This first one is time-dependent:
Eileen J. Garrett Research Scholarship Available
The Parapsychology Foundation offers the Eileen J. Garrett Research Scholarship Award of $3000 for research and study in parapsychology. One scholarship a year is available to any student attending an accredited college or university who plans to pursue undergraduate or graduate parapsychology studies. It is not for general study or for those with merely a general interest in the subject matter.
The Deadlilne for submission for the year 2000 is July 15, 2000. Application forms are available from the Parapsychology Foundation, 228 East 71st Street, New York, NY 10021. Phone: 212-628-1550. Website: www.parapsychology.org
Women Dream the Sex of their Fetus
Overheard on CNN Headline News: Dreams are the most reliable of natural methods for determining the sex of the unborn child. In a study asking women to forgo laboratory testing, but use natural and “folk” methods, of seventeen women who had dreams about the sex of their child, thirteen were correct, where only eight correct would be expected by chance. No folk method achieved above chance results.
A New Website Arrives for Your Intuitive Self
Intuition researcher Bill Taggert has put online a website (www.the-intuitive-self.com) to provide readers with educational material on intuition. He suggests starting with survey link from the home page, which will help you discover your relative preference for the rational versus intuitive ways of doing things.
Other features include:
· An intuition Bibliography with 1000 annotated entries, with the ability for you to add your own favorite references.
· A database of 200 Intuition Journal entries that illustrate how individuals have encountered intuition in their daily lives.
· A discussion of issues surrounding defining "intuition" and how the breadth of definitions offers a multidimensional context for understanding intuition.
· An exploration of the relationship between the "Tao Te Ching" and intuitive knowing in the 16 episodes of "The Tao of Management."
· Examples and explanations of how Mandala drawing have provided individuals with profoundly deep access to their intuitive knowing.
· An overview of practices that encourage a Meditator in the World attitude that opens the self to the intuitive flow of the creative moment.
· Outlines for online and/or onsite courses at different levels of study that offer both conceptual and experiential immersion in intuitive knowing.
Contrary to what is popularly believed, only 12.14% of those who report having had out-of-body experiences affirm they have had unpleasant experiences. A recent study done by researchers of the International Institute of Projectiology and Conscientiology (IIPC) suggests that the great majority (87.86%) of the out-of-body experiences (OBE) is of a pleasant nature and many OBEers actually try to repeat and control the experiences. The survey indicates that 54.78% of individuals interested in OBE apply diverse techniques to try to provoke the phenomenon, while only 3.57% makes use of drugs to produce such experience. It was also verified that 55.84% of those who claimed having had OBEs reported having felt at least once the body paralyzed during sleep, and 33.77% reported having felt a strong vibration all over the body.
Amongst the individuals surveyed in the pilot research project conducted by IIPC, it was observed that most of the OBEs, and particularly the first experience, happen spontaneously. However, it was found that 16.66% of the surveyed women experienced their first OBE willfully, and 27.84% of the surveyed men produced their first experience intentionally. These results suggest that men are more likely to invest effort to produce a conscious out-of-body experience while women experience more spontaneous OBEs.
To corroborate these findings and to expand the knowledge about the OBE phenomenon, the IIPC is now conducting a worldwide on-line survey on out-of-body experience. Upon submitting the questionnaire, the interviewee will see the results of the survey to date, showing the percentage of people who share specific experiences and opinions.
This survey can be accessed
at the Internet address www.iipc.org.
Keep Young With Blueberries
When researchers fed aged rats a serving of blueberries a day, they improved in balance, coordination and short-term memory, according to a report published in the Journal of Neuroscience. The rats were 19 months old, the equivalent of a human sixty five years old. The human-size equivalent serving of blueberries would be about one cup.
Like other fruits and vegetables, blueberries contain chemicals that act as antioxidants, according to an Associated Press news release on the study. Scientists think antioxidants protect the body against "oxidative stress," one of several biological processes that cause aging.
Blueberries, strawberries and spinach all test high in their ability to subdue molecules called oxygen free radicals, which are created when cells convert oxygen into energy. The study, conducted at the Agriculture Department's Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston said strawberry and spinach extract produced some improvement in memory, but only blueberry extract had a significant impact on balance and coordination.
For further information, see http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/092199hth-aging-blueberries.html
Fiction Can Predict the Future
Sometimes when an author stretches the imagination to come up with a good story, the mind reaches into the future. In his book, Incredible Coincidence (Ballantine), Alan Vaughan writes about how Edgar Allan Poe, in an 1838 novel, described a shipwreck in which three survivors in a lifeboat killed and ate the fourth, a cabin boy named Richard Parker. This horrific fate actually happened to a cabin boy named Richard Parker in 1884. The trial of the three cannibalistic survivors even mentioned the Poe story.
Other cases in Vaughan’s book include a Long Island housewife who wrote up a fictional news piece for a journalism class. She described details of an actual aircrash in the Florida Everglades a few days later. The actual news story was heard on the radio by her teacher as the teacher was reading her paper.
Words and Intuition Don’t Mix
Intuition sometimes comes wordlessly and trying to put intuitive knowledge into words can derail the intuition. This finding comes from the Learning and Research Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, where Jonathan Schooler has been studying people’s ability to be intuitive and verbal at the same time. In an article in The New Scientist surveying researchers’ attempt to investigate the mechanisms of intuition, Schooler is reported to have found evidence that contradicts the received wisdom, "if you can't express it in words you don't it and can't think about it". He finds that people who are good at recognizing objects in out of focus photographs are also good at solving puzzles that require a non-logical jump beyond reasoning. When those subjects who ultimately solve the puzzare are asked mid-stream what they are thinking, they usually reply, “nothing,” or “can’t put it into words.” In one study, Schooler found that when witnesses viewed a videotape of a robbery and were asked to describe in words the robber’s face, they were less likely to correctly recognize the robber in a line-up than were subjects who were not asked to put their visual impression into words prior to the recognition test. Schooler’s advice: “If you want to get the most from your intuitive brain, don't strive to put into words pieces of knowledge that are essentially nonverbal.”
Book Surveys Evidence for Past Lives
A new book on reincarnation, Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence For Past Lives, (Simon Schuster) by Dr. Ian Stevenson, Director of the Department of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia, provides enough evidence for reincarnation to get the respect of a journalist reviewing his work. Tom Shroder, a Washington Post editor, reviewed the 80-year-old clinical psychiatrist's research for the New York Times and wrote that he found it hard to refute.
In an interview with Dr. Stevenson, Shroder asks what impact a widespread belief in reincarnation would have on our world. Stevenson’s answer:
“It would lessen guilt on the part of parents. They wouldn't have as much of a burden that, whatever goes wrong with a child is all their fault, either through genes or mishandling during the child's infancy. People themselves would have to take more responsibility for their own destinies. I don't expect any great moral transformation. On my first trip to India I met a respected Indian monk, a swami. I told him I had come out to see what evidence there was in India for reincarnation. He remained silent for a long, long time. Then he said, ‘We here in India regard it as a fact that people are reborn, but, you see, it doesn't make a difference because we have just as many rogues and villains in India as you have in the West.’”
Improving Memory with Exercise
Want to improve your memory? Try exercise. Researchers at the University of Illinois found that people who get regular aerobic exercise perform better at tasks that use those parts of the brain that control short-term memory. Subjects who boosted exercise by adding 15 minutes to an hour of brisk walking a day to their usual routines improved their mental abilities significantly. Subjects showed better memory recall, quicker reaction times, and a greater ability to juggle complex information. Just a 5% increase in oxygen supply to the lungs was enough to make a noticeable effect.
This finding was reported by “Real Age,” an internet site which will compute for you your “real age” based upon your family background and lifestyle patterns. If you subscribe to the free service, they will send you daily pieces of information about how to lower your “real age.” For example,
RealAge Benefit: Doing stamina building exercises that boost heart rate and aerobic intake for at least 20 minutes three times a week can make your RealAge as much as 6.4 years younger.
To find out more about your Real Age, go http://www.RealAge.com
Writing About Traumas is Healing
People who write about the bad things that have happened to them experience a general boost to their health, requiring less medical attention for months after their writing. A study conducted at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and published in The Journal of the American Medical Association provides evidence of even more specific effects of writing.
Patients suffering from either asthma or arthritis were asked to write wrote for three days in a row for 20 minute sessions. The experimental group wrote about a trauma from the past while the control group wrote about their plans for the day. Four months later, the severity of their medical condition was reassessed. About half the experimental group showed signficant improvement, compared to a quarter of the control group. Almost a quarter of the control group showed a significant worsening of their condition, while only four per cent of the experimental group showed a deterioration.
Although the mechanism of the effect is unclear, the emotional component of the medical condition is clearly in evidence.
Time is Speeding, Or We Are
If it seems that the world is spinning faster, it may be that it is life itself that is moving at warp speed. In his new book, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Pantheon Books) science journalist James Gleick believes he’s found evidence that we somehow enjoy the speed. People seem to like “multi-tasking” (doing more than one thing at a time) and fast food, even though we realize it may be of lesser quality.
In many ways, it is only a subset of our culture, those people who have chosen this type of lifestyle, that is speeding up. Yet all of us are affected. One simple statistic: In 1968, the average length of the soundbite of the presidential candidate was 40 seconds. In 1988 it was 10 seconds. But maybe that was better.
Does God have a Future?
When the 1966 cover of Time Magazine asked, “Is God Dead?” the general feeling was that it was our idea of God that was in demise. Yet since that time there has been both a rise of religious fundamentalism, a continuing development of philosophical theology, and new findings in science that stretches the traditional mind. Our ideas about God continue, unabated, but perhaps our ideas our changing. Perhaps God has a future. What kind of God is God evolving into?
A God that is the totality of reality. So predicts philosopher Robert B. Mellert, who, writing in The Futurist, notes that the “panentheism” is becoming the most common and likely view of God in the future. Like “pantheism,” which is a term that describes the Hindu view that God is all, panentheism is the view that God is in all, and yet more than than the sum total of all reality. In that view, God is also the force behind the change in reality, the intelligence that provides the unity of the evolving universe.
A hint of this new view of God can be found in the popular slogan, “May the Force be with you.” In this view, God is both an impersonal “intelligent energy,” and yet it can be a personal, loving presence within you. The force can also exist within evil, which is seen to be the result of ignorance, or the incompleteness of evolution. The latter leaves us a place to participate in an improvement project!
For more information, contact Robert B. Mellert, Philosophy Department, Brookdale Community College, 765 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft, New Jersey 07738. Phone: 732-224-2918; email: Rmellert@brookdale.cc.nj.us
ESP: One Step Forward, One Back
The credibility of ESP leaped forward in 1994 when a prestigious journal published by the American Psychological Association printed an article summarizing past studies of ESP as statistically convincing. The type of experiment analysed was the one the U.S. government has identified as most promising: the “Ganzfeld,” where the sender, in one room, stares at a photo or watches a video, while the receiver, in another room, wears colored goggles, relaxes with open eyes while free associating aloud. The 1994 article was written by the late parapsychologist Charles Honorton and Cornell University psychologist Daryl Bem, giving it further credibility.
A step backward occurred recently as British researchers Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman have published an article in that same journal summarizing the earlier studies, plus all Ganzfeld studies completed since then, and found negative overall results.
In the ensuing debate, all sides agree that one or two large studies can sway the results of the overall average. In fact, according to a report published in Science News, all agree that if the still newer studies, completed since the writing of the second article, were now included into the mix, the results would be positive.
One other thing all parties agree upon: It would great to have a new form of experiment that didn’t rely so heavily upon fickle statistics!