If you had an imaginary friend who walked beside you and joined your childhood games, you may have left them behind as you grew up.
Scientists have now found a connection between that childhood experience and the feeling some adults have that someone is nearby, even when they are alone.
The question reaches beyond how we dream up a companion: How do we come to feel that they are sharing our space?
To investigate, researchers turned to adults’ childhood memories. They asked people who recalled imaginary friends about their experiences together, including where those companions seemed to stand.
That detail could help explain how an imagined character acquires a felt location beside us, and whether our awareness of our own bodies plays a part.
The team analyzed responses from 185 adults recruited through İzmir University of Economics in Türkiye who reported no psychiatric or neurological diagnoses. Of these, 45 remembered having an imaginary companion.
Everyone completed a questionnaire assessing how often they felt another presence without clear sensory evidence over the previous month. Those who recalled imaginary friends averaged 25.51 points, compared with 20.07 in the other group, on a scale ranging from 15 to 75.
Higher scores meant more frequent reports of these experiences. The difference suggests that adults who remembered imaginary companions were more prone to sensing a presence during that period.
The childhood memories also revealed a spatial pattern. Companions were most often recalled in front of or beside the body. Of 114 distance estimates for directions in which companions had appeared, 76 placed them within 70 centimeters (about 28 inches).
That puts about two-thirds of those estimates inside the study’s chosen boundary for the space immediately surrounding the body. Researchers call this peripersonal space: the nearby area we use when reaching, moving and interacting with others.
The researchers propose that imaginary companions may be linked to the way the brain represents the body and its surroundings, giving an imagined social partner a place within that space.
Earlier robot experiments covered by ScienceAlert offer a clue to how bodily signals can contribute to sensing someone nearby.
In those experiments, participants moved their hands while a robot touched their backs. When researchers introduced a brief delay between the movement and the touch, some participants felt another person behind them.
The proposed explanation was that conflicting signals led the brain to attribute sensations arising from the participant’s own actions to someone else.
The new study suggests that childhood imaginary companions and adult felt presence may both relate to how we experience our bodies and surrounding space. There is, however, an intriguing difference in where those experiences seem to unfold.
While the imaginary companions were usually recalled in front of or beside the body, earlier research commonly places adult felt presence behind or beside it.
One possibility the researchers raise is that imaginary friends occupy the space suited to face-to-face conversation and play. A presence behind us could involve ambiguous bodily sensations whose source we cannot immediately check by sight. These explanations are hypotheses; the survey didn’t directly test them.
The findings also depend on adults’ memories. Because the researchers didn’t follow children as they grew up, they cannot establish that imaginary companions cause later presence experiences. Most participants were women, everyone was recruited through one university, and the spatial result depended on analytical choices.
Participants knew the study concerned imaginary companions, which may have inflated the association. The authors caution that the effect could be weaker if the study is repeated without revealing its topic during recruitment.
The results don’t provide evidence for ghosts. But they do offer a way to investigate how the brain makes us feel like we’re sharing a space with someone.
Following children over time could reveal whether a tendency underlying imaginary companionship continues into adulthood, and how that feeling changes as we grow.
The research has been published in Consciousness and Cognition.
This article was fact-checked by Rebecca Dyer and edited by Rebecca Dyer. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know.
