A recent scientific study conducted by Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire, UK) in association with New Scientist, was the first carried out using the social networking site Twitter.
The experiment utilized Twitter in gaging people's abilities in the psychic phenomena known as remote viewing (RV) whereby a person is able to see in detail another location from a distance using their mind alone. Participants in both the informal study and the formal study all failed to remotely view the location of Richard Wiseman, with believers and non-believers alike failing to correctly identify the data. [1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17284-first-twitter-experiment-probes-belief-in-the-paranormal.html --- The irony of this experiment lies in the fact that real psychics - not just people who believe in it or want to believe, would not, logically, require use of online social networking services to communicate. Psychic powers enable direct transmission of thought between individuals. Perhaps transmission is the wrong word here. Those who are psychic are consciously aware of another layer of reality. Within this 'paranormal layer of reality', there is not transmission as such, it's simply that anything is accessible. A person aware of this reality can access the innermost essence of any thing. Any person. And likewise, any thing, any person, has their innermost essence publicly available here. Ergo, no need of social networks. To be honest, there's not even any real distinction between me and you, subject and object, self and other, in the psychic reality. You just float around, experiencing, not experiencing, being not being, stone arrow tree. Ascending, descending, playing snakes and ladders drifting in and out of the consciousness of your physical self and others. The trouble is, it's very scary. One minute you're minding your ordinary little humdrum life and then whoosh! You're launched into this other dimension of reality where your entire belief system is shot to fuck and scattered to the crows, and you find yourself being taunted and laughed at by, as it appears to the uninitiated, malevolent forces. So it's quite scary for the old ego and pretty damn difficult to accept you've been so stupid and dumb your entire life that you've missed out on this great thing that everyone else has been active in the whole time. Two scenarios emerge from this shock. Either the ego is weakened, or is strengthened by it. The latter is what happens in 99% of cases. The ego shuts off the part of the brain which is the launchpad for the experience, denies the experience, and does everything in its power to prevent another experiences like it from ever occurring again. This is why psychics don't need Twitter, and why believers do. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
