Category: Communication

The only certainty is uncertainty.

The fascinating aspects of chaos.

I must immediately volunteer the fact that the thrust of this article is the result of a programme that we watched last Thursday night.  It was a programme originally featured on the UK BBC 4 channel in 2008.  Called High Anxieties, The Mathematics of Chaos, it is a fascinating examination into the way that mathematicians have fundamentally adjusted their views, from the certainty of Newtonian principles to the certain uncertainty offered by mathematicians such as Henri Poincare and Alexander Lyapunov.  The 60-minute documentary, directed by David Malone, is wonderfully interesting and much more relevant to the uncertainty surrounding all our lives than one might anticipate from any references to mathematicians!  It puts the collapse of Lehman Brothers, some 2 years ago, last Thursday, into an interesting perspective.

Here’s the first 9 minutes as offered on YouTube, introduced thus,

David Malone http://golemxiv-credo.blogspot.com author of The Debt Generation, directs and presents this film, It is the first part of a documentary first shown on BBC4 Television in the UK in September 2008. The film was first broadcast 2 days after the collapse of Lehman brothers at the start of the financial crisis. It looks at the discoveries in mathematics during the 20th Century which have challenged the view that the world is an essentially knowable and therefore controllable place. The film focuses on the economy and the environment and suggests that ideas about unpredictability, the butterfly effect and tipping points, stemming from mathematics, are part of what underlie some modern anxieties about the world we live in.

If this first part grabs your attention then finding the other 8 parts is easy on YouTube.  Alternatively, the complete set of videos is linked together as one film on Top Documentary Films, click  High Anxieties: The Mathematics of Chaos. where it is described as follows,

The documentary looks at the modern advances in mathematics and how they affect our understanding of physics, economics, environmental issues and human psychology.

The film looks at how developments in 20th Century mathematics have affected our view of the world, and particularly how the financial economy and earth’s environment are now seen as inherently unpredictable.

The film looks at the influence the work of Henri Poincare and Alexander Lyapunov had on later developments in mathematics. It includes interviews with David Ruelle, about chaos theory and turbulence, the economist Paul Ormerod about the unpredictability of economic systems, and James Lovelock the founder of Gaia theory about climate change and tipping points in the environment.

As we approach tipping points in both the economy and the climate, the film examines the mathematics we have been reluctant to face up to and asks if, even now, we would rather bury our heads in the sand rather than face harsh truths.

Very, very interesting and rather puts the pictures of the Petermann Glacier shown here into context.

Don’t you just love this Doctor!

With grateful thanks from Neil K. in Devon for another gem.

Q: Doctor, I’ve heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life. Is this true? 
A: Heart only good for so many beats, and that it… Don’t waste on exercise. Everything wear out eventually. Speeding up heart not make you live longer; it like saying you extend life of car by driving faster. Want to live longer? Take nap.

Q: Should I reduce my alcohol intake?
A: Oh no. Wine made from fruit. Brandy distilled wine, that mean they take water out of fruity bit so you get even more of goodness that way. Beer also made of grain. Bottom up!

Q: How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?
A: Well, if you have body and you have fat, your ratio one to one. If you have two body, your ratio two to one.

Q: What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular exercise program?
A: Can’t think of single one, sorry. My philosophy: No pain…good!

Q: Aren’t fried foods bad for you?
A: YOU NOT LISTENING! Food fried in vegetable oil. How getting more vegetable be bad?

Q : Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle? 
A: Oh no! When you exercise muscle, it get bigger. You should only be doing sit-up if you want bigger stomach.

Q: Is chocolate bad for me?
A: You crazy?!? HEL-LO-O!! Cocoa bean! Another vegetable! It best feel-good food around!

Q: Is swimming good for your figure?
A: If swimming good for figure, explain whale to me.

Q: Is getting in shape important for my lifestyle?
A: Hey! ‘Round’ is shape!

Well… I hope this has cleared up any misconceptions you may have had about food and diets.

A game called Fetch!

Today, delighted to offer a guest post from author Garth Stein

Garth Stein and dog!

But first to how this came about.  Way back in June, I was contacted by Wiley Saichek who signed off his email, Marketing Director, Authors On The Web.  To be frank, I hadn’t heard of the organisation before.  Wiley invited me to participate in something he called a Blog Tour on behalf of Garth Stein. It was connected with Garth’s latest book, The Art of Racing in the Rain.

Jeannie had read it some time ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.  The book had been next to my side of the bed for weeks but, ironically, the demands of my own writing had just got in the way of me reading it.

Anyway, back to the Blog Tour!

Apparently, the ideal was to have the guest post published on Learning from Dogs during the period July 18th to August 1st but I dragged my heels waiting and hoping that the story from Garth could include a picture of Comet.  The picture has not been forthcoming so here it is anyway.  I shall be reviewing Garth’s book The Art of Racing in the Rain as soon as I can get around to reading it.

A Game Called Fetch, by Garth Stein

People often ask me about my dog, Comet.  They want to know if she was the inspiration for Enzo, the dog narrator in my book, The Art of Racing in the Rain (and the young reader version, Racing in the Rain:  My Life as a Dog).  And the answer is, flatly, no.  Enzo is a singular character, I tell them, and has no predecessor.  Comet is goofy and silly, and is very much not Enzo.  But she’s still very smart–in her own Comet way–and has taught me much about the world.

When Comet was just a pup, she hated being left at home; she didn’t like the responsibility of having the house to herself.  She would always get into some mischief:  eat an entire bunch of bananas, for instance (having peeled them first!).  Or claw her way into the pantry looking for cookies.  But one day, she communicated her anxiety in a way that was so clear, so unmistakable, there was no doubt at all as to her feelings.  We went out for a couple of hours, confining her to the kitchen/dining area of our house.  And when we came home, there was a perfectly round, undisturbed puddle of urine on the dining room table.

Now that is a statement.  Message received.  Since that day, whenever we get ready to leave her alone in the house, she willingly–one might saygratefully–finds her crate, curls up, and waits for us to secure the door.

While Comet may not be able to wax eloquently about philosophy and popular culture as Enzo does, she did teach me an important lesson this summer.

Comet loves playing fetch with a tennis ball.  She always has.  And she will run herself into the ground chasing balls, so that my arm gets sore throwing a ball for her with my Chuck-It, and I find myself neglecting my cooking duties, my lawn mowing, my reading, my writing, and even my children…all to throw a tennis ball for Comet.

This summer I purchased a GoDogGo.  It’s a ball launcher with a bucket of tennis balls and a delayed feed, so one can teach one’s dog to play fetch with herself.  A brilliant idea!  The machine spits the ball, the dog fetches it, drops it in the bucket, the machine spits it again.  Ad infinitum.

And so one weekend this summer, I decided to teach Comet how to use this machine so I could do other things that needed doing, like cleaning gutters and grilling chickens.

Well, she got the idea right away.  Launch, fetch, drop.  She was really quite good.  And then I taught her launch, fetch, drop-in-the-bucket, prepare for re-launch.  And she got that, too.

“I have the smartest tennis-ball-dog on the planet,” I thought.  “She picked this up in ten minutes!  Now I can go have an iced tea while she plays fetch with a ball throwing machine.”

But it didn’t work.  As soon as I stepped away, she lost the thread.  Ball launch, ball fetch, ball dropped in the bucket.  Instead, she dropped it next to the bucket and stared at it while the machine ground its ball-throwing wheels in anticipation.

“Come on, Comet,” I said.  “Drop it in the bucket!”

I dropped the ball in the bucket, the launcher launched, Comet fetched, and dropped the ball at my feet.

“In the bucket,” I said.  She wagged, sat and barked and waited for me to drop the ball in the bucket.

I spent two days teaching her how to drop the ball in the bucket by herself.  Sometimes she’d do it for me–so I knew it was possible!–but the moment I stepped away to attend to some other business, she lost her ability to drop the ball in the bucket.  She’d stand over the ball and bark until I came to help her.  It was a miserable time.

As Sunday evening arrived, my wife came outside to see how our training was going.  I expressed to her my frustration.  “She knows what to do,” I said.  “She just won’t do it.”

My wife watched as I put the ball in the bucket and the launcher clicked, ratcheting up its gears.  Comet had gotten to recognize the clicks that meant the ball would soon be launched, and she sunk to her haunches, tail wagging, staring at the launch tube.  And then with a thwack! the ball sailed across the yard and she took off after it, recovered it, dropped it at my feet and barked happily.

“She won’t drop it in the bucket,” I said, bewildered.  “She wants me to drop it in the bucket.”

My wife smiled at me my sympathetically.  “Comet doesn’t want to play fetch with a machine,” she said.  “She wants to play fetch with you.”

And I realized, in my effort to make my life more efficient, in order to multi-task one more thing during a busy day, that playing fetch is not about economy and efficiency.  It’s about playing fetch.

The ball launcher sits in the shed gathering dust these days, but the Chuck-It is always in use.  And while Comet might like to spend every waking hour of every day playing fetch, she realizes that I have to put the ball down at some point to cook dinner or play with my family or write a book.  But she’s okay with that.  Because when we do play fetch together, that’s the only thing we’re doing–we are focused on each other, and that’s what the game is all about.

More love in many forms.

A fascinating and beautiful insight into wild turkeys!

Yesterday, I published a couple of stories that demonstrated that close, loving bonds can form between different species, including an orang-utan and a dog, and a duck and a man.

By chance, Jean and I came across another example of cross-species bonding.  This time between Joe Hutto, an American living in Florida, and a brood (is that the right description?) of newly-born wild turkeys.  The first thing these tiny birds saw when they opened their eyes after breaking clear of their egg was Joe, and they immediately imprinted him as their ‘mother’.

Joe spent a complete year and more being ‘mother’ to these birds right up to the point where they naturally flew the nest, so to speak.  Joe’s experiences led to a book, Illumination in the Flatwoods, and from that to a BBC Natural World special My Life as a Turkey, regrettably not available to viewers outside the UK.

But speaking to someone who did watch the BBC film, it was clear that it was a most beautiful and touching account of how young wild turkeys can bond to a human.  Here’s part of the programme review in the British Guardian newspaper,

By Sam Wollaston, Guardian.co.uk

Joe Hutto’s life changed when a local farmer in the Florida flatlands where he lives left a stainless steel dog bowl full of wild turkey eggs on the porch of his cabin. Joe put them in an incubator, and waited. Some weeks later, cracks began to appear. This is the crucial time: “imprinting” only occurs in the first few moments after hatching. So Joe put his face down to the level of the opening eggs and the first poult emerged, wet and confused. Joe made a chirping, clucky noise, the poult looked him square in the eye, “and something very unambiguous happened in that moment”.

The little turkey stumbled and crawled across to Joe, and huddled up against his face. It recognised Joe as its mother. In the next few hours, Joe became mother to 15 more baby turkeys and remained so for the next 18 months. My Life as a Turkey: Natural World Special (BBC2) tells that story.

Across to the programme details from the BBC2 website (may not be available 26 days after the date of this article),

Biologist Joe Hutto was mother to the strangest family in the world, thirteen endangered wild turkeys that he raised from egg to the day they left home.

For a whole year his turkey children were his only companions as he walked them deep through the Florida Everglades. Suffering all the heartache and joy of any other parent as he tried to bring up his new family, he even learnt to speak their language and began to see the world through turkey eyes. Told as a drama documentary with an actor recreating the remarkable scenes of Joe’s life as a turkey mum.

Behind the scenes image of turkeys and Jeff Palmer (actor) in misty forest in Florida. Cameraman (Mark Smith) on track & dolly shows how some of the beautiful sweeping shots were filmed.

Sam Wollaston of the Guardian continues,

It’s not hard to see how the little birds were taken in. Joe’s moustache does look a bit like feathers, he has a long scraggy neck, an understanding of the forest, and a tentative, birdlike walk. He takes them out, to catch their first grasshoppers; he teaches them how to roost. For Joe, as for any mother, parenthood is an emotional rollercoaster ride. There is the joy of seeing his babies grow, but almost constant worry. Grief too, when one is taken by a rat snake, and another by a hawk, and two more get sick (bird flu?) and die.

Adolescence arrives with all its associated problems. The males start fighting; only the toughest will get to mate. “I had no way of knowing how I was going to be part of this rite of passage,” says Joe. Steady now, Joe, let’s not take this too far, you’re not supposed to mate with any of them. For one, they’re your children. They’re also turkeys. That would be doubly wrong. Sometimes I think Joe spends too much time alone in the forest.

Quite so!  However, the film was so beautifully shot that it was very, very easy to forget that this was a re-enactment of Joe’s original experience.  That love is all about how you make someone, or in these cases, some other creature, feel.  Another couple of pictures from the BBC website,

Lights, camera, action!
Jeff Palmer (actor) sat on large felled tree on his cell phone with a dozen wild turkeys.

One final extract from the Sam Wollaston article in The Guardian newspaper,

My Life as a Turkey isn’t simply a wildlife film though. It’s not just about wild animals, it’s about one man’s relationship with wild animals, and that’s what makes it so fabulous. Serious animal behaviourists may not agree, but if you throw a human being in there, it all suddenly becomes a lot more interesting. I’m thinking Ring of Bright Water, Gorillas in the Mist, I’m definitely thinking Werner Herzog’s brilliant Grizzly Man about a man named Tim whose friendship with bears went wrong and he ended up inside one. My Life as a Turkey has something of Grizzly Man about it – a man obsessed, alone in a beautiful place, living with wild animals. But, although Joe was attacked, he didn’t end up inside one of his turkeys thankfully. There would have been a certain irony to that, especially if it had happened at Thanksgiving.

Anyway, it’s a lovely film – beautiful, charming, funny, sad, thought-provoking even. What thoughts did it provoke in me? That I need to go and see my mum.

Unfortunately, as mentioned above if you are outside the UK you are not able to watch the film via the BBC iPlayer system.  But you can buy the book.

Joe Hutto's book of his life with wild turkeys.

Available from Amazon, here’s just one of the reviews,

My review is not unbiased because Joe Hutto, author of “Illumination in the Flatwoods,” and I have been friends for almost 25 years.

Joe is the most humble man I’ve ever known. I am honored that he brought me the original manuscript to read. It was so beautiful I could have cried.

With the same graceful writing skills used by conservationists Aldo Leopold (“Sand County Almanac”) and Herbert Stoddard (“Memoirs of a Naturalist”), Joe gives a masterful mix of documentary-style nature reporting and heartfelt thoughts on the meaning of life. As dramatic as that sounds, I think most readers will agree that “Illumination in the Flatwoods” is a life-changing book.

You will never regret the dollars you spend to buy this book nor the time it takes you to read it. . .

Kathy McCord Cooley

“Love is just love, it can never be explained.”

From otters to aliens!

Big shift of topic from yesterday!

Yesterday, I wrote about the fabulous success of the British otter having gone from the crumbling edge of extinction to now being found in every English county.

For something completely different, and I do mean completely, have a read of this item that appeared in the British Guardian newspaper of the 18th August.

Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists

Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report

It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.

Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.

This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a Nasa-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.

Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa’s Planetary Science Division and his colleagues compiled a list of plausible outcomes that could unfold in the aftermath of a close encounter, to help humanity “prepare for actual contact”.

In their report, Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis, the researchers divide alien contacts into three broad categories: beneficial, neutral or harmful.

Beneficial encounters ranged from the mere detection of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), for example through the interception of alien broadcasts, to contact with cooperative organisms that help us advance our knowledge and solve global problems such as hunger, poverty and disease.

Another beneficial outcome the authors entertain sees humanity triumph over a more powerful alien aggressor, or even being saved by a second group of ETs. “In these scenarios, humanity benefits not only from the major moral victory of having defeated a daunting rival, but also from the opportunity to reverse-engineer ETI technology,” the authors write.

Other kinds of close encounter may be less rewarding and leave much of human society feeling indifferent towards alien life. The extraterrestrials may be too different from us to communicate with usefully. They might invite humanity to join the “Galactic Club” only for the entry requirements to be too bureaucratic and tedious for humans to bother with. They could even become a nuisance, like the stranded, prawn-like creatures that are kept in a refugee camp in the 2009 South African movie, District 9, the report explains.

The most unappealing outcomes would arise if extraterrestrials caused harm to humanity, even if by accident. While aliens may arrive to eat, enslave or attack us, the report adds that people might also suffer from being physically crushed or by contracting diseases carried by the visitors. In especially unfortunate incidents, humanity could be wiped out when a more advanced civilisation accidentally unleashes an unfriendly artificial intelligence, or performs a catastrophic physics experiment that renders a portion of the galaxy uninhabitable.

To bolster humanity’s chances of survival, the researchers call for caution in sending signals into space, and in particular warn against broadcasting information about our biological make-up, which could be used to manufacture weapons that target humans. Instead, any contact with ETs should be limited to mathematical discourse “until we have a better idea of the type of ETI we are dealing with.”

The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have pushed species to extinction on Earth. In the most extreme scenario, aliens might choose to destroy humanity to protect other civilisations.

“A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states.

“Green” aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. “These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,” the authors write.

Even if we never make contact with extraterrestrials, the report argues that considering the potential scenarios may help to plot the future path of human civilisation, avoid collapse and achieve long-term survival.

I am bound to say that if Mr Domagal-Goldman and his colleagues believe that spending time and money on the possible outcomes of contact with extraterrestrials is a good idea in these present times then I am minded about those other visitors from outer space who passed Planet Earth by because there were no signs of intelligent life!

Here’s Alex Jones on the topic …

Definitions, questions and prayers.

Some beautiful reflections from John Hurlburt here in Payson, AZ.

Definitions du Jour

Spirituality: the celestial energy of conscious connection and compassion

Religion: divine visions and guidelines striving for a unified understanding.

Science: verifiable natural facts exploited, denied or ignored for personal profit.

Economics: unregulated and unbalanced personal and corporate greed.

Politics: a carnival of words without the integrity to produce results.

Questions and Prayers

Who speaks for God?

Who speaks for our living planet?

Who speaks for humanity?

May your imagining be unlimited,

May your visions become real,

And may your voice be a teacher

From an old lamplighter!

Ernst Friedrich “Fritz” Schumacher

Ernst Friedrich “Fritz” Schumacher (16 August 1911 – 4 September 1977)

Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

It seems amazing to realise both that this far-sighted man was born a century ago this day and that his incredibly influential book, Small is Beautiful, was published 38 years ago.

The book has been hugely influential.  Indeed, my gut sense is that it probably started the whole ‘green’ movement.  The Times Literary Supplement of October 6, 1995 regarded E.F. Schumacher’s 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered as among the 100 most influential books published since the end of the Second World War.

Just a personal note that for many years I lived just a few miles from Dartington in Devon (UK) where Schumacher College was founded in 1991.  Named after the great man, it provided, and still does, learning for sustainable living.  Perhaps no surprise at all that nearby Totnes became the world’s first ‘transition town’.

Want to find out more?  Then go to the New Economics Institute website here and discover,

The New Economics Institute is a US organization that uniquely combines vision, theory, action, and communication to effect a transition to a new economy — an economy that gives priority to supporting human well-being and Earth’s natural systems. Our multidisciplinary approach employs research, applied theory, public campaigns, and educational events to describe an alternative socio-economic system that is capable of addressing the enormous challenges of our times.  Our premise is that a fair and sustainable economy is possible and that ways must be found to realize it.

The Institute, formerly the E. F. Schumacher Society, is working in close partnership with the New Economics Foundation from London to add the programs and experience developed in the UK to its own work in the US.

Finally, to get a flavour of this wonderful man and the amazing legacy that he has left the planet, watch this short video of E.F. Schumacher answering a question from the moderator about whether or not Buddhist Economics can work in the West. (Question & Answer Panel at Great Circle Center, 3/19/77.  Peter Gillingham Collection, E. F. Schumacher Library Archives.)

Lord of the Ants

A passing visit to the American biologist, E. O. Wilson

E O Wilson

Edward Osborne Wilson was born in June 1929 thus making him, at this time of writing, just into his 82 year.  His biological specialty is myrmecology.  Got that?  Myrmecology.  And if you, like me, didn’t have a clue as to what  myrmecology is and had to look it up, it is the study of ants.  Blow me down, there is even a myrmecology blogsite!

So where is this all heading?

One of the things that we do know about dogs, especially if we go way back into the dim and distant times when they behaved more like the grey wolf, from which the species ‘dog’ genetically originates 100,000 years ago, is that their social order, their pack behaviour, was highly stable.  As an aside, when Jean was rescuing dogs in San Carlos, Mexico during the years that she lived there with her late husband she readily observed that the stray dogs, of which there were too many, had a natural propensity to group up into their historic pack formations.  (And as an aside to my aside, Jean’s close friend of many years, Dan’s sister Suzann, today carries on the splendid work of looking after stray dogs from her San Carlos house!)

OK, back to the plot!

E O Wilson’s study of ants has revealed much about social order and organisation.  The following YouTube video was from a PBS programme, aired in May, 2008, from which I quote (that is the PBS website),

Program Description

At age 78, E.O. Wilson is still going through his “little savage” phase of boyhood exploration of the natural world. In “Lord of the Ants,” NOVA profiles this soft-spoken Southerner and Harvard professor, who is an acclaimed advocate for ants, biological diversity, and the controversial extension of Darwinian ideas to human society.

Actor and environmentalist Harrison Ford narrates this engaging portrait of a ceaselessly active scientist and eloquent writer, who has accumulated two Pulitzer Prizes among his many other honors. Says fellow naturalist David Attenborough: “He will go down as the man who opened the eyes of millions ’round the world to the glories, the values, the importance of—to use his term—biodiversity.”

It’s a fascinating film, truly engaging, so do settle down for a relaxing 53 minutes and watch,

Now there’s more to this and I do want to continue with the theme of this Post tomorrow.

So for now, look in on the E O Wilson Biodiversity Foundation’s website and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Social intelligence of dogs

Underlining what 30,000 years of domestication produces!

This video, just under 6 minutes long, may well be ‘old news’ to many dog owners but still very much worth a viewing.

Scamp

And while I think about, if you didn’t see the video about Scamp and his ability to identify, and then comfort, humans very close to death, when it first appeared on Learning from Dogs, then do drop back to here and watch it.  It’s from the Extraordinary Animals series from Channel Five on British television and just 22 minutes long.

Sixth sense? Of course, say dogs!

 

Science is catching up with dogs!

Those of you who have come across Rupert Sheldrake and, in particular his book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home will really not be surprised at what is coming, in terms of the rest of this Post.  Because most dog owners know, from countless observations, that dogs have an uncanny ability to see the world around them in a more deeper and intuitive manner than we can explain.

I wrote of Sheldrake’s book on the 1st June including touching on a report of Mason, a small terrier mix …

On April 27th, Mason was hiding in his garage in North Smithfield when the storm picked him up and blew him away. His owners couldn’t find him and had about given up when they came back Monday to sift through the debris, and found Mason waiting for them on the porch.

A few evenings ago, we watched a documentary from the website Top Documentary Films from the series Through The Wormhole.  This particular documentary was entitled Is There a Sixth Sense? Here’s how that film was introduced,

Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are the tools most of us depend on to perceive the world. But some people say they also can perceive things that are outside the range of the conventional senses, through some other channel for which there is no anatomical or neurological explanation. Scientific researchers who study such abilities call them extrasensory perception (ESP), but lay people often refer to them as the sixth sense.

Either term really is a catch-all for a variety of different purported abilities that vary from person to person. Some people claim the power of telepathy – that is, the ability to perceive others’ thoughts, without having them communicated verbally or in writing. Others claim to have the power of clairvoyance, which is the ability to perceive events and objects that are hidden from view because of barriers or distance. Still others claim to be gifted with precognition, which enables them to look into the future and glimpse what hasn’t yet occurred.

The belief in ESP or the sixth sense dates back thousands of years. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Croesus, who ruled a kingdom in what is now Turkey in the sixth century B.C., consulted oracles – that is, groups of priests claimed to be able to predict the future — before he went to war. In ancient India, Hindu holy men were believed to possess the power to see and hear at a distance, and to communicate through telepathy.

In the late 1700s, the Viennese physician Franz Mesmer claimed that he could give people ESP powers by hypnotizing them. Just before his assassination in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln told friends that he’d dreamed of his own body lying in state in the White House. In the 20th century, Edgar Cayce and Jean Dixon attracted wide followings by claiming that they could foresee future events. During the Cold War, U.S. military and intelligence agencies, spurred by reports that the Soviets had psychics at their disposal, even tried to utilize clairvoyants who claimed remote-viewing powers for espionage purposes.

As well as watching it directly from the Top Documentary Films website, it is also available from YouTube.  Here are the four links.  It is a most fascinating review of the scientific findings in this area.  If you have a dog with you when you watch the videos, don’t be surprised if he or she fall asleep!  Nothing new for dogs in all this!