Too Loving A Touch
Too many cash prizes, offered by skeptics investigating psychic powers, have gone unclaimed for the rational mind to take claims of extrasensory perception too seriously.
And yet I still remember an incident from my adolescence, when I desperately needed a young woman's phone number (well, it seemed desperate at the time: if I did not get her number in the next 48 hours, I knew my life would be ruined). I remember lying in bed, feverish with my horror that my last opportunity for happiness would pass me by. I remember how loud and fast my heartbeat grew, how dry my mouth became, how totally my reasoning power left me.
So I lay there unable to think or sleep. Then suddenly I was calm. My heart stopped racing, and I was happy. For no clear or compelling reason, I was quite sure that a particular friend of mine would call, and that he would have the magic number even though he had no more access to the person or the number than I.
Then the phone rang.
The psychologists of today have a boxful of explanations for such events. I myself prefer any one of a dozen of their explanations to the mystical alternative. Still, it is most important to remember the incidents in your life that violate your expectations. Psychologists have also proved that the surprising, disconcerting incidents are the ones we are most likely to forget. This is perhaps the ultimate tragedy—for these incidents are the only ones that point out the flaws in our views, that would enable us to fix and improve the models of the world we use to mold our expectations.
And let's face it—no matter how many times we prove that ESP does not exist, we will never be able to disprove it entirely. Just as the experiments in physics that endlessly seek a proton decay can only increase the number of billions of protons needed to detect one, so we can only restrict the probability of psychic events to increasingly smaller odds. We can never reach zero.
And for anyone who believes in psychic phenomenon, I have good news as well: I have every faith that, if someone were to prove the existence of ESP one day, the physicists and the psychologists would have plausible explanations for it the day after. Goodness, the people who brought us outrageously counterintuitive explanations of the universe like quantum chromodynamics and Heisenberg uncertainty should surely be able to explain a simple thing like telepathy!