| An open letter to Psychic News from Stan Gooch My book The Paranormal has now been republished on the internet by Crow Street Press in America. This edition has a new Introduction describing what happened on a Granada TV afternoon chat show. On that show I was asked if I could project an image telepathically into the minds of the viewers. I said yes, I could and the show host then asked me to do so, and I did. The switch- boards in Manchester and Liverpool were jammed for the rest of the day by viewers who had seen the image I projected. (But, as much, I received no publicity whatsoever for this 'Uri Geller' achievement.) The second 'coincidence' is that my birth sign is Gemini, the twins - and duality figures equally centrally in my work. One of my claims is that we are a hybrid species, a cross between the two early species of man, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. When widely separated species of animal are crossed in the laboratory the offspring frequently possesses two opposing sets of instincts, with which it continually struggles to come to terms. We ourselves have inherited two opposing sets of instincts from our two very different ancestors (hence our many metaphors; the divided self, the two souls within one beast, the head wanting one thing and the heart wanting another, and so on) and these are the source of our social problems- our universal split into left-wing and right-wing politics, our desire for one true everlasting love on the one hand (pair bonding) and our general promiscuity on the other, and so on. A second major duality concerns our two major brains, the cerebrum and the cerebellum. (we should first mention here that Roger Sperry's 'split-brain' theory for which he received the Nobel Prize, and which concerned the left and right hemispheres of the cerebrum, was officially dumped by the scientific establishment in 1999, as fundamentally flawed. (I of course have said from day one that the theory was fundamentally flawed - and I was the only person in the world to do so - in my book The Double Helix of the Mind, and in a number of articles and reviews.) My own claim is that the cerebellum (the 'lesser' brain at the back of our heads- which however in term of surface area or cortex is actually three-quarters the size of the apparently much larger cerebrum, and is also more complexly structured) is the source of dreaming, of mediumship, telepathy, clairvoyance, pre-cognition, psychic healing, religious belief, sleep-walking, multiple personality and much else besides (As it first so happens women have a larger cerebellum than men, and women dream more than men, more women are mediums than men, women hypnotise more easily than men, and so on and on.) I promise that the cerebellum will defeat our myopic and literally half-brained scientists. Stan Gooch 17/08/05 |