James Randi shows how it’s done and how people think they’re getting amazingly accurate horoscope readings when all they’re getting is things true of most people and things people want to be true about themselves.
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If you’ve ever taken a lie detector test, that is basically going to a fortune teller.
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Then I have been to 2 fortune-tellers. I didn’t have to pay for the detector, and it didn’t do them any good. I was a stubborn little shit and held fast to my lies. When they thought they had me… 'We’ll maybe when I was a child! Perhaps a classmate in second grade." The guy tried to be a hard-nosed asshole and I just pissed him off. Yea, even as a kid I had that unique talent.
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Though one is usually free, and the other not. 
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I get that. I met a girl who read my palm and predicted I would find love that very night. She was right.
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I don’t believe in psychics, but I do believe that there are undiscovered and/or unquantified natural processes that seem psychic.
- The strange, bizarre similarities that are demonstrated in identical twins whom were separated at birth. In one particularly interesting case, separated twins had wives with the same first name and both had dogs with the same name (“Toy” was the name of the dog). Please see below:
- When a new mom has a baby and breast feeds, we see some interesting things. When a baby has been exposed to a microbe that can cause illness, the quantities of antibodies in the mother’s milk increases drastically despite the illness being in the incubation period before any symptoms or changes. No lab test can demonstrate anything different about the baby’s physiology, yet the mother’s body “knows” what’s going on, and gets proactive by increasing antibody production. Please see below:
- It is common knowledge that many people have intuition that can be so accurate, that it appears to be psychic. I happen to (very) strongly believe in intuition, as long as it’s applied in it’s proper context. I believe I know where intuition comes from, but expounding on it is beyond the scope of this post. Let me know if you want me to list my arguments later.
So, I don’t believe in psychics, but I do believe that people who seem psychic actually rely on natural processes that are poorly understood, and I think that it’s very important that these processes be explored and quantified.
As an example, dogs seem to be able to detect cancer before any tests or imaging shows the disease.
The secret (so far) to surviving cancer is to catch it early, and the earlier the better.
So, it follows that researching the canine ability to do this may result in saving countless lives . . . so I am open-minded toward psychics.
Just not so open-minded that my brains fall out.
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I’m very much for researching why things occur and agree it can be a benefit to understand the mechanisms of how things work. I think Intuition often relies on experience and good deductive reasoning skills. I would like to see your thoughts on intuition 
. If we can figure out just how a dog can detect cancer that could be huge in saving lives. Dogs are amazing. My understanding is that researchers suspect it has to do with their heightened sense of smell. There’s a Scottish woman, Joy Milne, with the proven ability to smell the early onset of Parkinson’s disease. What I don’t believe is that these things have anything to do with magical psychic powers. I think the verdict is in on that.
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Ok, so I was understandably dubious about this claim, but apparently she has a rare condition called hereditary hypersomnia that gives her a heightened sense of smell, and when her husband was 33, she noticed that he had started to develop an odour, which she described as a subtle, musky smell. She also noticed the same distinct smell when attending meetings organised by the charity Parkinson’s UK. It was at that point that she was able to link the smell to the disease.
Which explains how some dogs are able to detect certain cancers, given their sense of smell is vastly more developed than humans.
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I agree 100% with your post.
My concern is that I believe that we can become so accustomed to dismissing displays of supposed psychic power that we also–incidentally–dismiss the other occurrences that I outlined in my post . . . so we throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I equate this situation with someone panning for gold. Someone who pans for gold must process tons and tons of gravel and dirt before–very occasionally–finding gold dust or nuggets that make all of the tedium worthwhile. I think that sorting through mountains of bullshit can–for example–yield the source of the strange coincidences that are associated with separated twins.
Speaking for myself, when it comes to the coincidences between separated twins, I’m strongly tempted to look at quantum entanglement, although I realize that there are several drastic problems with this idea.
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Most experiments that demonstrate quantum entaglement involve extreme conditions–like temperatures near absolute zero and a hard vacuum–that simply don’t exist in the human body.
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On this forum, Get Off My Lawn seems to have a strong background in science and an understanding of physics that’s much deeper than my own, and GOML has pointed out that there are actually mathematical reasons and/or mathematical arguments that preclude transporting information by quantum entanglement . . . so quantum entanglement supposedly can’t be used for meaningful communication, although it does play a role in quantum computing.
I don’t have the same (or comparable) background in physics that GOML has, so I have to concede to those arguments, which I’ve actually heard before . . . although in a different context.
Still, there is much about quantum mechanics that is counter-intuitive, and there is also a lot about it that we don’t know and/or understand. I would also guess that there is much more to learn about quantum mechanics, and I also strongly believe that we don’t know as much as we think we do.
That having been said, I can’t think of any other plausible mechanism to explain twin coincidences. I was discussing these ideas with a friend who is a mathematician, and she suggested that these coincidences might be a result of unconscious data mining combined with preconceived expectations . . . like the fallacy of “counting the hits but disregarding the misses.”
I can’t really refute that counter-argument beyond the fact that studies have also been done with fraternal twins separated at birth, and these coincidences don’t seem to show up in fraternal twins.
So I can’t suggest a good answer to this puzzle, beyond excluding psychic phenomena as a matter of principle.
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O ye of little faith 
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