its brain — a simplified picture of its surroundings, moving shadows which might be enemies and edible objects like flies. Everything else is ignored. Humans are more complicated because they need to be in order to survive; but anything that has no survival value is filtered out by the senses.
There is strong evidence that we have also ‘filtered out’ various powers that our ancestors once possessed. The tiger-hunter Jim Corbett, author of
Man Eaters of Kumaon
, explains how he has developed a faculty which he calls ‘jungle sensitiveness’, which has often saved his life when a tiger has been lying in wait. But such a faculty would obviously be useless to a stockbroker. There is also much evidence — which we shall consider later — that animals and primitive peoples possess far more highly developed powers of extra-sensory perception than civilized human beings. We do not need them; therefore we have discarded them — or rather put them into cold storage, to be recovered as needed (as, for example, by Jim Corbett when stalking tigers). Caspar Hauser and Yuliya Vorobyeva seem to suggest that our brains are ‘wired up’ to perceive X-rays and infra-red rays but that we only rarely have to call these powers into operation.
But now we come to the most baffling part. It is easy enough to see why man has discarded ‘jungle sensitiveness’ and other simple forms of ESP: they are no longer essential to his survival. But ‘moments of vision’ like those experienced by Muz Murray and Derek Gibson are an entirely different matter. Powers like these cannot have been essential to our survival at
any
point in our evolution. In fact they seem to be a contradiction of the theory of evolution. If you think of the evolution of tiny micro-organisms into amoebas, then into fishes, then into land animals, you can see that there was
no
point in our evolution when we needed the power to see into the heart of trees or to float out among the stars and planets in space. And the same applies to many more mundane faculties. Children known as calculating prodigies can perform incredible feats with numbers. A five-year-old boy named Benjamin Blyth asked his father what time it was and was told, ‘Half past four’. A few minutes later the child said, ‘In that case I have been alive …’ and named the exact number of seconds since his birth: about 158 million. His father worked it out on a sheet of paper and said, ‘No, you were wrong by 172,800 seconds.”No I wasn’t,’ said the child, ‘you forgot the two leap years.’
The obvious explanation for this is that our brains are ‘wired up’ to calculate numbers, and some brains are better at it than others — after all, an ordinary abacus could calculate in billions and trillions if necessary. But that explanation simply fails to fit the facts. For example, there are certain numbers known as primes — numbers that cannot be exactly divided by any other, like 5, 7, 13, 17 and so on. But there is no simple method of finding out whether a number is a prime except by dividing all the smaller numbers into it. So if a number is extremely large there is no quick way of discovering whether it is a prime or not; even a modern computer would have to do it ‘the hard way’. Yet there are certain calculating prodigies who can do it almost instantaneously. The Canadian ‘lightning calculator’ Zerah Colburn was asked whether a certain ten-digit number was a prime or not; after a moment’s thought he replied that it was not, because it could be divided by 641. Yet what he did was a logical impossibility. The psychiatrist Oliver Sacks has described a pair of subnormal twins in a New York mental hospital who amuse themselves by swapping
twenty-four-figure
primes — an even greater impossibility. The brain cannot be ‘wired’ to perform such feats instantaneously. The twins must be arriving at their results by some non-logical process akin to mystical vision. (Derek Gibson
There is strong evidence that we have also ‘filtered out’ various powers that our ancestors once possessed. The tiger-hunter Jim Corbett, author of
Man Eaters of Kumaon
, explains how he has developed a faculty which he calls ‘jungle sensitiveness’, which has often saved his life when a tiger has been lying in wait. But such a faculty would obviously be useless to a stockbroker. There is also much evidence — which we shall consider later — that animals and primitive peoples possess far more highly developed powers of extra-sensory perception than civilized human beings. We do not need them; therefore we have discarded them — or rather put them into cold storage, to be recovered as needed (as, for example, by Jim Corbett when stalking tigers). Caspar Hauser and Yuliya Vorobyeva seem to suggest that our brains are ‘wired up’ to perceive X-rays and infra-red rays but that we only rarely have to call these powers into operation.
But now we come to the most baffling part. It is easy enough to see why man has discarded ‘jungle sensitiveness’ and other simple forms of ESP: they are no longer essential to his survival. But ‘moments of vision’ like those experienced by Muz Murray and Derek Gibson are an entirely different matter. Powers like these cannot have been essential to our survival at
any
point in our evolution. In fact they seem to be a contradiction of the theory of evolution. If you think of the evolution of tiny micro-organisms into amoebas, then into fishes, then into land animals, you can see that there was
no
point in our evolution when we needed the power to see into the heart of trees or to float out among the stars and planets in space. And the same applies to many more mundane faculties. Children known as calculating prodigies can perform incredible feats with numbers. A five-year-old boy named Benjamin Blyth asked his father what time it was and was told, ‘Half past four’. A few minutes later the child said, ‘In that case I have been alive …’ and named the exact number of seconds since his birth: about 158 million. His father worked it out on a sheet of paper and said, ‘No, you were wrong by 172,800 seconds.”No I wasn’t,’ said the child, ‘you forgot the two leap years.’
The obvious explanation for this is that our brains are ‘wired up’ to calculate numbers, and some brains are better at it than others — after all, an ordinary abacus could calculate in billions and trillions if necessary. But that explanation simply fails to fit the facts. For example, there are certain numbers known as primes — numbers that cannot be exactly divided by any other, like 5, 7, 13, 17 and so on. But there is no simple method of finding out whether a number is a prime except by dividing all the smaller numbers into it. So if a number is extremely large there is no quick way of discovering whether it is a prime or not; even a modern computer would have to do it ‘the hard way’. Yet there are certain calculating prodigies who can do it almost instantaneously. The Canadian ‘lightning calculator’ Zerah Colburn was asked whether a certain ten-digit number was a prime or not; after a moment’s thought he replied that it was not, because it could be divided by 641. Yet what he did was a logical impossibility. The psychiatrist Oliver Sacks has described a pair of subnormal twins in a New York mental hospital who amuse themselves by swapping
twenty-four-figure
primes — an even greater impossibility. The brain cannot be ‘wired’ to perform such feats instantaneously. The twins must be arriving at their results by some non-logical process akin to mystical vision. (Derek Gibson
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