 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Emerald\_Hawk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e495f1/32.png) [@Emerald\_Hawk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Emerald_Hawk)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2006, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evp-for-real/338370/27 "2006-01-06T19:50:30Z")
I just felt I had to chime in with another possible explanation, similar to the AM radio one already mentioned: baby monitors. James Randi discusses this explanation [here](http://www.randi.org/jr/042205modern.html#11) and there is a hilarious story [here](http://www.randi.org/jr/042905some.html#5) as well. On a side note, does anyone else ever amuse themselves by seeing patterns in television static? I used to love doing that when I was a kid, as my overactive imagination would see all kinds of cool shapes and creatures, moving and morphing into one another as I watched the static. These days it seems the good TV’s just show a blue screen, so perhaps this is a lost art. ---
**Author:** ![Cervaise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cervaise/32/16693_2.png) [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2006, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evp-for-real/338370/28 "2006-01-06T19:58:23Z")
> [@Bryan Ekers](#): > > I bet electricity had a similar effect, when it started to become familiar to the general public. Note the 1935 masterpiece _[Murder by Television](http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0026740)_ (starring Bela Lugosi, no less). ---
**Author:** ![Antinor01](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecae2f/32.png) [@Antinor01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Antinor01)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2006, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evp-for-real/338370/29 "2006-01-07T00:29:25Z")
> [@Nature's Call](#): > > Reminds me of the Bloom County cartoon where a fundie “back-masking” combatant plays a Black Sabbath (I think) record backwards while making his case… only to be surprised that the message revealed is, “Go to church. Say your prayers.” > > Oh, and the irony of someone looking for _hidden_ satanic messages on a Black Sabbath record 😃 As I recall, the whole message was, “Go to church, say your prayers, TITHE TITHE TITHE!” Ah, good times ---
**Author:** ![DarrenS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/977dab/32.png) [@DarrenS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DarrenS)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2006, 12:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evp-for-real/338370/30 "2006-01-07T00:42:03Z")
> [@Robert Emmett](#): > > As Princhester and SaintCad said, the human mind is famous for finding patterns where none exist, or where there is some sort of design which the mind places into convenient designs. Sometimes they just ‘unintentionally fabricate’ something by rejecting what they don’t want to see and tweaking it into they produce something they like. OK, now I’m going nuts trying to remember the psychological term for this. Something like, parolelia (but not). 😕 ---
**Author:** ![DarrenS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/977dab/32.png) [@DarrenS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DarrenS)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2006, 6:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evp-for-real/338370/31 "2006-01-22T06:26:01Z")
OK, with much Googling I finally remembered the term: [pareidolia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evp-for-real/338370.md?page=1)