IStock Photo 10539149 © Geralda van der Es

If modern media is any indication, the paranormal has a tenacious hold on the American zeitgeist. Television and movies are saturated with shows and films about paranormal events and phenomena—the Syfy Channel’s pseudo-reality series Ghost Hunters is consistently one of cable’s most highly-watched shows and, during its nine years on FOX (1993-2002), The X-Files became one of popular entertainment’s most famous paranormal-related series of all time.

Popular entertainment about extra-sensory perception or ESP, clairvoyance, and mediumship (the ability to speak to the dead) is particularly widespread: Patricia Arquette sees dead people and Jennifer Love Hewitt whispers to ghosts on CBS, and Anthony Michael Hall plays a psychic science teacher in USA’s The Dead Zone. But the popularity of shows dealing with matters beyond belief may in fact have a lot to do with what Americans actually believe: The odds that an American adult thinks it is possible to communicate with the dead, believes in clairvoyance, and believes in ESP are 1 in 5.03, 1 in 3.85, and 1 in 2.08, respectively.

Although there is some statistical evidence for ESP, the research is far from conclusive; some question its methodology, pointing to difficulty of replication and other methodological problems. Some defenders of the research point out the aesthetic objections of scientists to “action at a distance” similar to the repugnance felt at quantum physics’ overturning of determinism.

Just as there may be reasons why scientists are disposed to reject the paranormal, there may be a reason that people are disposed to acceptance. “I think that our brain was wired by evolution to see patterns,” says Dr. Terence Hines, Professor of Psychology at Pace University, adjunct Professor of neurology at New York Medical College, and author of the book Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Seeing things that were not there was a matter of survival for early humans, Hines says. “Imagine you are a proto-American out hunting and you see movement in the trees. It could just be the wind, or it could be a sabertooth.” But, Hines argues, you are more likely to survive if you believe it’s a sabertooth. In other words, “there is no evolutionary cost in seeing patterns that don’t exist.” It’s better to be suggestible and safe, than skeptical and dinner. Hines believes the receptiveness of today’s humans to paranormal ideas is a holdover from those more uncertain and danger-filled times.