Or, the problem of the lucky dupe!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm41d4C2w5g

"Put away the Ouija board and take out the Pledge.

Ghostbusters at Clarkson University in New York are investigating the link between indoor air quality and ghostly sightings, according to Medical Daily. They say toxic mold can trigger psychosis and that might cause you to see and hear things that go bump in the night.

The more sensitive you are to mold, the more likely you may think you're up against a poltergeist, the website reports.

“Hauntings are very widely reported phenomena that are not well-researched,” says Clarkson engineering professor Shane Rogers, according to the university's website.

"[The ghost sightings] are often reported in older-built structures that may also suffer poor air quality," Rogers says.

"Similarly, some people have reported depression, anxiety and other effects from exposure to biological pollutants in indoor air. We are trying to determine whether some reported hauntings may be linked to specific pollutants found in indoor air."

Rogers describes himself as a "longtime fan of ghost stories," and that he doesn't see himself as a paranormal debunker.

"What I do hope is that we can provide some real clues as to what may lead to some of these phenomena and possibly help people in the process."

Rogers' team of undergraduate students plan to measure air quality in several haunted locations in upstate New York, including the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, N.Y. The museum is the former home of Madame Vespucci, and, according to Haunted Places, her voice can be heard echoing from the museum's upper level at night.

If they come back alive, they plan to publish the results of their finding."==http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/05...ref=ghosts

We all have painful, embarrassing, or even traumatic memories. Memories we obsess about or which come upon us when triggered by certain stimuli. Here's a technique for neutralizing those memories and sapping of their anxious and shameful power over us.

"Recent studies have demonstrated how a simple mind trick can significantly reduce the emotional distress we feel when reflecting on painful experiences or memories from our past.

Ozlem Ayduk from the University of California and Ethan Kross from the University of Michigan conducted a fascinating series of studies which investigated the factors that distinguish adaptive from maladaptive self-reflection (read about the surprising dangers of brooding here). They discovered that the perspective via which we recall an experience determines how much pain its memory evokes.

When we replay and analyze painful experiences in our minds, our natural tendency is to do so from a first-person or self-immersed perspective—where we see the scene unfolding through our own eyes. Using this perspective usually elicits significant emotional pain as it is makes us relive the experience. Ayduk and Krosss had participants replay emotionally painful memories from a third-person perspective—which involves visualizing ourselves within the scene as if we were watching it from the perspective of an outside observer.

The difference between the two types of perspectives was profound. Participants reported feeling significantly less emotional pain when they envisioned the memory using a third-person perspective than when using a first-person perspective. Further, utilizing a psychologically distant vantage point also allowed them to reconstruct their understanding of their experiences and reach new insights and feelings of closure.

The results were even more impressive because in addition to eliciting far less emotional pain, third-person perspectives also caused significantly lower activation of stress responses and participants’ cardiovascular systems—participant’s blood pressure rose less than those who reflected on painful experiences using first-person perspectives, and it returned to its normal rate more quickly as well.

Lastly, follow-ups one week later indicated that people who used third-person perspectives when reflecting about painful experiences brooded about them far less often and felt less emotional pain when doing so than people who used first-person perspectives when reflecting on their experiences.

How to Change Perspectives When Reflecting about Emotionally Painful Experiences

1. Make sure you are sitting or lying comfortably.

2. Recall the opening scene of the experience or memory.

3. Zoom out until you see yourself within the scene, then zoom out even further so you can see the scene unfold as if you were a stranger that happened to pass by.

4. Play out the scene while maintaining the third-person perspective.

5. Make sure to employ a third person perspective whenever you find yourself reflecting on the experience."===https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the...ional-pain

If you're fish fanatic like I am, you are often confronted with the dilemma of which fish to order at a restaurant. Some of my favs are fresh caught trout, halibut, and cod. Here's a few that may tingle your palette...

http://foodandhealth101.blogspot.com/201...quest.html

"It has been described as a “scary” sight at night — a 400-pound bronze sculpture of Lucille Ball, greeting villagers with zombie-esque eyes and a deranged, toothy grin.

The statue, which stands in a memorial park in her hometown of Celoron, N.Y., has provoked protests and prompted its sculptor to agree to redo it.

“I take full responsibility for ‘Scary Lucy,’ though by no means was that my intent or did I wish to disparage in any way the memories of the iconic Lucy image,” sculptor Dave Poulin said this week in a letter to The Hollywood Reporter.

“Yes, in retrospect,” he added, “it should have never been cast in bronze and made public, and I take complete ownership of that poor decision.”

He will make a new one free, he said.

The statue — unveiled in 2009 at the Lucille Ball Memorial Park in Celoron, a village in far western New York — depicts the famous “Vitameatavegamin” scene from the classic 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy.

Since then, critics have contended that the likeness looks nothing at all like the actress — instead comparing it to Conway Twitty, the snake in Beetlejuice, actor Steve Buscemi or an extra from The Walking Dead.

In 2012, a Facebook group called “We Love Lucy! Get Rid of This Statue” was created to petition for its replacement.

To some folks, the sculpture is more of an insult to Ball — who was born in Jamestown, a city that shares its border with Celoron, where she lived with her mother as a small child.

Even the mayor doesn’t like it, said Buffalo News art critic Colin Dabkowski.

“Despite the fact that the statue bears almost no resemblance to its subject — despite the fact that its deranged grimace and jagged teeth inspire more dread than reverence — tour buses still stop at the park. People still pose for pictures with their arm around Lucy,” he wrote in a recent column. “And Celoron residents are still proud of their village’s role in the life of the First Lady of Comedy, even if some of them privately wish that the statue commemorating her would be struck by lightning.”=====http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/...pture.html

"In a recent Edge interview, Dan Dennett pitches the most fascinating new idea I've read in a long, long time: That our neurons are powerful computational building blocks in part because they've reverted to an older and slightly feral state.


Here's Dennett :

"Realize that every human cell in your body, including your neurons, is a direct descendent of eukaryotic cells that lived and fended for themselves, for about a billion years, as free-swimming, free-living little agents. They had to develop an awful lot of know-how and self-protective talent to do that. But when they joined forces to become multi-cellular creatures, they gave up a lot of that. They became, in effect, domesticated — part of larger, more monolithic organizations.

In general, we don't have to worry about our muscle cells rebelling against us. (When they do, we call it cancer.) But in the brain, I think, some little switch has been thrown in the genetics that, in effect, makes our neurons a little bit feral. It's like what happens when you let sheep or pigs go feral: they recover their wild talents very fast.

Maybe the neurons in our brains are not just capable, but motivated, to be more adventurous, exploratory, or risky in the way they live their lives. They're struggling amongst themselves for influence and for staying alive. As soon as that happens, you have room for cooperation, to create alliances, coalitions, cabals, etc."

Dennett traces this idea — of the "selfish" neuron — to computational neuroscientist Sebastian Seung. According to Seung and Dennett, it's precisely because of neuronal selfishness that the brain is able to "spontaneously reorganize itself in response to trauma or novel experiences." For example:

Mike Merzenich sutured a monkey's fingers together so that it didn't need as much cortex to represent two separate individual digits, and pretty soon the cortical regions that were representing those two digits shrank, making that part of the cortex available to use for other things. When the sutures were removed, the cortical regions soon resumed pretty much their earlier dimensions.

Or if you blindfold yourself for eight weeks, as Alvaro Pascual-Leone does in his experiments, you find that your visual cortex starts getting adapted for Braille, for haptic perception, for touch.

Why should these [idle] neurons be so eager to pitch in? Well, they're out of work. They're unemployed, and if you're unemployed, you're not getting your neuromodulators, so your receptors are going to start disappearing, and pretty soon you're going to be really out of work, and then you're going to die.

In other words, the selfishness of neurons incentivizes them to be useful — to hook up with the right network of their fellow neurons, which is itself hooked up with other networks (both 'up' and 'downstream'), all so they can keep earning their share of life-sustaining energy and raw materials.

Thus there is, in this view, an internal 'economy' in the brain, in which neurons must compete with each other for resources. This design stands in contrast to the standard, Von Neumann computer architecture, whose parts never have to worry about where their energy is coming from. Without resource contention, there's no need for selfishness. And this is, in part, why computers are less flexible and adaptable — less plastic — than brains.

Plasticity, says Dennett, is itself one of the most amazing features of the brain, and if you don't have an architecture that can explain it, your model has a major defect. I think you really have to think of individual neurons as micro-agents, and ask what's in it for them?

Neurons as agents: This could well be the single most important fact about our brains."====http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/

"In 1972, the Toronto Society for Psychical Research (TSPR) decided to conjure a ghost.

The six men and women, with job descriptions as diverse as industrial designer, housewife, sociology student, and former chair of MENSA, had no particular psychic talent, only an interest in paranormal. Together, they invented Philip—a 17th century Scottish nobleman who killed himself after a love affair ended tragically. One of their number drew a picture of this character, and for a year they meditated upon it and his "history" in hopes that he would make an appearance. Except for a few vague sensations reported by individual members, the experiment seemed a failure.

That’s when a psychologist, sympathetic to the group’s efforts, suggested they employ 19th century Spiritualist methods. After all, he reasoned, since they were aiming for classic séance results, classic séance practices might be the way to achieve them. The TSPR pasted pictures of Philip’s castle (a genuine location) on their meeting room walls, lowered the lights, and sat around a large wooden table with their fingertips resting lightly on its surface. Only then did a presence claiming to be Philip begin to rap upon and levitate the table. Once, he intelligently directed a breeze through the draft free basement room.

Philip would give correct responses to any question about himself or the time in which he lived, as long as the information was already known to at least one member of the group, or had been agreed upon beforehand. If questions strayed out of his limited area of expertise, his answers seemed hesitant, or were not forthcoming.

After a few months of meeting with Philip in the dark, the TSPR turned up the lights and invited in an audience. Philip continued to rap the table, and even drag it around the shag carpeted room. When the peculiar quality of the rapping was analyzed, the sound print showed a buildup to the to the sound’s peak rather than the other way around, as is normal. Philip also rapped on a metal plate specially wired to record vibrations and discourage fraud. He lifted his table about an inch and a half above the ground in front of the group and a film crew, which was caught by surprise and failed to record the event.

The methodology used to create Philip has been replicated a number of times with a variety of dramatically backstoried characters. These entities have been cited as evidence of psychokinesis (PK), and related to poltergeist phenomena. In fact, some of the TSPR members reported instances of poltergeist-like activity in their post-Philip private lives. Poltergeist phenomena are usually associated with troubled individuals (often children and teenagers), unlike hauntings, which are associated with locations. If the PK theory is correct, Philip type entities and poltergeists are less supernatural and more a relatively rare and little understood function of the human brain.

Or they could be related to egrigors. Egrigors, or "thought forms," are beings brought into existence through the power of intense group or individual thought. An example, cited by John A. Keel in his book The Mothman Prophesies, is a specter which fits the description of the fictional character The Shadow. It has been sighted by a substantial number of disinterested parties over the years in the vicinity of Shadow creator William Gibson’s home, but only after Gibson lived there.

If that shade is an example of an egrigor, it is a relatively mild one. Some traditions claim egrigors have been created to serve as sexual surrogates, and a few of those developed into full fledged doppelgangers who murder their creators and take their place. Egrigors have also been equated with elementals (though of a degraded kind) and Tibetan tulpas. Advocates for tulpas contest this association, as egrigors have a bad reputation, but that doesn’t necessarily make tulpas good.

For example, explorer and Orientalist Alexandra David-Neel decided to conjure the tulpa of "a fat little monk." After months of directed meditation, it materialized, not only to her, but to other residents of her camp. After a while, the tulpa graduated from her control. It slimmed down and took on a decidedly sinister aspect. At that point, David-Neel decided to pull the plug on her tulpa, and with the help of some Buddhist monks of her acquaintance, re-absorbed his energy.

If Philip-type entities, egrigors, tulpas, and poltergeists are projections of human thought, it would explain why so many places that seem as if they ought to be haunted are. This theory also differentiates them from pre-existing, opportunistic beings looking for an entry into the physical world, via ouija boards and the like. Those entities will no doubt be featured in a future Cobra’s Ghost, but will only get the following aside here.

In 1994, group of students from Franklin Pierce College attempted to replicate the Philip phenomena. They met with little success, most likely due to the short duration of the experiment, and their laughably slapdash methodology. One night, having again failed to contact their creation Robert, they decided to try reaching him using a ouija board. Several beings (or one masquerading as several, whatever) communicated with them, but sniffily denied any knowledge of Robert.

Be that as it may, the different varieties of supernatural entity described above do behave in distinctly different ways, and have specific limitations not necessarily shared by pre-existing or demonic beings. No Philip type entity has yet materialized (though materialization was the primary goal of the TSPR), whereas that is the signature feature of egrigors and tulpas. Egrigors and tulpas individuate, unlike Philip types and poltergeists, who remain connected to individuals. Poltergeist or PK phenomena are not associated with egrigors or tulpas.

Differences in the behavior of different supernatural beings are not without precedent. In the Mormon tradition, for example, there is a prescribed method for discerning what kind of (non-human) being might claim to be delivering messages from God. The Doctrine & Covenants advises you offer to shake the messenger’s hand. An angel, being resurrected and therefore having a body of flesh and bone, will take it. The spirit of a "just man made perfect," who is not resurrected but still covered in God’s glory, will ignore your hand and proceed with the message. The devil, being compulsively deceptive, will try to shake it, but being without a body, will fail (and with any luck, become frustrated and go away).

In the realm of PK or thought form creation, however, a little human deception seems to go a long way. The darkened environment that facilitated Philip’s appearance set the scene for all sorts of pseudo-Spiritualist chicanery (see "Whatever Happened to Ectoplasm?" from last October’s Cobra’s Ghost). British psychologist Kenneth Batcheldor, who by all accounts has had great success relating to Philip style PK activity, suggests a "designated cheater" is helpful in the early stages of the process. That person produces an initial rap or table tilt in order to relieve group members from the uneasy thought that they are personally responsible for the occurrences to follow ("ownership resistance"), or to get the group past the first, semi-dreaded spooky event ("witness resistance"). Most researchers in this field agree that anybody who hopes to successfully generate the sort of phenomena described above has really to want it to happen, and really believe it will. In any case, the dubious settings and methodologies of the experiments by necessarily biased researchers inevitably shadow the results, however impressive.

Uncertainty, or unknowability, seems to be a constant in paranormal studies. Following the death of prominent psychic researcher FWH Myers in 1901, practitioners of automatic writing worldwide received messages attributed to him which were supposedly prearranged to fall into an order that could only have been orchestrated from the Beyond. After thirty years and more than 2,000 messages, the results were inconclusive. Decades later, in 1972, an English psychic named Matthew Manning received an automatic script signed F. Myers. It read in part:

"You should not really indulge in this unless you know what you are doing. I did a lot of work on automatic writing when I was alive and I could never work it out…Carry on trying though because you could soon be close to the secret [of life after death]. If you find it, nobody will believe you."====http://www.thecobrasnose.com/xxghost/tulpa.html

It seems that a high temperature anomaly in the North Pacific centered west of Oregon, nicknamed "the blob" by scientists, might be what's behind the unusual weather this last winter, particularly California's drought and the unusually cold and snowy weather in the East.

http://www.voicechronicle.com/201504-str...und-the-us