The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries Read Free

discussing. But in the early 1980s Professor John Lourber of Sheffield University discovered a student with an IQ of 126 whose head was entirely filled with “water”. A brain scan showed that the student’s brain was merely an outer layer, only one millimetre thick. How can a person function with virtually no brain? Lourber, who specializes in hydrocephalis (“water on the brain”) replies that he has come across many cases of perfectly normal people whose heads are filled with 95 per cent of fluid, and that 70 to 90 per cent is actually quite common.
    If a person can think without using the brain, the obvious conclusion would seem to be that the being who does the thinking exists apart from his brain.
    The real problem posed by experiences such as that of the Sandersons is one concerning the nature of time. All scientific reasoning, even the least dogmatic, tells us that it is totally impossible to slip back into the past or foretell the future. Where the past is concerned, we can admittedly speculate that the “time slip” is some kind of “tape recording”. But a vision of the future should be a total impossibility, since the future has not yet happened. In spite of which, there are many well authenticated cases of “glimpses” into the future. (I once presented a television programme about one of these – an Irish peer named Lord Kilbracken who dreamed repeatedly about the winners of horse races, and won money by backing them.) It seems to follow that there is something fundamentally wrong with the vision of the world presented to us by our senses – in fact, we have only to think for a moment to see that there must be something wrong with a logic that tells us that everything has a beginning and an end, and then presents us with the paradox of a universe that apparently has neither.
    This is why the views of CSICOP should be treated with suspicion. It is not simply a question of whether ESP or telepathy deserve to be taken seriously, but whether – as Martin Gardner would like to believe – the universe is ultimately as rational and “normal” as a novel by Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope. This is an easy belief to maintain, because the universe that confronts us when we open our eyes in the morning looks perfectly “normal”, and it is unlikely that we shall encounter any event during the day that contradicts this assumption. But then the universe looks “unquestionable” to a cow for the same kind of reason. We know that the moment we begin to use our intelligence to ask questions, the universe becomes a far more strange and mysterious place. Most scientists would, in fact, agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, for science begins with a sense of mystery. But a certain type of scientist – and they are, unfortunately, in the majority – would alsolike to believe that the mysteries can all be solved by the kind of simple deductive logic employed by Sherlock Holmes. And the problems presented by “time slips” or precognitions or synchronicities, or by poltergeists and out-of-the-body experiences, make it clear that this is wishful thinking. We can only keep science within comfortable logical boundaries by refusing to acknowledge the existence of anything that lies outside those boundaries.
    It may seem reasonable to ask: Where is the harm in that? No one blames a policeman for not being interested in mysticism or philosophy – that is not his job. Why blame a physicist for taking no interest in poltergeists and ESP?
    The answer is that his preconceptions about the universe also involve preconceptions about the human mind. In the nineteenth century it made no difference whatever whether a scientist was interested in psychical research or regarded it as a delusion. But by the second half of the twentieth century, science was speculating whether the universe might contain eleven dimensions and whether black holes might be an entrance into a dimensionless “hyperspace” – even whether we