Shayla Love in Psyche Magazine: Why so many of us see our loved ones after they have died.

This just happened to me the other day – a friend and coworker died at age 41 in 2018, and I was near the office we both worked in and swore I saw him crossing the street. Here’s the nut of the piece:

After a loss, as the brain filters incoming perceptual information, it continues to do so through a stubborn belief that our loved one is still out there – in a sense, the priors that help shape our perception haven’t yet been updated. ‘If there’s some perceptual cue in the environment that might be related to what it would be like to see our loved one in this place, your brain will fill that in for us,’ O’Connor says. ‘The brain is really good at pattern detection and filling in the bits that might not be there.’

It’s a good article, and I’m glad to have thought about my friend again. He was a shameless singer, was always singing terrible pop songs at full volume. I do that now in remembrance of him. My family claims to hate it, but I know the truth.