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Psychic ability correlated to LESS brain activity - Magical Realist - May 23, 2025
That's good news for me!
https://paranormaldailynews.com/frontal-lobe-enhances-psychic-ability/5594/
"In a new-ish study published in March of 2024 in the journal Cortex, an open-access journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, scientists temporarily suppressed the left medial middle frontal lobe and then ran tests for psychic ability on the test subjects. Subjects that had this area suppressed did better on psychic testing than control subjects.
This might seem an oddly specific area to target, and one has to wonder how they came to pick this spot to focus on. In their paper they explain that they were building on two previous research papers they did on people with frontal brain lesions. And their paper from 2003 builds on previous research from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab, known as PEAR (referenced in various paranormal TV shows), which used people with frontal lobe damage to test a theory that reduced self awareness helped in facilitating psi ability....
Here’s where it gets REALLY interesting: Research into psychic ability has included several different approaches over many years in order to trigger the ability more consistently. It’s often easier for people to miss a target than for them to succeed. It’s been obvious to psi researchers for decades that some sort of suppression is taking place. Suppression is an important concept here because it’s different from our normal assumptions about how the brain works.
We would normally expect heightened and more vivid experiences to correlate one to one with increased brain activity. The greater the intensity of the experience, the more brain activity we should be able to see. In fact, when we look at the experiences with perhaps the greatest intensity of all, near death experiencs, the brain is hardly functioning, if at all. And it’s been demonstrated that psychedelics work by suppressing part of the brain.
It’s Not a Super Power, it’s an Ability
We now know that psychic ability isn’t some special power that people have, it’s the result of decreased activity in the brain. Awareness expands as brain functions decrease. No materialistic model of the brain can account for this. It only makes sense if you see the brain as a filter, not a generator of consciousness.
It also points the way for the development of psi experiments that produce more consistent results. If we have a better understanding of how psychic ability activates in the brain, then this can be used to create more reliable experiments that exhibit stronger psi responses. One of the outcomes of this will be that it takes fewer experiments and less money to produce statistically significant results and another outcome is that experiments will be more robust and harder to explain away. This is excellent news, and it points the way for the holy grail of psi research: the easily replicated experiment. It’s an exciting time for parapsychology!"
RE: Psychic ability correlated to LESS brain activity - Syne - May 23, 2025
"The dominant (left) middle frontal gyrus plays a key role in the development of literacy." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK554483/
So much makes sense now.
It seems obvious that suppression of this area, also responsible for attentional processing, just makes one more aware of subconscious cues in the environment (less attentional filtering)... but still without awareness of the source of the information. Hence thinking they're psychic. 9_9
RE: Psychic ability correlated to LESS brain activity - Zinjanthropos - May 24, 2025
Here I think is the actual experiment headed by Dr Morris Freedman who I believe might be Canadian or work at a Canadian University.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945223002733
Ya, it’s a long read with plenty of medical terminology. So I jumped to the conclusion part after a brief perusal period. Here it is….
Quote: 5. Conclusions
Our findings in healthy participants with rTMS induced reversible brain lesions are potentially transformative for the way we view interactions between the brain and seemingly random events. They replicate our previously published findings in individuals with damage to their frontal lobes and support the concept that the brain serves as a filter to block psi effects. This may help explain why these effects are so small and hard to replicate in healthy participants.
Our findings also suggest that individuals with neurological or reversible rTMS induced frontal lesions in the left medial middle frontal region may comprise an enriched sample for more reliable detection and replication of psi effects. Thus, studies with a focus on this group may significantly advance research in the area of psi and help bring this controversial phenomenon into the realm of mainstream science.
Words like potentially, seemingly, support the concept, suggest, may help explain, may compromise, may significantly advance research….. not words that fill me with confidence they found the smoking gun. Maybe they’re trying to induce more funding and whether or not they receive some backing, the Canadian Govt awarded Brain Canada $80m in the 2024 budget.
Mind you they went in with a priori hypothesis so who knows. Confirmation bias? They do mention it’s ‘for the way we view’ in the conclusion. Many test subjects packed it in but experimenters apparently had planned for that. I only found this article because I was checking for the ethics of conducting this experiment but apparently it was ok’d by some reputable organization. Notice that even the experimenters admit this is not part of mainstream science.
RE: Psychic ability correlated to LESS brain activity - Magical Realist - May 24, 2025
"As A Scientist, I Didn’t Believe In Psychic Powers. Then I Experienced Something That Changed My Life''
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/scientist-psychic-psi-power_n_65ac31dae4b041f1ce662f4d
"I began reading magazines like The Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic, which used critical thinking to debunk extraordinary claims. From this perspective, humans were simply viewed as very good at deluding and fooling ourselves. Rational and logical thinking dictates that we see belief in ghosts and paranormal abilities as psychological reactions and tricks of the mind.
Meanwhile, my psychology training program was shaping a particular way of viewing the world — that an atheistic, logical, and rational approach was the only one with validity. Belief in the paranormal was associated with immaturity (at best) and psychopathology (at worst). Consciousness was seen as arising from the neural connections of the brain. When we stop breathing and the brain ceases its functions, consciousness is lost, and the body decays. There is no God. There are no ghosts. Nothing is real unless science can prove it. I was no longer open to experiences and possibilities outside the realm of what was considered “normal,” but that was all about to change..."
RE: Psychic ability correlated to LESS brain activity - C C - May 24, 2025
(May 23, 2025 06:32 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: That's good news for me!
https://paranormaldailynews.com/frontal-lobe-enhances-psychic-ability/5594/
[...] when we look at the experiences with perhaps the greatest intensity of all, near death experiencs, the brain is hardly functioning, if at all. And it’s been demonstrated that psychedelics work by suppressing part of the brain. ... it’s the result of decreased activity in the brain. Awareness expands as brain functions decrease. No materialistic model of the brain can account for this. It only makes sense if you see the brain as a filter, not a generator of consciousness...
Maxwell Smart: "The old Aldous Huxley reducing valve trick."
Mind at Large: Huxley held that psychedelic drugs open a 'Reducing Valve' in the brain and nervous system that ordinarily inhibits 'Mind at Large' from reaching the conscious mind. In the aforementioned books, Huxley explores the idea that the human mind has evolved to filter wider planes of reality, partly because handling the details of all of the impressions and images coming in would be unbearable and partly because it has been taught to do so. He believes that psychoactive drugs can partly remove this filter, which leaves the drug user exposed to Mind at Large.
AH's The Doors of Perception: The brain, Aldous Huxley asserts, is like a reducing valve, filtering out great masses of unnecessary experiences, creating a unified, simple experience of the world. [...] In our everyday life, we are bombarded with an intensely overwhelming number of experiences.
It’s easy to account for all of the things we’re conscious of experiencing, but if you add to that mix all of the things we simply must have experienced, but haven’t necessarily integrated with our conscious experience of the world, that number of experiences becomes staggeringly huge and abstruse to our minds. Our brains simply must whittle this nebulous mass of perceptions, ideas, general sense data down into some form of coherency, so that we may live orderly lives.
This is the nature of Huxley’s reducing valve, mentioned above. Because the mind does this, we each become our own veritable islands, with our own narratives and identities through which our experiences must be filtered. Although we each find that our experiences of the world are filtered to fit the identities we have, almost all of us are similar enough in nature that that difference is insignificant.
(May 24, 2025 07:52 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: "As A Scientist, I Didn’t Believe In Psychic Powers. Then I Experienced Something That Changed My Life"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/scientist-psychic-psi-power_n_65ac31dae4b041f1ce662f4d
"I began reading magazines like The Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic, which used critical thinking to debunk extraordinary claims. From this perspective, humans were simply viewed as very good at deluding and fooling ourselves. Rational and logical thinking dictates that we see belief in ghosts and paranormal abilities as psychological reactions and tricks of the mind.
Meanwhile, my psychology training program was shaping a particular way of viewing the world — that an atheistic, logical, and rational approach was the only one with validity. Belief in the paranormal was associated with immaturity (at best) and psychopathology (at worst). Consciousness was seen as arising from the neural connections of the brain. When we stop breathing and the brain ceases its functions, consciousness is lost, and the body decays. There is no God. There are no ghosts. Nothing is real unless science can prove it. I was no longer open to experiences and possibilities outside the realm of what was considered “normal,” but that was all about to change..."
EXCERPTS: He proceeded to tell me a long and complicated story about his mother, Janet Mayer. Apparently, Janet began spontaneously speaking [...strange...] languages after participating in a holotropic breathwork session.
After four years of searching, Janet eventually found someone who could help. The late Dr. Bernardo Peixoto, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution and a shaman was originally from the Urueu-Wau-Wau tribe in Northern Brazil, where he was known as Ipupiara or Ipu. He recognized something in Janet’s recordings and indicated that she was speaking Yanomami, a South American tribal language. This was the confirmation Janet had been looking for.
Even though she didn’t know what she was saying, she always felt that there was a meaning behind the sounds — that they weren’t just nonsense. When her exact words were translated, they generally took the form of prayers and teachings related to honoring Mother Earth. Over time, Ipu translated several tapes and reported that Janet sometimes spoke other South American tribal dialects, including Fulnio, Tukano, and Kanamari.
[...] Janet knew that I conducted EEG brain imaging and was open to participating in a series of experiments to measure what was happening in her brain when she allowed the languages to come through. ... It turns out that the specific location involved was in the right parietal lobe (RPL). ... When this part of the brain is damaged or goes “off-line,” like it did with Janet, it is associated with feelings of spiritual transcendence and a softening of boundaries between “self” and “other.”
Somehow, it appeared Janet was able to temporarily disrupt the functioning of her RPL..
RE: Psychic ability correlated to LESS brain activity - Magical Realist - May 29, 2025
“Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.”― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception