The Mind Outside the Brain (Part 1)
By now everyone is familiar with advances in brain imaging and the fascinating insights being produced in many areas of brain research. Much less known are advances in locating the mind outside the brain. Long considered paranormal and therefore easy to dismiss, the reality of many phenomena is being verified. For a long time there has been a popular belief in ESP, clairvoyance, and related abilities. I thought it would be interesting to devote a series of posts to some intriguing studies, but more importantly, there is a major discovery waiting around the corner. Science is about to realize that intelligence is a field effect and that this "mind field" surrounds us on all sides, like the earth's magnetic field. It is thanks to the mind field that our brains are able to think and also to connect with other minds, not by physical means but invisibly, the way one magnet is connected to every other on earth.
The latest findings, which got wide publicity in the media, have to do with our ability to sense what is going to happen in the future.
Is this REALLY proof that man can see into the future?
London's Daily Mail reports on a Dutch professor of psychology, Dr. Dick Bierman, who is using real-time brain scans to see if people sense things before they happen. "Sense" is different from "envision." Bierman is working with "presentiment," the physical or emotional feeling that something unusual is about to happen. Anecdotally, presentiments have been associated with many if not most great disasters. Some people didn't go to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11 because they felt suddenly sick or uneasy. Similar symptoms have kept passengers from flying on planes that later crashed. The French crew of the Concorde had dark premonitions before one of the supersonic jets crashed in 2000. Children felt uneasy going to school the day a coal-mine disaster engulfed a school in Wales in 1966, killing 144 people. One mother reported that her young daughter had a dream the night before of a black mass burying the school, which is exactly what occurred.
Bierman wants to quantify such presentiments, following up on a revealing experiment done by Dr Dean Radin, a former researcher on the military project Stargate, which looked into the phenomenon of 'remote viewing' and psychic premonition. Radin hooked ordinary subjects to a lie detector in order to measure changes in galvanic skin response. He then flashed at random a series of photos, some of which were violent or erotic. One would expect galvanic skin response to spike when such pictures appeared, but Radin discovered a strange phenomenon. Subjects tended to respond a few seconds in advance of the actual image flashing on the screen. In other words, they sensed an event before it occurred.
Subsequently the experiment was successfully replicated, startling even a Nobel Prize winner who acted as a subject. Dr. Bierman in Amsterdam is verifying that specific brain areas light up when presentiment occurs. He is certain that the phenomenon is real; now he wants to determine if certain people are more gifted at presentiment than others. This is the best glimpse to date that anyone has had of the mind field's existence as an everyday affair, for it would appear that to some extent all of us have experienced hunches, intuitive flashes, sudden premonitions, and other hints of foreknowledge. How far does this phenomenon extend, and what is its deeper significance?
(to be continued)
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