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Comment: As Christmas draws nearer and attention turns to celebrations, holidays and time spent with loved ones, grief can come into sharper focus.
The season’s emphasis on connection reminds us not only of who is present, but who is absent – the missing face at the dinner table.
Yet some people may notice moments that feel unexpectedly different, where they sense the deceased in the room.
Known by scientists as “sense of presence” experiences, these fleeting impressions can include the sudden whiff of a familiar scent, seeing a familiar shadow, hearing a phrase associated with the loved one, even feeling a comforting touch on the shoulder.
Examples cited in the international scientific literature:
- “When I sat alone at the dining table, I felt how she put her arm round my shoulders as she used to do when she served me food”
- “I started to smell cigar smoke, and then out of the corner of my eye I saw someone sitting in the chair. And it scared me, and then I realised it was my grandfather and I felt surprised. Now whenever I travel I smell that cigar smoke and that’s how I know he’s around”
- “And, all of a sudden, from nowhere, he appeared! I mean, I just – a vision of him was right in front of me. I mean, it lasted a split second. But, it was there.”
These experiences are far more common than many realise. Between 47 percent and 82 percent of bereaved individuals reported them in studies cited in a review in 2020. So, why do they occur, and what role might they play in adapting to loss?
As part of my PhD research, I interviewed 26 bereaved individuals across New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States, from a wide range of cultural identities and from both religious and non-religious backgrounds.
Their accounts were remarkably consistent. The sense of someone’s presence was most closely tied to the emotional closeness of the relationship, rather than to spiritual beliefs or cultural traditions. What connected their stories was the ongoing sense of relationship with the person who had died.
For some, the presence occurred during moments of emotional need, and they were comforted by it. For others, it happened in places strongly associated with the person who had died. Many reported that these experiences became less frequent over time, even when they wished they would continue.
In a landmark investigation by psychiatrist William Dewi Rees in 1971, almost 40 percent of 293 widowed people in Wales reported sensing their spouse after death. He pioneered research into bereavement, arguing that these experiences were common, non-clinical, and comforting for many widowers.
Despite this, psychiatrists struggled for decades against the concept of life after death: a sense of presence was framed either as a product of hallucination or inherently spiritual and supernatural, which left little room for everyday psychological explanations that resonated with the lived experience of the bereaved.
A major shift in understanding came with the introduction of the Continuing Bonds Theory in the 1990s in the wake of the publication Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief by Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman. The researchers and authors viewed a ‘sense of presence’ as not unusual or pathological but a sign of the bereaved person’s ongoing inner relationship with the deceased person.
In my research, I’m investigating the brain mechanisms that might underlie the phenomenon.
Early in my PhD, it was important to understand how grief and a sense of presence might differ from those reported in religious contexts or from neurologically driven phenomena. My work explores the theory that the brain maintains a ‘person network’ consisting of memory, emotion and social perception that stores the rich associations built up around a person who was significant to us.
When a close person dies, the brain does not instantly update the network. Instead, it needs to re-learn how it’s going to maintain the bonds.
This isn’t denial of the death, but a gradual process of adapting to a relationship that is no longer physical. Someone who may have been sitting across from us at last year’s Christmas gathering is now absent, but the brain takes time to absorb this change into an ongoing inner connection.
In this context, a sense of presence can be understood as a brief outward expression of an internal representation – a moment when the brain’s stored model of someone important momentarily influences perception.
This theory also helps to explain why grief-related presences differ from neurological phenomena such as autoscopic hallucinations, where people feel that they’re watching from outside of their bodies, or hallucinations in epilepsy or from certain brain lesions.
Neurological presences tend to feel unfamiliar or unsettling. In grief, by contrast, people almost always recognise the presence as belonging to the person they lost. That difference – familiar versus unfamiliar – is crucial and points to the role of attachment, memory, and meaning in shaping the experience.
To investigate these ideas further, I am currently conducting an electroencephalogram (EEG) study, measuring brain activity to understand more about how the brain responds to different people within an individual’s social circle.
Early work suggests that each relationship activates its own distinct person network.
Understanding these patterns may shed light on why some people continue to feel the presence of someone close after death – and how the brain sustains important relationships with those who are no longer with us physically.
Sense of presence experiences may reflect how we carry meaningful relationships forward. Exploring these moments more fully, and talking about them more openly, may help us better understand a common part of grieving – especially at a time of year that highlights the importance of connection.
