August 24th, 2009

You're walking down the street along a regular route to work. Today, unlike every other day, you stop at that little café you normally always pass by for a latté. Thirty seconds later, a pane of glass falls from a building and crashes down right about where you would have been walking.

-or-

You're at home chatting with family or friends and you suddenly say, "I wonder what Bob's been up to these last few months." Right then your cell phone rings and it's Bob telling you he's in town.

-or-

You go to bed early with a splitting headache. Early in the morning, you are woken by the telephone. You wake up and say out loud, "my grandma's dead." On the phone it's someone telling you your grandmother died in the night.

These are real examples, by the way.

It's rare, but it sometimes happens that the scientists, mystics, humanists, and artists can all agree on something. It's the power of Implicit Knowledge. People think they're exceptionally lucky to have made a certain decision. Or they might believe that some hidden extra sense was operating—ESP guided them. Or the might think that they are just smarter than the rest of us (but not secretly, of course, since if they were honest with themselves they'd acknowledge that they didn't "know" anything different at the time).

People rely on integrating their intuition with traditional decision-making procedures; physiological response is as much a part of the process as their thinking. And, certainly, some value must be attributed to Implicit Knowledge— that is, they don't know they know something (or forgot they know something) that suddenly bubbles up to the surface in one of those "aha" moments. It's a simple matter of buried memories that become unburied, except we don't always know they were buried to start with.

Things get seen out of the corner of eyes—a scaffold high up with two men wrestling a pane of glass into a window frame, a casual comment made by someone six months previously about his schedule that stuck in the back of your mind even if you don't think you remember it, or you know a family member is old and frail and your internal biological clock "knows" something about longevity that your conscious mind doesn't.

The point is this: So-called ESP is often—maybe always—a testament to the exceptional abilities of the human mind to synthesize even the most minute of clues into an accurate prediction. Seemingly mystical but based in reality.

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