Sept 8, 1977 Sense & Nonsense

This afternoon when my daughter phoned, I exulted at the sound of her voice. “Aha! You did catch my E.S.P. message this morning! Why didn’t you phone earlier?”

“Mother, are you feeling alright? Why was I supposed to phone earlier?” asked my obviously un-tuned in offspring. ”

“I was testing my psychic abilities. Didn’t you feel a tingle in your dialing finger at approximately 9:30 this morning? I sent out thought rays to all my friends and relatives. I mentally screamed at everyone to phone me. I even pictured them dialing my number.

“Do you not recall having a terrible urge to phone your mother this morning??”

“No, I’m sorry Mother. My dialing finger never tingled.”

Well, so much for that experiment. My other psychic experiment of the morning had failed miserably as well. I had endeavored to play a solitary game of “Concentration” utilizing our deck of 49 playing cards. Concentration is supposed to be a social game, in which the player with the best memory is destined to win. He is best able to recall where the cards are that he and the other players have previously lifted and then placed in a face-down position on the table.

When I was a child, our family played Concentration often. I usually lost. My brother, with a younger and therefore less cluttered brain, usually won. However, one time when I was about 12 years old I astounded him and my mother with my remarkable aptitude for the game. We had played for hours and I was completely bored with it.

When it was my turn, I laid out all the cards on the table and absentmindedly began picking out pairs. In this slightly vacant state of mind, I successfully mated every card I picked up. I shuffled the cards, laid them out, and again picked up pairs in front of my open-mouthed family. I somehow knew exactly where the mate to every card I picked up was located.

Halfway through this second game I “woke up” and began wondering. “How come I am suddenly so good at this game?” This ruined everything. I was again relying on my memory, and my psychic button clicked to “off”.

This morning’s experiment in Concentration was almost as stunning. Out of 49 cards, I should have accidently, at least, have picked up some pairs. I had picked them up at random, not looking at the first card as you do in regular Concentration. When I checked the sets of cards I had placed facedown, I discovered not even one was a pair.

Could it be that my “short deck’” had somehow scrambled the psychic waves?

People are accepting psychic phenomena as a matter of course. “Telepathy”, “clairvoyance”, “precognition” and “psycho-kinesis” are words that are being tossed about almost as nonchalantly as motherhood, taxes and the weather. Scientists are busily researching psychic phenomena. Many predict that controlling it will result in a “new frontier” in communications, medicine, and other areas of human endeavour.

“Oh good, my phone is ringing. Perhaps somebody has been resisting my psychic messages of the morning and has finally succumbed to the urgings of their dialing finger!”

“Hello… Oh my God, it’s an obscene phone call!!  Something made you WANT to dial this number…..