Epilogue to Dissolution
If at first the idea isn’t absurd, there is no hope for it.
– Albert Einstein
Now we come full circle and return to the idea that started this series – Anomalies – and the fact that conventional wisdom or current scientific knowledge does not account for everything in our Reality.
I will not be rehashing those shibboleths of the modern fringe movements which have gained the status of mythology. A prime example is the “100th Monkey Effect”, where monkey knowledge of how to wash sweet potatoes allegedly jumped to distant islands. This story so embraced and repeated by fringe thinkers was in fact entirely made up. The original research was that monkeys learned entirely from social contact. Decades later, Lyall Watson, an author and biologist, just made up the story about this behavior jumping to distant islands. The lie spread so well because it’s something people wanted to believe. Sorry, Rupert, there is no morphic field.
I am a materialist and rationalist, but that doesn’t mean being blind to possible evidence of the unknown.
I. Human Senses
In my lifetime, what is considered the human senses has dramatically expanded from the 5 senses recognized in 1960. They include:
Proprioception — the sense of where your body parts are in space without looking. Known to specialists earlier but now firmly established as a distinct sense with specific receptors.
Vestibular sense — balance and spatial orientation, mediated by the inner ear. Distinct from hearing though in the same structure.
Interoception — sensing internal body states: hunger, thirst, heartbeat, pain, temperature, bladder fullness. Now considered a major sensory system with significant research attention.
Thermoception — temperature sensing, now understood as distinct from touch with specific receptor types (TRP channels, discovered largely in the 1990s-2000s).
Nociception — pain perception, now understood as a distinct sensory system rather than just extreme touch.
Chronoception — time perception, increasingly recognized as a genuine sensory capacity.
Magnetoreception — controversial but documented. A 2019 Caltech study found human brain responses to magnetic field changes. Cryptochrome proteins in the eye are the proposed mechanism.
The interoceptive system — the body’s continuous monitoring of its own internal states — operates largely below the threshold of conscious awareness. Baroreceptors in the aorta and carotid arteries monitor blood pressure moment to moment. Chemoreceptors track blood oxygen and CO2 levels. Glucose sensors influence hunger signals before conscious hunger is felt. The body is constantly processing vast amounts of internal sensory information and acting on it without conscious participation. Antonio Damasio’s research on somatic markers documented how these subliminal signals shape decision-making and emotional responses in ways that feel like intuition but are grounded in genuine biological sensing. People with damage to the relevant neural pathways lose this capacity and make consistently poor decisions despite intact intelligence — demonstrating that the body’s subliminal sensing is not incidental to cognition but foundational to it. The boundary between conscious and unconscious sensing is not fixed. Much of what the body knows never reaches awareness at all.
From 9 to 21 different senses have been described. So the question is, what other senses might eventually be recognized?
II. ESP and Extraordinary Abilities
Almost everyone has experienced one or more of these for which there is no rational scientific explanation:
- déjà vu
- feeling of being watched
- premonitions
- psychokinesis – mind over matter
- teleportation
- clairvoyance – remote viewing
- out-of-body experiences
- NDE’s and the afterlife
- spirits
I have several vivid memories from my youth of feeling a sense of déjà vu, but I was actually remembering a memory from a dream, and I knew exactly what was going to happen next. Psychologists call this “precognitive déjà vu”. A friend recounts a time when he was at a stop light, and felt like his foot was immobilized on the brake pedal when the light turned green. Seconds later an oncoming car blew thru the intersection ignoring the stop light. Everyone has a similar anecdote, and the scientific establishment dismisses them all. While most people have a poor understanding of chance and probability, some fraction of these experiences remain unexplained.
Scientists, of course, have concluded that is all an illusion or “bad wiring” in the brain. They will point to the 1959 study showing a feeling of predictive déjà vu can be provoked by electrically stimulating a specific region in the temporal lobe. Psychologists think they can recreate the sensation on demand in the lab, and prove it has no predictive power. On the other hand, a different study showed that allowing subconscious impressions produced by dreams, some subjects could actually predict which of 4 images would be shown to them in the future. (Vernon, 2024)
The feeling of being watched without any possible sensory impressions is called scopaesthesia. Almost everyone has experienced looking behind them and finding someone staring at them. Surveys show 70–94% of people report experiencing this. In some fascinating experiments to identify how this works, subjects in a room with a video camera were asked or monitored to see if they could tell that someone in a different room was watching the camera feed. Believe it or not, consciously provided answers were no different than chance but measured autonomic responses, like increased heart rate when they were watched, were statistically significant. This touches upon a key difference with ESP. Much documented evidence of ESP occurs when the effect is subconscious and no possibility of deception or being deceived can explain it.
Premonitions are a kind of precognition where someone has a feeling of anxiety about impending events. Precognition is someone claiming a future event will happen, but their verbal predictions can always be reinterpreted after the fact. Researchers instead have measured what they call “Predictive Anticipatory Activity”. These are subliminal changes in autonomic functions in the body which can be detected up to 10 seconds before a stimulus occurs. The stimulus can be randomly chosen by computer and entirely unpredictable, but the “PAA” happens anyway.(Mossbridge, 2014) Clearly conventional science has no current explanation for this effect.
Psychokinesis: Ninel Kulagina was a Soviet woman who proved to dozens of Eastern and Western scientists under every conceivable controlled experiment that she could move objects with her mind. Of course, Western skeptics simply claimed without a shred of evidence that she was deceiving everyone . But scientists confirmed she had no hidden magnets or was using hard to see threads. She could move objects inside a sealed plexiglass box. (Krippner, 1980) How could she do this? It didn’t matter if the objects were grounded or non-paramagnetic. Curiously, she could not move objects in a vacuum.
Teleportation: China had a frenzy of reports of extraordinary human abilities in the period 1979 to 1981. It was an amazing cultural phenomena where they claimed many superpowers, like feeling color or knowing sealed numbers by touch, could be taught, especially in children. Truzzi has an amusing account (Omni, 1985) of traveling to China in the company of trained scientists to verify this phenomena. He found instead a total unwillingness by these “child psychic savants” or their handlers to perform in a controlled environment. The CCP eventually banned talk of ESP. A core of believers however continued with research on extraordinary individuals who seemed to be capable of performing “impossible” things on command. The case of Zhang Baosheng is noteworthy. He demonstrated psychokinetic abilities by moving objects out of sealed containers using only mental focus. A film made by the Institute of Space-Medico Engineering in 1987 actually shows a medicine pill moving through an irreversibly sealed glass vial, which occurred in three frames of a 400 frame per second film.
Much further out there, in the 1980’s, Chinese paranormal research turned into the Qigong movement. “qigong master Yan Xin, typically working at a distance of several kilometers was able to create, shift, or intensify absorption peaks in the infra-red, ultra-violet, and paramagnetic resonance spectra of biological media. In other cases, chemical phase-shift change parameters were shifted” – by intention alone. (Zuying, 1987) They observed and documented these changes in fundamental properties of physics, but this kind of “spooky action at a distance” is not allowed by Western science.
Dr. Dean Radin of IONS has been studying PSI phenomena for decades. He even worked on the DOD’s Project Stargate. Despite being an electrical engineer and conducting hundreds of “hard science” experiments, he is vilified by the scientific community. “Dr. Radin’s sin was to explore parapsychological phenomenon, although national surveys conducted by IONS indicate that over 90% of scientists and engineers state they have personally experienced psi experiences.” (Gale & Null, 2018) He has found statistically significant results for consciousness affecting electronic Random Number Generators. (Radin & Nelson, 2018).
Out-of-Body Experiences & the Spiritual
OBE’s, NDE’s, remote viewing, and so on involve an entirely different phenomena which seems to be the spiritual nature of man separating from the physical nature. It is plainly impossible to conduct an experiment in the material world which would prove or disprove a spiritual dimension. A very long time ago, I had read the recently published book, “Journeys Out of the Body” by Robert Monroe (1971) in which the author exuberantly described his almost routine experiences out of his own body, and how anyone could develop a similar ability. I meditated using these techniques until I too achieved a distinctly altered state of consciousness, and I could fantasize about leaving my body. No, I don’t believe I actually left my body, and instead it made me dwell on the question of people’s near infinite capacity for self-delusion. Monroe’s Gateway Program inspired the DOD to spend millions on Project Stargate, which was an attempt to get useful information by remote viewing. Curiously, even Monroe failed to validate he could view anything ( like numbers written on a card atop a closet) while “floating out of his body”.
That said, a large body of evidence seems to support “Non-Ordinary Spiritual Experiences”. These include documented cases of information from the dead, detailed reports of reincarnation, awareness during Near-Death Experiences despite absence of brain activity. and ghost manifestations. While there is no absolute scientifically sound proof that any of this is real (ghosts are not amenable to replicated experiments), there is also no way any of it can be explained within current scientific understanding.
III. Deception and Delusion
Deceivers and those they deceive have a co-dependent relationship. The magician’s audience is entertained at the possibility they are seeing Real Magic. They want to believe. Sadly, all these fringe topics invite deception.
Daniel Kahneman’s System 1/System 2 framework shows quick and facile intuitive thinking resists correction by slow and methodical thinking. Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral reasoning shows people typically reach conclusions first and construct justifications afterward. The research on motivated reasoning — David Dunning, Ziva Kunda — showed that people reach desired conclusions by subconsciously shaping how they access, construct, and evaluate beliefs.
Deception requires willing recipients. The tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the media narrative machinery — none of it works without people who want to believe the reassuring story. The mechanisms documented throughout Dissolution exploit genuine human cognitive tendencies rather than overcoming rational resistance.
Magicians experienced in the sleight of hand are often best able to tell when a medium or psychic is using deceptive tricks. Houdini was famous for exposing frauds. The late James Randi was devoted to the task and founded CSICOP, now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Martin Gardner’s contribution in numerous investigations and articles should be acknowledged too. However, many a serious paranormal investigator have witnessed both Randi and Gardner making unwarranted claims to dismiss real phenomena which challenges their own biases and dogma. None of us are immune to this.
IV. Intuition
Intuition is a subconscious synthesis of complex mental models, subliminal information – and ESP! This synthesis is happening all the time, but occasionally, if it is urgent, It bubbles up into consciousness as a “gut feeling”. People can’t say why—nor can they consciously retrieve the information it was based on.
Subliminal ESP—unconscious physiological anticipation of future salient events—evolved as a low-cost, low-bandwidth early warning system. Its function is not to provide conscious foresight, but to prepare the body for a probable future state before that state arrives. The conscious experience of this preparation is ‘intuition’: a felt sense of readiness, foreboding, or attraction, without an accompanying narrative. Full conscious access to the precognitive signal would impose prohibitive attentional and metacognitive costs, and would offer no additional survival benefit beyond the unconscious physiological priming already provided.
From a sociobiological perspective, consciousness is a narrow-channel, high-cost adaptation for deliberate, sequential reasoning about the local present. Any information stream that is probabilistic, low-bandwidth, and about non-local (spatially or temporally distant) events would be maladaptive if it entered consciousness with equal salience to sensory data. The evolutionary solution is to process such information—including apparently extrasensory anticipatory signals—through unconscious autonomic and limbic channels. The conscious output is a ‘gut feeling’: a somatic marker without a retrievable narrative. This design preserves the adaptive benefit of physiological preparation for a probable future state while avoiding the catastrophic attentional, cognitive, and metacognitive costs that would accompany conscious precognitive awareness.
The absence of universal, reliable telepathic ability in the human species is precisely what we would expect if no such heritable trait exists. A genuinely adaptive extrasensory capacity—one that conferred even a modest survival advantage in ancestral environments—would have been driven to fixation by natural selection. That it has not is powerful evidence, though not conclusive proof, that reports of telepathy reflect cognitive biases, experimental artifacts, or statistical noise, rather than a latent biological faculty.
The Hollywood trope of the tormented psychic who must ‘learn to filter the noise’ is a revealing narrative device. It functions as an ad-hoc explanation for the absence of reliable, demonstrable telepathic ability under controlled conditions. From a sociobiological perspective, a genuine sensory system that delivered primarily noise—requiring conscious filtering even to approach functionality—would be ruthlessly selected against. The trope thus inadvertently concedes the very point it seeks to obscure: that telepathy, if real, is not a properly evolved biological capacity.
V. Conclusion
“The world is full of stories, and from time to time, they permit themselves to be told.”
– Enisi, the Cherokee grandfather in the 2006 video game Prey
Never stop asking questions.
The world documented in these pages is not a comfortable one. Institutions that claim to pursue truth are shown to pursue funding. Knowledge infrastructure built to illuminate is shown to obscure. The substrate of human cognition itself has been contaminated. The mechanisms of silence have been documented from classified patents to unmarked graves.
And yet.
The anomalies persist. The questions remain. The cracks in the facade let light through precisely because no amount of institutional pressure has been able to seal them completely. The Allais effect keeps appearing in sensitive instruments during eclipses. The entangled particles keep correlating across distances that should make correlation impossible. The people who notice things keep noticing them, even knowing what noticing costs.
The Dissolution series was never intended to provide answers. It was intended to document the questions that aren’t being asked — and the machinery that prevents asking them. Whether that machinery is deliberate or emergent, conspiratorial or institutional, the effect is the same: reality keeps offering itself, and the apparatus keeps looking away.
You don’t have to look away.
To paraphrase Enisi, “The world is full of questions, and from time to time, they permit themselves to be answered.”
Read More
“The 100th Monkey Effect: Where the Story Came From and Why It Falls Apart”, https://wondrousstories.com/100th-monkey-effect/
Interoception
Primary source: Damasio, A.R. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam, 1994.
This is the book where he develops the somatic marker hypothesis most fully, including the documented cases of patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage who retained normal intelligence but made consistently poor decisions due to impaired access to bodily signals.
Key academic paper: Damasio, A.R., Tranel, D., & Damasio, H. “Somatic markers and the guidance of behavior: Theory and preliminary testing.” In H.S. Levin, H.M. Eisenberg, & A.L. Benton (Eds.), Frontal Lobe Function and Dysfunction. Oxford University Press, 1991.
The Iowa Gambling Task — the experimental paradigm Damasio’s team developed to demonstrate the somatic marker effect — is documented in: Bechara, A., Damasio, A.R., Damasio, H., & Anderson, S.W. “Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex.” Cognition, 50(1-3), 7-15, 1994.
Déjà Vu & Premonitions
Vernon, D., et al., “Testing home dream precognition and exploring links to psychological factors”, Vol 17, No 2 (October 2024) of International Journal of Dream Research, https://doi.org/10.11588/ijodr.2024.2.100871
Thompson, J., “Can Dreams Predict the Future?”, https://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/precognitive-dreaming-research.html
Scopaesthesia
Jones, H., “A sixth sense? How we can tell that eyes are watching us”, Sep 2016, https://theconversation.com/a-sixth-sense-how-we-can-tell-that-eyes-are-watching-us-65661
Friday, R., Investigating conscious, psychophysiological, and behavioural measures of covert surveillance detection via nonconventional means. PhD thesis, 2019, University of Greenwich. https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/44081/
Premonitions
On presentiment studies: https://noetic.org/blog/our-bodies-know
Mossbridge, J. et al., “Predicting the unpredictable: critical analysis and practical implications of predictive anticipatory activity”, 2014 Mar 25;8:146. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00146
Dean Radin & Ana Borges, “Intuition through time: what does the seer see?”, 2009 Jul-Aug;5(4):200-11, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19608110/
Psychokinesis
Overview of US DOD pursuit of ESP research for decades: https://www.anniejacobsen.com/operation-paperclip-1
Krippner, S,”Human possibilities : mind exploration in the USSR and Eastern Europe”, 1980, https://archive.org/details/humanpossibiliti0000krip
Keil, H.H.J et al., “Directly Observable Voluntary PK Effects”, 1976, PSPR Vol. 56, https://www.scribd.com/document/152730763/Nina-Kulagina-PSPR-Volume-56
Teleportation
Truzzi, M., “China’s Psychic Savants”, OMNI, 1985, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00792R000300420017-1.pdf
Shen D., “Unexpected Behavior of Matter in Conjunction with Human Consciousness”, March 2010, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292542734_Unexpected_Behavior_of_Matter_in_Conjunction_with_Human_Consciousness
“CIA Document Confirms Reality Of Humans With ‘Special Abilities’ Able To Do ‘Impossible’ Things”, Jan 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20230331170250/https://www.anonews.co/cia-doc-human/
Institute of Space-Medico Engineering, Zhang Baosheng filmed in 1987, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKEQaoZ2ogw
Zuying, L. et al., “Academia Sinica’s Shengwu Wuli Xuebao (Acta Biophyscia Sinica)”, 1987, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00792R000300270007-9.pdf
Clairvoyance
Richard Gale and Gary Null, PhD, “Wikipedia’s Culture of Character Assassination: The Case of Dr. Dean Radin”, 2018, https://prn.live/wikipedias-culture-of-character-assassination-the-case-of-dr-dean-radin
Dean I. Radin and Roger D. Nelson, “Evidence for Consciousness-Related Anomalies in Random Physical Systems”, 1989, Foundations of Physics, 19, 1499-1514.
Out-of-Body Experiences & the Spiritual
Monroe, R., “Journeys Out of the Body”, 1971, https://ia802303.us.archive.org/9/items/astral-projection-books/Journeys%20Out%20of%20the%20Body%20-%20Robert%20Monroe.pdf
“Project Stargate”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_unit)
“Children Who Report Memories of Past Lives”, University of Virginia – Division of Perceptual Studies, https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/our-research/children-who-report-memories-of-previous-lives/
Saad, M., “Non Ordinary Spiritual Experiences: some phenomena without a satisfactory explanation”, 2023, Avicenna J Neuro Psycho Physiology
https://doi.org/10.32592/AJNPP.2023.10.1.100
Deception and Delusion
Daniel Kahneman — System 1/System 2:
- Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
- The foundational academic work: Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” Science, 185(4157), 1124-1131, 1974.
Jonathan Haidt — moral reasoning and post-hoc justification:
- Haidt, Jonathan. “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.” Psychological Review, 108(4), 814-834, 2001.
- Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon Books, 2012.
Motivated reasoning — Ziva Kunda:
- Kunda, Ziva. “The Case for Motivated Reasoning.” Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480-498, 1990. This is the primary source — a genuinely important paper worth reading directly.
David Dunning — related work on self-assessment bias:
- Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. “Unskilled and Unaware of It.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121-1134, 1999.
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