Michael Jawer
Speaker to Support Group August 2005
This Press Release Date: March 31, 2006
Emotion Gateway Research Center
Spanning disciplines to explore the neurobiology of personality
A Neurobiology of Sensitivity? New Study Suggests a Link
Between Environmental Sensitivity and Anomalous Perceptions
Vienna, Virginia (March 31, 2006) – People with a
‘sensitive’ personality type are far more likely to
report apparitional experience, according to a paper in the current
issue of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.
Such persons commonly report longstanding allergies, chronic pain and
fatigue, depression, migraine headaches, or sensitivity to light,
sound, and smell. These individuals are also more likely to
report that immediate family members suffered from the same
conditions. The survey raises the question of whether a
‘neurobiology of sensitivity’ could underlie
reports of apparitional experience occurring across societies and
throughout history.
Sixty-two self-described ‘sensitives’ participated
in the study, along with 50 individuals serving as controls who did not
profess any outstanding forms of sensitivity. Persons in the
former group were 3.5 times as likely, on average, to assert that
they’d had an apparitional experience (defined as perceiving
something that could not be verified as being physically present
through normal means.) Sensitive persons were also 2.5 times
as likely to indicate that an immediate family member was affected by
similar physical, mental or emotional conditions.
Overall, 8 of the 54 factors asked about in the survey were found to be
significant in the makeup of a sensitive personality:
Being female
Being a first-born or only child
Being single
Being ambidextrous
Appraising oneself as imaginative
Appraising oneself as introverted
Recalling a plainly traumatic
event (or events) in childhood
Maintaining that one affects - or
is affected by – lights, computers, and other electrical
appliances in an unusual way.
Additionally, synesthesia
– the scientifically recognized condition of overlapping
senses, such as hearing colors or tasting shapes – was
reported by approximately 10% of the sensitive group but not at all
among controls. This finding gives added weight to the
possibility that apparitional perceptions stem from an underlying
neurobiology of sensitivity.
“It seems quite possible,” writes study author
Michael Jawer, “that certain individuals are, from birth
onward, disposed to a number of conditions, illnesses, and perceptions
that, in novelty as well as intensity, distinguish them from the
general population. If so, apparitional experience might have
a bona fide neurobiological basis that makes it accessible to
scientific inquiry.”
The paper is posted online at http://cogprints.org/4810/. The
Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 by a distinguished
group of Cambridge University scholars, is the foremost British
organization for the scientific study of anomalous
perceptions. Its website is http://www.spr.ac.uk/.
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Michael Jawer directs the Emotion Gateway Research Center, based in
Northern Virginia. The Center is an independent organization
that investigates the neurobiological basis of personality.
Details: emotionalgateway@hotmail.com.
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