talkmagic.co.uk

i used to genuinely believe i have a very strong intuition/gut reaction, especially with people...but after a while, i realised that it was just me forgetting all the times i was wrong (i kept a journal for a while)...

That was the point I was awkwardly trying to make.

There is much that is not known about the mind but to foretell the future as Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce and the many others who claim the ability to talk to the dead, only fall short when any good magician can do cold readings and pretrend to be psychic. True psychic ability should not be vague and leave the door open to skepticism.

My teacher knocked me down from fifthteen feet away

But didn't Derren Brown replicate this? If so doesn't that leave this open to skepticism? Though that obviously depends on what you believe it was that made you fall.

Edit: Double post

Wow! I just had Dejavu three times.
I could have fallen because it was a psycological thing but I did not know what he was going to do and my back was toward him. DB could not duplicate that. This may be hard to understand and accept but, it is a reality for some.

Best
Al

Actually, he did. He started from the front, then, to cancel out what people might think, he did it from behind- with the spectator unable to see him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfffcjEcYJc

Though with Derren, as always, there may be more to it than meets the eye.

With any aspect of the entertainment arts, an actor, magician and mentalist must make what we do believable. There is always more to it than meets the eye. If you watch someone that claims to be psychic, they are very good at getting information from their subject by asking leading questions that get the person to fill in the blanks. If the person says no, the psychic insistseven stronger until the subject will say maybe my fathers aunts grandmothers nickname was that. Suddenly a victory for the psychic and the subject says to themselves, How did they know? Its all show business. Now as to developing the ability to project your energy or Chi, as the chinese martial artist call it, it does exist. books have been written on it and you could ask a martial arts instructor about it. In a test condition, DB could not do it to me with out psyically touching me. Does that makes me a skeptic? Derren Brown is a good entertainer and delivers a good, beliveable show. I want my act to have the same look of believability as his.
Al

sleightlycrazy wrote:Actually, he did. He started from the front, then, to cancel out what people might think, he did it from behind- with the spectator unable to see him.

expectation is everything...

In a test condition, DB could not do it to me with out psyically touching me.

But could a martial artist do it to me in labortory conditions? Are their any genuine labatory conditions tests recorded?

expectation is everything...

Personally I think that sums it up.

If he was a true Chi Gung master and you were not aware he was in the room with you, you would freak out when you could not explain why you are falling down or unable to move. The results would be the same even if you knew what was about to happen and tried to resist it.

Unfortunately, I can't take you for your word on this...

I bet even if he told me he was a master etc., if I didn't want to fall/stop moving, I wouldn't. I think it was in National Geographic where they showed a martial artist who claimed similar abilities. He knocked several people in his school down from front, behind, and even with a curtain between them. When asked to demonstrate on one of the skeptics, he had no affect. He claimed that little things such as the position of one's toes can affect the "balance" and make the attach have no affect.

It sounded like a weak excuse.

I don't want anyone to take my word for it. I experienced it and that is enough for me to believe it. Having a background in the Chinese martial arts helps me to understand the possibilities of training your mind and body. As in all aspects of life, there are people that claim they can do things and people that can do those things. I would be the first to admit that there may be some true psychics in a world full of pretenders. It is easier to find the pretenders than it is to find those who are real. How long are you willing to search for the answers is up to you.
Best
Al

Getting back to "intuition", from an evolutionary point of view it's thought that emotions evolved to provide exactly this sort of function. Without any sort of rational thought or logical workings-out, you -- or a dog, or a lizard -- can just feel whether your surroundings are nice or nasty.

This is why a big part of street-smarts comes down to trusting your emotions. If the street you walk down every day suddenly feels scary today, then there's probably something wrong. You've picked up something subliminally -- maybe the shadow of someone lurking in shrubbery, or a peek of a toe, or a suppressed cough. Your emotions are informing you long before your rational mind could possibly analyse the scene and work out the logical thing to do.

Same thing with reading people's intentions. Subliminally picking up on micro-expressions, voice tremors, etc. will add up to a gut feeling much faster than conscious scanning and analysis.

"Knowing when you're being watched" used to be dismissed as psycho-rubbish. Now it seems to have a basis in fact. Research under laboratory conditions suggests that people really do tend to know when they're being stared at from behind. Again, this makes evolutionary sense. Predators fixate on their prey before attacking, so sensing a stare -- and feeling nervous as a result -- would be very advantageous to a prey species.

For people who insist on scientific proof, the big drawback is that it's so hard to get funding for experiments in this sort of field. The scientific community won't support research in the area of psychic ability (to use the term loosely), and then this lack of research is held up as "proof" that there's no scientific basis for any of it.