Having Certain Traits May Make You More Susceptible To “Hearing” The Dead - IFLScience

The researchers led by Durham University, however, wanted to explore why some people with these auditory experiences are more likely to adopt spiritualist beliefs and engage in the so-called practice of "hearing" the dead, while others who find the experience more distressing may receive a mental health diagnosis.

They recruited 65 members of the UK's Spiritualists' National Union and 143 members of the public, who don't regularly claim to hear the voices of the dead, to carry out the largest scientific investigation into the experience of clairaudient mediums yet.

Compared to the control group, the results showed that spiritualists were more likely to report a belief in the paranormal, and less likely to care what people thought of them.

Instead, people who adopt spiritualism are more likely to be predisposed to absorption and to have experienced unusual auditory experiences when young, and spiritualism's beliefs align with their experience

For our participants, the tenets of Spiritualism seem to make sense of both extraordinary childhood experiences as well as the frequent auditory phenomena they experience as practising mediums," lead researcher Dr Adam Powell from Durham University’s Hearing the Voice project said