Past, Present and Future

[Jester]

However regarding the first two, I strongly disagree. One of the women was my wife, of whom had regular periods throughout the year until working for sears behind a cashier terminal with two other women who also had regular menstruation's within a day or two of each other after working together for a few months. When my wife began working with them, her period shifted 12 days to the center of each month instead of the end of each month, and the other ladies period cycle shifted a few days forward until they were all synchronized withing a few days of each other.

Have you ever noticed that, when you're in line to turn at an intersection, that your turn signal falls in and out of sync with the turn signal ahead of you? All steady beats fall "in" and "out" of synchronization with one another. Womens' cycles are not exactly one month, nor are they the same as one anothers'. At any given time, about half of them will be "synchronizing" (getting closer together) and half will be doing the opposite. If three women work together for a long enough stretch, then their periods will converge eventually - this is a mathematical certainty.

If we're primed to find the hits (when they're getting closer together) and not the misses (when they're getting farther apart), then we're obviously going to conclude, just from anecdote and personal observation, that womens' cycles converge.

Now, perhaps this effect does exist. It's not impossible. Given the way hormones work (at least some of them), it's plausible that there is some olfactory element that causes synchronization. However, the tests that have been run on this suggest that this is not the case. Since it is very easy for humans to fall into intuitive-but-wrong theories based on these kind of observational biases, I know where I stand: this is a perceptual illusion. A convincing one, perhaps. But until I see a strong, carefully controlled study suggesting otherwise, I'm sticking with a negative here.

And like I said before, this is not the first time I have observed this phenomenon. And about yawning, we both agree that it's a human reflex, yet my point being: we still don't know why with all our science.

There are all sorts of things we don't know. We can either a) admit we don't know, but search for the most plausible explanations and test them rigorously, or b) try throwing implausible, fanciful ideas at it, fail to recognize our own biases, and be fooled.

I'll try and find a link to the man who helped the military when I get home.

To partially merge this with the movies thread, The Men who Stare at Goats was at least marginally interesting in parts.

It is fact that, at one time or another, the military, the CIA, law enforcement, and who knows who else, have experimented with remote viewing and other paranormal methods. Their experiences have overwhelmingly been negative, and they have pretty much abandoned their use as operationally useless. This may be because, as Kandrathe suggests, these powers cannot be controlled or directed. Or it may be as I suggest, that this whole field of inquiry is fairy dust and unicorns.

-Jester