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I found the following study from University College in London amazingly interesting. I brough to mind what I learned in a Silva class 15 years ago, that we can learn to tap into our inner intuition to help us get guidance to solve major problems in life. And that this intuition is often the first thought entering our mind, and subsequent thoughts are more logical and often not as right. The study below mentions how these "first thoughts" about a given situation are often far more correct than than logical thoughts. Strong evidence for the existance of ESP in all of us.

A University College London (UCL) study has found that you are more likely to perform well if you do not think too hard and instead trust your instincts. Appearing in the journal Current Biology, the research shows that instinctive snap decisions are sometimes more reliable than decisions taken using higher-level cognitive processes.

The experiment involved subjects picking the odd symbol (a rotated version) out of over 650 identical symbols presented on a computer screen. Tracking participants' eye movements, the researchers controlled the time allotted to each individual's search for their target. The visual display screen was switched off at various time intervals either before or after the subjects' eyes landed on the target (between 0 and 1.5 seconds). They then had to decide whether the odd one out was on the left or the right-hand side of the screen.

Intriguingly, the researchers found that participants scored better if they were given no scrutinizing time at all. With only a tiny fraction of a second for scrutinizing the target, subjects performed with 95 percent accuracy. With over a second to scrutinize the image, subjects were only 70 percent accurate. Accuracy was recovered if scrutinizing was allowed to run for more than 4 seconds.

"This finding seems counter-intuitive. You would expect people to make more accurate decisions when given the time to look properly. Instead they performed better when given almost no time to think. The conscious or top-level function of the brain, when active, vetoes our initial subconscious decision - even when it is correct - leaving us unaware or distrustful of our instincts and at an immediate disadvantage.

Falling back on our inbuilt, involuntary subconscious processes for certain tasks is actually more effective than using our higher-level cognitive functions," explained Dr Li Zhaoping, of the UCL Department of Psychology.

The researchers say the instinctive decisions were more likely to be correct because the subconscious brain recognizes a rotated version of the same object as different from the original, whereas the conscious brain sees the two objects as identical. For the conscious brain, an apple is still an apple whether rotated or not.

So while the lower-level cognitive process spots the rotated image as the odd one out, the higher-level functions override that decision and dismiss the rotated object because it is the same as all the other symbols. When subjects were given the time to engage their higher-level functions, their decisions were therefore more likely to be wrong.

"If our higher-level and lower-level cognitive processes are leading us to the same conclusions, there is no issue. Often though, our instincts and higher-level functions are in conflict and in this case our instincts are often silenced by our reasoning conscious mind. Participants would have improved their performance if they had been able to switch off their higher-level cognition by, for example, acting quickly," explained Dr Zhaoping. "

Our eye movements are often involuntary. What seems like a random darting of the eye is often an essential subconscious scanning technique that allows us to pick out unique and distinctive features in a crowd - such as color or orientation. Soon after our eyes have fixed on a target, the conscious or top-down part of cognition engages and examines whether the candidate really is the target or not. If the target is not distinctive enough in the 'eyes' of the conscious, failure of identification can occur."

Source: University College London.  Discovered via Scienceagogo.com

Scientist and author Rupert Sheldrake has announced what is perhaps, the most famous example of telepathy and scientific research.

Sheldrake, a UK scientist, claims he has evidence of what he calls "telephone telepathy" - the phenomenon by which you think about someone and, lo and behold, the phone rings...

According to Reuters, Rupert Sheldrake reported on Tuesday the results of experiments which "proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even emails".

Sheldrake's guinea pigs gave researchers the names and phone numers of four relatives or friends. One of these was contacted at random and asked to give the subject a bell. Forty-five per cent guessed correctly who was on the other end of the line, Sheldrake told the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science shindig - "well above the 25 per cent you would have expected."

Sheldrake further commented:

The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one.

A similar test involving email yielded the same result, although the researchers' limited pool of testees - 63 for the phone and 50 for the email - coupled to the fact that only nine subjects were filmed across the two tests, prompted "some scepticism".

Sheldrake has vowed to continue his experiments, however, to prove what he believes is the "interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping".

Next up for scrutiny is text message telepathy. Will more cases of telepathy and scientific research come to public light? We certainly hope so.

Article from The Register. Orginally found on Reuters, Sep 2006.

By YVONNE BOLOURI, September 08, 2006, The Sun

LITTLE Cameron Macaulay was a typical six-year-old, always talking about his mum and family.

He liked to draw pictures of his home too — a long single-storey, white house standing in a bay.

But it sent shivers down his mum’s spine — because Cameron said it was somewhere they had never been, 160 miles away from where they lived.

And he said the mother he was talking about was his “old mum.”

Convinced he had lived a previous life Cameron worried his former family would be missing him.

The Glasgow lad said they were on the Isle Of Barra.

Mum Norma, 42, said: “Ever since Cameron could speak he’s come up with tales of a childhood on Barra.

“He spoke about his former parents, how his dad died, and his brothers and sisters.

“Eventually we just had to take him there to see what we could find.

“It was an astonishing experience.”

Cameron’s journey to find his previous life is now the subject of a spooky TV documentary.

Norma said: “His dad and I are no longer together but neither of our families have ever been to the island.

“At first we just put his stories down to a vivid imagination.” Then life took a more sinister turn as Cameron started to become distressed at being away from his Barra family.

Norma said: “It was awful and went on for years.

“When he started nursery his teacher asked to see me and told me all the things Cameron was saying about Barra. He missed his mummy and his brothers and sisters there.

“He missed playing in rockpools on the beach beside his house.

“And he complained that in our house there was only one toilet, whereas in Barra, they had three.

“He used to cry for his mummy. He said she’d be missing him and he wanted to let his family in Barra know he was all right.

“It was very distressing. He was inconsolable.”

“He wouldn’t stop talking about Barra, where they went, what they did and how he watched the planes landing on the beach from his bedroom window.

“He even said his dad was called Shane Robertson, who had died because ‘he didn’t look both ways.’

“I assume he means knocked over by a car but he never says that.

“One day his nursery teacher told me a film company were looking for people who believed they had lived before.

“She suggested I contact them about Cameron. My family were horrified. There was a lot of opposition to it. I’m a single parent so it was me and Cameron’s brother Martin, who is only a year older than him, who were being badly affected by this.

Read the Full Article Here >>

Dr. Leonard Nijssen shares this story with us.

Doctor Leonard Nijsen has doctorates in the field of Optometry (3countries), a B.S. in Psychology and various other minor degrees. He is also a leading member of Mensa.

"In 1972, I was in a bad shape physically, mentally and emotionally, just having come out of a bad marriage and a nasty divorce. Over a few years before my divorce I had acquired:

• Migraine headaches that went to tunnel vision (interesting experience when I was driving in the fast lane on the freeway) and I was taking prescription medication three times a day for this.
• A LONG list of allergies for which I was also taking prescription medication three times a day for this. These allergies included dust, pollen and cattle hair.
• My nerves were in a VERY bad shape, my hands were shaking constantly like in palsy and I was also taking prescription medication three times a day for that.

Failing to take the medication timely I would get an asthma like attack in which I would sit with my mouth open gasping for air.

One weekend in the spring I wanted to “get away” and decided to go to a ranch of friends where I helped them gather overgrown calves to be branded. I was wearing a sheepskin jacket, of course on horseback,
LOT’s of dust and LOT’s of pollen. NO ALLERGIC REACTION !!! Oops, something does not fit the medical findings.

Shortly after that, one of my friends suggested that I participate in a Silva Mind Control training offered in San Francisco. This, at the time, was Tuesday evening through Friday evening plus Saturday and Sunday all day.

On the second evening the “headache control” technique was offered and I immediately thought: “If it can control headaches, it can also control nerves and allergies since they are frequently related.” That very same evening I stopped all medications and got rid of all three conditions.
Now, at age 70 and after 34 years, I have not head a single headache, no allergies and my hands are as steady as a neuro surgeon.

This success in 1972 started me on the road to seriously explore “the mind”, it’s capabilities and other (supposedly) para-psychological aspects.

While I can give you a quite long list of experiences and successes I will limit this to the above and below listed aspects.

Click Here to Read The Full Story »

Our newest contributor, Jacob of Mind-Energy.net shares this article with us.

Many people desire to develop their own ESP (Extra-Sensory Perception). Yet most people think that you have to be born psychic to have ESP abilities, that you can't develop them on your own. Of course, being born with special abilities could be a big benefit, but since you want to develop them, most certainly you think that you don't possess them now.

The truth is that ESP can be developed. I know people who learned to possess some aspects of ESP over their life through several techniques. I'm on that course myself, having a bit of progress over the last couple of years.

I want to show you several ways that you could you use to develop your ESP abilities:

Click Here for the Full Article »

<3Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them. Now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy.

Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College in Cambridge, England, said on Tuesday he has conducted experiments that proved such precognition exists for telephone calls and even e-mails.

Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone.

"The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."

Read the Full Article Here >>

Steve Pavlina wrote a great article a few months ago about Psychic Intelligence - what it is, why certain people experience it more than others and what it's components might be. Here's the article ~ Editor

In addition to logical intelligence, emotional intelligence, and various other forms of intelligence, we have psychic intelligence. Psychic intelligence is a measure of how intuitively perceptive you are and how willing you are to trust and act on those perceptions.

Here are some key components of psychic intelligence.

Awareness

There are certain colors I cannot perceive because I’m colorblind. When I look at what other people refer to as the color purple, all I see is dark blue. I can’t even imagine purple — how do I imagine a color I’ve never seen before?

Unless you’re blind or colorblind, your color intelligence is like magic to me. You probably don’t even know how you do it. You just know. You can patiently explain to me the difference between purple and blue, but I just won’t get it. I can look at the same images you see but only detect a subset of the information you can detect. Sometimes I’m tempted to label people who claim to perceive clearly fictional colors like purple as crazy or deluded. You must be on drugs or something. There is no purple!

You can try to prove to me that purple exists, but I may only half-believe you. I won’t even look at your data because you’re so obviously wrong.

This (albeit exaggerated) story of my color perception is how many people regard psychic intelligence.

I have friends that vehemently deny the existence of psychic phenomena. They don’t believe we have a valid sixth sense because they have no personal experience with it. I generally don’t waste time trying to convince them otherwise because from their perspective, they’re right. That would be like trying to convince a deaf person that she could really hear. Such people often regard those who believe in psychic phenomena as crazy, deluded, or naive… just like I do with those purple-pushing fanatics.

Read the Full Article Here

Telepathic attraction. Who hasn’t felt it at least once? But wait a minute. What is telepathic attraction? A weird sensation that is difficult to put into words, an uncontrollable instinct with no logic. What about erotic telepathy? Maybe somebody is calling you with their mind, but your rational mind is not trained to take in such messages.

So, what is telepathy? When an unknown situation all of a sudden feels all too familiar, when you believe you know what somebody else is thinking, even if that somebody is unknown to you, when you are turned on by someone you have never seen before...is this telepathy? These experiences might be the result of a pleasant, excellent and affectionate love relationship, or the deepening of mental communication between two people who are in contact. The underlying question is: what is the mind?

Read more here >>

The uncanny ability of blind people to "sense" unseen objects has been demonstrated for the first time in sighted volunteers whose vision was blanked out by scientists.

The findings suggest "blindsight", which has been observed in blind people whose eyes function normally but who have suffered damage to the brain's visual centre, is a real and not imagined phenomenon.

Click here to read more.