Sleep paralysis is one of the most terrifying experiences a person can have—and it’s surprisingly common. Cultures around the world describe eerily similar episodes: waking up unable to move, a crushing pressure on the chest, and the overwhelming sense that someone—or something—is in the room. This chapter explores how those experiences may arise from the collision of sleep architecture and perceptual ambiguity. It covers the basic neurobiology of REM sleep, explains what happens when paralysis persists into wakefulness, and investigates how hallucinations can emerge in these liminal states. The chapter also examines the role of the temporoparietal junction in out-of-body experiences and the sensation of a nearby presence. Rooted in both science and cultural context, this chapter offers a grounded explanation for a deeply human phenomenon—one that’s haunted people for centuries and continues to blur the line between brain and belief.

This contribution to understanding friendship as a distinct social relationship examines the distinction between friendship dyads and groups of friends by focusing on the communicative dynamics of intimacy and discretion. Drawing on the work of Simmel and Luhmann, I argue that dyadic friendship supports intimate communication characterized by immediacy, mutual disclosure, and the suspension of self-consciousness. The addition of a third party, however, shifts interaction into public mode, requiring increased discretion and greater communicative management. I offer a formal account of how the number of participants alters the quality of interaction and suggest that while intimacy is not a constant feature of friendship, it nevertheless remains a constitutive potential. To conclude, I argue that groups of friends can be intimate social formations only insofar as endogenous, “private” dyadic bonds are formed.

Chapter 5 addresses yet another aspect of word meanings. Back in the mid-twentieth century, the linguist J. R. Firth (1957, p. 11) stated that “you shall know a word by the company it keeps.” More recently, this idea has been supported by distributional semantic models (DSMs), which come from computational linguistics and demonstrate that a word’s meaning can in fact be derived partly from its statistical co-occurrence patterns with other words. For instance, part of the meaning of scissors can be derived from its tendency to be used together with certain other words like sharp, pointy, cut, snip, paper, hair, etc. DSMs are surprisingly good at predicting people’s performance on many (although not all) conceptual tasks, and they are now so sophisticated that they constitute the engines of many chatbots and AI systems. What’s more, by combining DSMs with brain mapping methods, a rapidly growing line of research has been accumulating evidence that the distributionally based properties of word meanings are not only captured by purely verbal representations in the core language network, but enable a “quick and dirty” shortcut to comprehension.

If we’re trying to come up with a theory to explain the sound of footsteps behind you, a feeling of a presence, lights that you can’t explain, or the psychic who knows everything about you, we might be tempted to say that supernatural forces are at work. But we also know that each one of these instances can be easily explained with neuroscience and psychology. This is what I’ve attempted to do in this book.

The focus of this chapter is on the relationship between psychopathy traits in adolescence and persistent involvement in offending through adulthood. Too often, research on psychopathy has restricted itself to very simplistic measures of offending outcomes. For example, recidivism reflects whether or not someone reoffends. However, some people reoffend dozens of times, and others only once. I used generalized estimating equations to measure repeated offending at each year of age beginning at age eighteen and continuing for over twenty years. Regardless of whether psychopathy was represented by PCL:YV total scores, four-factor model scores, or three-factor model scores, higher scores significantly increased the likelihood of persistent offending. However, this relationship was far from perfect; some people who scored high on the PCL:YV did not continue to offend at a high rate in adulthood. I use case study data to qualitatively explore why this may have been the case.

The Science of the Supernatural might, at first, feel like an oxymoron. I don’t think most people would immediately see the myriad connections between the paranormal and psychology. I didn’t at first, either. I’ve always loved ghost stories, horror movies, and scary novels. I have a distinct memory of lying in my bed as a kid, trying unsuccessfully to go to sleep. I had just read Stephen King’s short story “The Boogeyman.” I remember staring at my closet door, sure that it was slowly creaking open. Certain that the boogeyman was on the other side, waiting to kill me.

introducing the relevance of the book and its main aim

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical approach of the book. Images are conceptualized as cultural artefacts that are both signs open for meaning making and tools open for social action. They are also dialogical and political artefacts that take part in knowledge production and circulation.

To this point, the empirical analyses in this book have focused on individual-level risk and protective factors. It is also important to consider the broader social context in which a person is embedded. Recent scholarship in criminology has identified that “when” a person is (e.g., the era in which they were born, the historical contexts they experience) may matter more than “who” a person is (e.g., psychopathy traits) for involvement in criminal behaviour. Montana et al. (2023) found that the predictive accuracy of markers of criminal propensity was weaker for younger generations exposed to lower crime rates compared to older generations exposed to higher crime rates. Legal systems may be making biased sentencing decisions against the younger generations. However, when it came to ISVYOS data, the PCL:YV was associated with persistent offending in a similar manner, regardless of when someone was born or the type of legal system to which they were exposed. The consistency of findings may be evidence that Canada is in a “settled period” where it is difficult to discern an independent influence of cultural factors on individual behaviour.

Analyses in this chapter focused on what happens in the somewhat rare event that positive outcomes in adulthood do occur for people with psychopathy traits. Do people with psychopathy traits respond to their environment the same way that people without psychopathy traits do? For example, do positive sources of informal social control (e.g., a job, stable housing, and prosocial relationships) decrease the frequency of offending even for people with psychopathy traits? Analyses indicated that measures in adulthood of informal social control, prison networks, and substance use failed to moderate the relationship between psychopathy and offending. However, there was evidence that only people with low scores on the PCL:YV responded to positive sources of informal social control in the expected manner. This implies some level of social resistance on the part of people with psychopathy traits. This finding is illustrated by using qualitative data from an ISVYOS participant who had a relatively positive social environment yet continued to offend over the life course.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by describing several linguistic and psychological aspects of word meaning, with emphasis on those that have received the most attention in cognitive neuroscience. Specific topics include the treatment of word meanings as public concepts for social coordination; the decomposition of word meanings into semantic features; the characterization of word meanings in terms of frames, prototypes, mental models, and background situations; the nature of word associations and co-occurrence patterns; the influence of context on interpretation; and the importance of crosslinguistic similarities and differences.

Zombie myths have captured imaginations for centuries, but their roots may lie in real-world infections that alter behavior in terrifying ways. This chapter explores the biological underpinnings of the zombie archetype, beginning with cultural practices surrounding Haitian Vodou and moving into the realm of neuroscience and virology. Rabies serves as a chilling real-world analog to zombification, with symptoms like aggression, hydrophobia, and loss of cognitive control emerging as the virus travels from the bite site to the central nervous system. The chapter also examines Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite capable of rewiring host behavior and reducing fear responses, particularly in rodents. By tracing the ways infectious agents can alter motivation, movement, and fear, this chapter offers a grounded, scientific perspective on one of the most enduring horror tropes—and explores what happens when the threat isn’t supernatural, but biological, and it’s already inside the body.