The Delpasse-Effect

- 14 - All in all, it seems that parapsychology had manoeuvred itself into a highly unpleasant situation. Taking the reputable attitude of serious science into consideration, it should not flirt with the subject of immortality. Its messages from the hereafter, like for instance the already mentioned CROSS CORRESPONDENCE, are therefore highly undesirable. Everything one deals with must be explainable within the framework of the world of the here and now. They are however physically inexplicable at the same time. - The logical dilemma is indeed considerable! If ESP1 phenomena do not fit within the framework of the natural sciences the question arises, which laws does it abide by instead? These must be laws that exist next to the laws of nature we are familiar with, laws that have remained completely hidden in spite of all the progresses within the sciences. One would have to assume that a second, non-physical ORDER for the functioning of this world, would have to exist next to the physical. 1. 8 The theory of thought molecules During the fifties, the American scientists James McConnel and Robert Thomson surprised the world with a sensational experiment. They had experimented with flatworms, limbless creatures with flat bodies that live in effluence. Flatworms (turbellaria) belong to the class of plathelminths. They do not possess blood vessels, but they already have a simple nervous system. McConnel and Thompson wanted to know whether animals of such a primitive construction were able to learn something. They illumined their flatworms with a bright lamp, something that usually made them stretch out. Immediately following the light signal, these animals received a mild electrical shock and this produce are rather severe contraction of their bodies. After more than one hundred of these experiences, every flatworm learned to equate the light with pain. They already contracted the moment the beam of light hit them, before the electric shock was triggered. • The scientists then cut all the worms in half. Each of these halves regenerated into a completely new worm. One could now expect that the worm that regenerated from the head part would remember the lesson. But to their surprise they found that the head section as well as the tail section had not forgotten what the complete worm had learned. The experiments by McConnel and Thompson initially remained controversial, because they could not be repeated in all their details. What remained was the insight that the brain must not necessarily be the only seat of memory. They came up with more experiments with flatworms and they eventually made a very strange discovery: • If the trained flatworms were cut into little pieces and fed to their conspecifics, they in turn learned the light-shock-treatment in a considerably shorter time that other, untrained worms. The knowledge in their devoured predecessors had in a mysterious fashion entered their own possession.

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