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The Third Man Factor: The Secret to Survival in Extreme Environments, by John Geiger, Penguin Canada, 295 pages, $24

When Ernest Shackleton returned from his legendary trek across Antarctica in 1916, accounts of his ordeal spread quickly: He had led his men through seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and survived.

In his own version, South, published in 1920, he admitted that "there is much that can never be told" about the expedition, but in later writings, Shackleton referred to the uncanny sense he had experienced during the worst of his struggles that "during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three."

Shackleton's admission sparked a flurry of similar tales from a host of explorers, sailors, mountaineers, pilots and other survivors of extreme hardship.

The phenomenon quickly took on a name: "the Third Man" factor, taken from T.S. Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land , which contains the line: "Who is the third who walks always beside you …" — not, as I had thought, a reference to the resurrected Christ, but actually borrowed from Shackleton's own revised narrative.

John Geiger, the celebrated author of Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, has collected dozens of these accounts and arranged them in such a way as to lead to a tentative explanation of their origin.

The stories, which range from the poles to the mid-ocean to Everest and even outer space, make fascinating reading in themselves, but Geiger's patient tracking of the psychology behind the "sensed presence" is equally compelling. The Third Man Factor is a mystery story that takes place in some of the most horrific environments imaginable.

The Third Man typically appears "in extreme danger," Geiger writes, when the person visited is "imperilled by the enemy and exposed to hunger, sleep deprivation, and exhaustion." Geiger quickly dismisses the religious explanation, that the visitant is some angelic figure that has swooped down to save a particularly careless or unlucky victim from certain death.

He does, however, note that in a 1993 survey, 69 per cent of Americans "accepted angels as fact," and quotes William James who, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, placed such encounters "squarely in the realm of religious, if not specifically angelic, experience."

Since James, the phenomenon has been studied by many psychologists and neurologists, most of whom agree that what people "see" are hallucinations. The majority of these apparitions appear to people who are isolated (facing what Graham Reed has termed "loneliness in the face of Nature") and numbed by monotony. Ironic as it may seem, trudging for days through a blinding blizzard, or lying for weeks in a drifting lifeboat, can be extremely boring, amounting to an extreme case of sensory deprivation. Suddenly seeing a beneficent companion walking beside one may be "an attempt by the brain to maintain a sufficient level of stimulation in a monotonous environment."

It may also be the result of a combination of stresses: loneliness and boredom combined with sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion, terror and suddenly altered circumstances. Peter Suedfeld, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, notes that signs of psychological stress appear when monotony is combined with "a need to maintain a high level of alertness."

Geiger also cites a 1981 study suggesting that extreme cold can produce hallucinations, occurring just before hypothermia sets in sufficiently to incapacitate the brain.

In another study, published in the British Medical Journal in 1993, hallucinations are symptomatic of blood glucose concentrations so low as to be "almost incompatible with life." Shackleton and his men had lost more than 40 per cent of their body weight during their Antarctic ordeal.

Perhaps the most compelling element of The Third Man Factor is its revival of U.S. psychologist Julian Jaynes's theory of the bicameral mind. In 1976, Jaynes proposed that human consciousness was a late development in human evolution; as recently as a few thousand years ago, the left and right hemispheres of the brain were only loosely interconnected, that there was a right-brain "god-side" and a left-brain "man-side," and that in situations of extreme stress a human being would experience visual and auditory hallucinations emanating from the god-side and appearing as physical beings, or gods.

Geiger speculates that extreme environments coupled with exhaustion and danger produce the kinds of stresses that would trigger such hallucinations: The right brain takes over and the left brain "sees" a helpful companion. Support for this theory comes from recent experiments in which "autoscopic hallucinations" — third men — have been induced by the application of electrodes to the left temporoparietal junction of the subject's brain.

Geiger's book has a lot going for it: The many accounts of Third Man visitations in perilous situations make for edge-of-seat reading, and the citations and explorations of the theory of the sensed presence give the book scientific weight.

It even contains a moral, that the repeated appearance of a Third Man who leads us out of harm's way is "the ultimate and beautiful illustration of the extent to which we are social animals — that in our time of deepest solitude and need, there is a way to reassure us that we are not alone, and provide us with that feeling of shared humanity that makes the difference between life and death."

In view of the book's subject, this is an oddly comforting thought.

Wayne Grady travelled to the North Pole before writing The Quiet Limit of the World, but regrets that he did not encounter a Third Man.