Supernatural or Other Easily Explainable Phenomena?

Certainly......fashion trends wax and wane.

 

I read a fascinating book some years ago on ‘cold reading’. Of course that’s without being able to check someone’s social media etc these days. So I think I can safely say we do know!
Hidden mics and researchers talking in their ear can make anyone seem like they have supernatural abilities.

 

Well, we can make a very good educated guess. In order for this to be a true psi phenomenon, there has to be a mechanism by which information travels to the medium, and physics suggests that this should get much weaker with distance from its source (e.g., the farther you get from a light, the weaker the light by the inverse square law). Yet nobody has established what carries the information for putative psi phenomena, nor why they supposedly do not get weaker at a distance. So, to believe in psi phenomena means that you have to believe in some physical mechanism that doesn't obey the laws of physics. Unlikely.

 

Perhaps psi ability is a quantum effect where distance does not matter. Similar to particle entanglement. These entangled particles read each other’s state instantaneously regardless of distance.This quantum effect is definitely part of laws of physics. No one has established what carrys the particle state information. However repeated experimental results show the effect is real.

 

Interesting point, but wouldn't that would require temporally and spatially coordinated quantum entanglement of many subatomic particles between brains? I gather lab-induced entanglement occurs under very special conditions that are possibly not so good for living cells. FWIW I am no physicist - I am a mere mortal (neuroscientist).

 

True. We can only estimate the likelihood of things, and we're often wrong. I am very sceptical but not so arrogant that I discount psi phenomena, spirituality or religion completely. I've been burned too many times in my field (a conventional science) when we thought we understood something but we actually didn't. Still, i am not holding my breath for a viable physical explanation for telepathy.

 

Good point about multi particle connection. Have not read much on useful applications for quantum entanglement. Physicists are still scratching their heads regarding entanglement across diameter of universe. Perhaps 4 dimensional space time is mearly a projection of 2 dimensional universe. Such that time and 3rd dimension are just illusionary.

Saw where physicist lived after having proton shoot through his head at near speed of light.

In any case if psi ability were real, you know NSA/CIA would have that person squirreled away, never publicly seen again.

 

Ever see The Men Who Stare At Goats? If you haven't, you should. It sounds like a comedy, but in fact it is a conglomeration of true stories.

I was a PhD student at Princeton when the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) was in operation and it seems like they had attracted considerable interest and support. At one point we had to decline ever so gently (but forcefully) the suggestion that we use laboratory animals in psi experiments. In any case, certainly some of the research talks sponsored by PEAR included work that must have been funded by the US government (e.g., sending bathyspheres to the bottom of mid-ocean trenches so that 'senders' had no chance of contact with 'receivers' in 'remote viewing' experiments).

 

Yes, saw it. Why you think my mind is so messed up and I wear aluminum foil lined hats.

 

It was the LSD experiments the messed with my mind....

 

They have answers to everything that we know as "paranormal". I'm sure they have

 

My contribution to the ghost stories and then a few comments.

My wife and I have lived in our current apartment during 2 separate periods since 2007, 9 years in total. Around the first time, maybe 10 years ago, I was on the bathroom in the most distant bedroom of the flat (most distant from the entrance, the closest to the street) brushing my teeth during a particularly hot summer afternoon. I finished brushing my teeth and decided to freshen up by washing my face.

While removing my prescription glasses and just before bending over the sink, I heard my wife (we were alone in the house) entering the bedroom, the way you hear someone with bare feet walking in wooden floor, and "felt/noticed/heard" movement behind me. I continued washing my face (with my eyes closed, of course) and kept blabbing with my wife about a conversation we had had a few minutes before. Right then I clearly felt my wife walking up to me and lovingly hugging me from behind, I felt a cheerful sensation, rinsed my eyes and looked upon the mirror to establish eye contact with my wife to ask her if there was a special reason for the hug... and there was no one there.

I froze, the hugging sensation had vanished less than half a second before. I called out loud: Honey?!, Love, where are you? I walked as fast as I could and found my wife on the kitchen to ask her if she had ran out of the bedroom for some reason. As she laid eyes on me she frowned with worry (later she would tell me I was pale and looked scared, as pale as a brown man can be, paler than she had ever seen me), and told me she had been cooking for over 20 minutes and had not left the kitchen. She solemnly swears it wasn't her, because for some time I thought maybe it was a prank. But there is no way she could have left that fast without making any barullo, without running heavily.

We have a Pomeranian now, it is in love with my wife and follows her (like a lap dog) wherever she goes, except to that bedroom. To this day the dog still refuses to enter that bedroom. Whenever we are in there, the dog sits in the door's threshold eyeing us nervously.

This are called hypnagogic hallucinations, are pretty common and do not indicate any pathology. We observe this frequently in the sleep lab.

You beat me to it, it's a parasomnia called sleep paralysis and it's nothing to worry about. In México, the floklore calls it "se le subió el muerto" (the dead man climbed upon him/her) and usually causes a lot of distress, but nothing else. It is a transitory dysfunction in the neural nucleus (in the brainstem) that switches off the muscle tone in the body during the rapid eye movement phase of sleep (it should switch the muscle tone back on upon awakening or upon exiting the REM phase).

 

Sudden loss of sensory input (taking glasses off) results in a sate in which internal processing might be mistaken for actual perception (not quite day dreaming but close); or simply just an error in the brain's perceptual system, which is trying to reconstruct reality from highly processed inputs; etc. The dog could be reacting to the stress/fear of its owners, who remember the incident and find it unsettling when they're in the room. FWIW, I am not trying to belittle @cdcastillo. I was once watching a TV advertisement – unintoxicated, fully awake – when the bloody McDonald's Hamburglar jumped out of the TV at me, causing me to fall out of my chair from the fright. Our perceptual system cannot provide a perfect account of reality all of the time, and occasionally there are glitches.

Now, if @cdcastillo's wife also saw or felt something, then perhaps things would be more compelling.

 

I have had that happen a number of times in my life. I don’t ever recall any ‘evil’ component to it. Simply, you know you are awake and cannot move at all or speak. I even attempted to call out to roommates while it was happening and couldn’t. In seconds everything is fine. I knew I was awake and not dreaming it. Yup, something called sleep paralysis. Something not all that uncommon apparently as you say. S.

 

It is very common, and sometimes people with narcolepsy suffer it during sleep attacks and it can be distressing.

 

I get it now and then. Including two days ago.
But it’s not supernatural. Just as you say, sleep paralysis.

 

What the hell is this. This scientists certainly are not lying.

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Similar creature on land

 

5 major paranormal unexplained events happened in my life. People just won't believe it if i say anything.