The Weird

First of all, apologies for the lack of content here. I’ve been to Canada in September and have had some projects I’ve been working on ever since (including all the prep work for moving house). I’ll do a more detailed post on what I’ve been up to exactly sometime later. For now, I’d like to take a minute to talk about fringe science¹.

I remember my dad telling me stories as a kid about how he was interested in paranormal activity. I wouldn’t say he’s a believer, but he certainly is in the curious side of things. Being open to the unknown, and if not being able to explain things, being open to experience them. I haven’t talked to him about it in ages. I guess I really should talk to him about it again. Over the past few years I’ve been rekindling to the idea of the weird and it would be really interesting talking to him about how far his beliefs hold.

That said, I’m not a full believer myself. At least not for the big ones (like ghosts, premonitions, telepathy, etc…), I’d love for all of that to be a thing. I would love to live in a world where the seemingly unimaginable would be commonplace. Thought, that being said, it would only feel as something special if I had first experienced a world where those things would not exist… So that’s somewhat of a catch 22 to really appreciate that.

A story I remember my dad telling me, and mind, stories are far and few between. My dad isn’t the guy who endlessly bores you with the same stories. You get the story and that’s it. You’re supposed to know it now. It won’t see the light of the day again, unless you explicitly bring it up again. He always told me, he could never confirm any paranormal activity, except for one occasion he could not explain. He told me about an experiment he did, about how he would leave a tape to record a certain frequency of sound. The tape would just be there, recording static most of the time. But at some point, it recorded a single word. It was a nonsense word. For the life of me, I can’t remember what it was, and I’ll have to ask my dad about it. But there it was, clear as day, amidst a whole load of nothingness.

It’s not completely unthinkable to give reason to this. Someone in the neighbourhood might have been broadcasting on that frequency or one adjacent enough so that it might get picked up by the receiver. It’s an obvious explanation. But somehow, I’ve always liked that story for the mystery it presented to me as a child. To believe in an unknown world. A world of experiences that can’t be rationally explained, and to be open to experiences that are unknown to us, and might remain unknowable for quite some time.

I’m deeply envious for anyone who has these kind of experiences. The closest thing I have to something unexplainable is déjà vu, which I experience on a bi-frequently basis. The funny thing about this sense of déjà vu is that when I experience it, it might feel like something that has happened a day ago, or some weeks ago. But it might also be a memory of years ago. In fact, I’ve been thinking about déjà vu a lot lately. The most prevalent theory² of déjà vu is that it is your brain preparing yourself for a situation your anxious about³. If anything, science has definitively proven that your brain is capable of making you believe things that aren’t actually there. There are multiple studies that prove that we can’t always trust are own memories, our own eyes, our touch. Basically, our senses can’t be trusted. So I was wondering, if déjà vu really comes stems from anxiety and our brain tricks us into preparing for that situation, can déjà vu be triggered? Can an experiment be created where a subject is treated in such a way that it would trigger déjà vu? I’ll have to get back to you on that…

This blog post has been inspired by Rupert Sheldrake. I first became aware of him through the podcast We Can Be Weirdos by Dan Schreiber. I absolutely love that he is out there researching these and other phenomena that other scientists wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. I might not agree with all his theories, but they fascinate me. The unknown fascinates me, and I thought that was what science was all about. Realizing we don’t yet know everything and being open to ideas that might seem completely out there. In some future generation people will look back at us and be amazed that we had no idea how the sense of being stared at⁴, for example, works. Much like we know look back to past generations and cannot believe that some things that are now taught in primary school weren’t common knowledge in the past.

In a remarkable case of coincidence I hadn’t realized that Merlin Sheldrake is Rupert’s son. You may have heard of Merlin Sheldrake from writing Entangled Life which launches the concept of the Wood Wide Web (and sits on my bookshelf). His other son, Cosmo Sheldrake is a musician, and his music has been playing on the background while this post has been written. Go check him out!

I’d like to end this post with a call to remember something that happened to you that you can’t fully explain. Share that story what your partner or friends, what do they think? If you would be so willing my mailbox is open to any of your stories (particularly déjà vu).