What about the explanation based on physical contact? It goes without saying that no one wants to get really close to a serial killer. Maybe you fear for your life, but it could also be that we treat evil as a physical contaminant that could be transmitted by touch. Not touching something contaminated by evil could be another heuristic to avoid having bad things happen to us. Perhaps Mother Nature provided us with a quick and easy rule of thumb: ‘If something is bad, do not touch. You might catch it too.’ After all, we don’t know why someone becomes a psychotic killer. It could be that something they touched or ate drove them mad. In September 2000, twenty-three-year-old Jacob Sexton murdered a Japanese female exchange student in Vermont following a two-month binge on LSD.9 After beating the girl to death with his bare hands, he lay down in front of the state police car when the authorities arrived and confessed that he had felt like killing because he ‘wanted to gather souls’. His defence was temporary insanity due to drug-induced psychosis. Physical substances like drugs can alter our minds and make us do crazy things. Sexton had willingly ingested the drug, but Albert Hoffman, who first synthesized LSD back in the 1950s, also experienced mind-altering trips when he unknowingly absorbed the compound through his fingertips. Simply by touching the drug, his mind was changed. Many toxins can be absorbed by skin contact, and minute quantities of harmful particles can present an invisible threat. Not only do murder and ghosts have to be declared when stigmatized homes are put up for sale, but many US states require houses that have previously contained methamphetamine manufacture labs to be identified and certified clean because of the residual threat of contamination. So when we behave as if houses or clothing could transmit psychosis, we are not being entirely irrational.
However, the fear of contamination does not require something physical. Just the thought of doing something immoral can make us feel physically dirty. It doesn’t have to be murder. When adults were asked in a recent study to think about cheating someone, they felt the need to wash their hands afterward.10 The researchers found that the brain areas that were active when subjects were feeling disgust from physical things like dirt and germs were the same as those that were active when they considered acts of moral disgust. This ‘Macbeth effect’ reveals that tricks of the mind can be just as powerful as the real thing. So thinking that something could be physically contaminating seems a good reason not to touch it. It is as though we suspect that something like an electric shock could leap from the object. This is why the Fred West cardigan stunt triggers mostly a sense of spiritual, not physical, contamination. You can’t wash away such contamination as though it were dirt, but, in a kind of balancing of evil with good, it can be cancelled or ‘exorcised’ by contact with someone good like Mother Teresa. The Vatican university, the Regina Apostolorum, has devised a two-month course on how to carry out an exorcism. From what I understand, these exorcism rites closely follow what was depicted in the classic horror film The Exorcist: a combination of prayers, rituals, and commands for the demons to leave the afflicted.11 The exorcism rite is usually performed in cases of individual possession, and sometimes the sufferer’s home is also cleansed with holy water and blessings.
I think that an audience responds as it does to the Fred West cardigan demonstration because most of us would treat the cardigan as if were imbued with evil. In the same way that some of us revere holy sites, priests, and sacred religious relics, we also shun places, people, and objects that are taboo. To do that, however, we have to attribute something more to them than just their physical properties. They must transcend the natural and become supernatural to elicit a disgusted response from us.
WATER COOLER CONVERSATIONS
I have just finished reading Quirkology by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman.12 It’s an enjoyable collection of curiosities and factoids about human behaviour, from the search for the world’s funniest joke to studies on finding the best opening line when speed-dating. The book is filled with examples harvested from psychological studies, which provide the curious sort of material that people love to discuss in so-called ‘water cooler conversations.’
At the end of the book, Wiseman reports the outcome of a series of ‘experimental’ dinner parties at which people were asked to rate a list of factoids described throughout the book on a scale from 1 (‘Whatever’) to 5 (‘When does it come out in paperback?’). He identifies the top ten factoids that people found most interesting. Here are just the top three most interesting facts. In third place was:
The best way of detecting a lie is to listen rather than look – liars say less, give fewer details, and use the word ‘I’ less than people telling the truth.
In second place was:
The difference between a genuine and a fake smile is all in the eyes – in a genuine smile, the skin around the eyes crinkles; in a fake smile it remains much flatter.
Guess what the number-one factoid was?
People would rather wear a sweater that has been dropped in dog faeces and not washed, than one that has been dry-cleaned but used to belong to a mass murderer.
Now you know why people find this one of the most curious facts about human nature.
WHAT NEXT?
They say that hindsight gives you 20/20 (perfect) vision, and in the cold light of day it is easy to dismiss our reactions to cardigans and pens as irrational when we have all the facts in hand. Whether we knock on wood, wear special tennis shoes, believe we heard a ghost, or avoid objects that may be contaminated with evil, the supersense can be found in many of us.
Some of us are better than others at controlling these thoughts and urges, but we should recognize that they are natural. I think that those with a strong supersense believe that there is more to the human body than simply the physical and that there is a soul or spiritual essence that can leave the body. These are self-confessed supersensers who talk about ghosts and spirits and consult with mediums. However, many of us just feel uncomfortable at the mention of the supernatural. Maybe this is an urge inside most of us that we have to suppress.
I think belief can operate with the same intuitive reasoning that helps us to understand the natural world by letting us make rapid decisions that feel right. The supersense is about these thoughts and behaviours and how they work to bind us together through a belief in invisible forces or essences. They don’t all have to be about unearthly experiences. We can use the supersense to connect with each other. Our physicalizing of the spiritual explains our need for contact with those we want to be intimate with, but it also explains how we can castigate others as unclean.