Researchers asked more than 5,000 adults to describe the strangest thing that had ever happened to them, then asked what it did to their lives afterward. About half said the experience left them better off.
The findings, published August 5 in PLOS ONE by a team at the Institute D'Or for Research and Education in São Paulo led by senior author Ronald Fischer, come from a survey of 5,117 Brazilian adults, each of whom reported on one of 38 unusual experiences. Although 20% of participants reported an immediate negative impact and 25% described some degree of suffering or discomfort, 51% rated the experience as producing overall positive long-term effects on their lives.
That inversion is the story. Experiences that psychiatry has historically treated as warning signs turned out, in a general-population sample, to be common, brief, and mostly benign.
Not Just Ghosts: What the 38 Items Actually Covered
The word "paranormal" undersells what the team measured. The inventory ranged from sensing the presence of the deceased and seeing auras to déjà vu, sudden compassion, awe, near-death experiences, paralysis, and the feeling of observing yourself from outside your own body. Emotional experiences such as joy, fear, and hopelessness sat alongside items about extrasensory perception and past lives.
That breadth is deliberate. The team used the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences, a tool built by Ann Taves and colleagues specifically to separate what a person experienced from what they concluded it meant. Taves and Michael Barlev define these events as ones that stand out to people as special relative to their ordinary lives, without assuming that boundary is the same across cultures.
Most existing questionnaires bake in an interpretation. A religious scale asks whether you felt God's presence. A clinical scale asks whether you sensed an evil presence. Either way, the researcher has already decided the answer.
Fischer's group first validated an expanded set of follow-up questions with 160 Brazilian adults, adding nine new categories covering where the experience happened, how long it lasted, how much control the person felt, and how family or community reacted. Then they ran the expanded survey at population scale.
Most People Were Wide Awake, Alone, and Stone Sober
The contextual data may be the most surprising part of the full paper.
Being "awake and alert" was the single most common state during these events, selected by an average of 56.6% of respondents across all 38 experiences. Only about 3% reported being under the influence of a substance, and roughly 3% reported a mental or physical health condition at the time. Even for experiences typically linked to illness, such as near-death events or hopelessness, no single item exceeded 13% for a health problem.
Being alone was the most frequent setting, averaging 38.6%. The researchers suggest solitude removes the ordinary reality check of another person in the room, letting expectation and memory carry more weight than sensory input.
The events were also fleeting and rare. Roughly 63% lasted only minutes or less, and about 27% were described as nearly instantaneous. Two-thirds of respondents reported the experience first happening in adulthood, not childhood.
The Interpretation Appears to Matter More Than the Vision
Participants split almost exactly down the middle on explanation. About 49% believed science can or eventually will explain what happened to them; about 51% disagreed. Roughly 48% considered the experience religious or spiritual in character. Combining all supernatural agents offered, including God, the Holy Spirit, angels, orixás, and unspecified energies, around half of experiences were attributed to some non-physical cause.
Yet when asked who caused it, the most common single answer, at 33%, was that nobody did. Asked why it happened, 38% chose the option that it may simply have been chance.
Control also stood out. Just over half of respondents reported having at least some control during the event. Prior clinical work has proposed controllability as one marker separating non-pathological unusual experiences from disordered ones.
Community response skewed neutral. About 58% said family or community members reacted without judgment, 32% reported a positive reaction, and only 10% a negative one.
The researchers frame appraisal as the hinge. The same phenomenon, they argue, can lead to personal growth or to marginalization depending on how it is interpreted and whether the person's environment offers a workable explanation. That argument builds on their earlier systematic review of nonordinary experiences and health.
Why This Survey Cannot Settle the Question
Nothing here says ghosts exist. The study measured reports and interpretations, not causes.
Several limits matter. The sample was Brazilian, a country where religious and spiritual explanations are widely available and socially acceptable, and the authors say directly that this shapes appraisals. The design was cross-sectional, so it cannot show that an experience caused later wellbeing rather than that people who are already doing well remember odd events more kindly. Each participant reported on only one experience. Respondents were more educated than the national population. And the analyses in the prevalence study were not preregistered, though the data and scripts are public.
Distress was real for a meaningful minority. Negative impact in the moment averaged 18% but reached 60% on the worst-rated single items, and the authors note that cognitive theory links negative appraisal plus safety-seeking behavior to a self-maintaining cycle of distress.
What the data challenge is the automatic equation of unusual perception with illness. Anyone whose experiences are frightening, recurrent, uncontrollable, or interfering with daily functioning should speak with a qualified clinician rather than self-interpret.
Key Questions Answered
What did the study actually find?
In a sample of 5,117 Brazilian adults, 51% said an unusual or "nonordinary" experience had an overall positive long-term effect on their life, while 20% reported an immediate negative impact and 25% reported some suffering or discomfort.
Does this prove paranormal events are real?
No. The research examined how people experience and interpret unusual events and how those interpretations relate to wellbeing. It made no claims about supernatural causes.
Were participants asleep, ill, or intoxicated?
Mostly not. Being awake and alert was the most commonly reported state at 56.6%. Substance use and illness each accounted for roughly 3% of responses on average.
Why do researchers care about this?
Several of these experiences overlap with symptoms listed in psychiatric manuals. Showing they are common in people who are functioning normally argues against treating them as automatic evidence of disorder.
When should someone seek help?
When experiences are distressing, feel uncontrollable, recur frequently, or interfere with work, sleep, or relationships, a licensed clinician can help sort out what is happening.
What remains unknown?
Whether these patterns hold outside Brazil, whether appraisal genuinely drives outcomes over time, and which specific experiences carry the highest risk of lasting distress.
