Unusual abilities

In a famous film called Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman played a man who could work with numbers as fast as a computer. People like this are able to tell you immediately what day of the week the twenty-fifth of December in the year 2678 will be. They are usually good at remembering too – names and dates, or information about sport, or buses and trains. They can tell you the result of a football game played in 1895, for example. Sometimes they are very good musicians, or artists who can draw pictures of complex buildings by remembering what they have seen.

But these people are not often good at ordinary school work, and they may have difficulty relating to other people. Scientists are using new machines to look at the brains of people with these unusual abilities. This helps them understand more about how the brain works. Which part of their brain are they using? Is another part damaged?

At least scientists agree that something unusual is happening here, but they generally disagree about the strange ability known as telepathy. One day in 1955, an American mother knew immediately when her five-year-old daughter, Joicey, was hit by a car outside the cinema several streets away from her home. She phoned the cinema to ask about her.

In the seventeenth century, the English poet John Donne was in France when he saw a picture in his head of his wife at home in England. Although they did not have a child, she was holding a dead baby. He later learned that their new baby had indeed been born dead.

But are these stories true? How often do we imagine danger for someone that we love, and then forget all about it when nothing happens? Can we know what is happening to another person, even when they are in another street, or another country, just by thinking about them? There are many stories about the aborigines of Australia, for example, ‘feeling’ when one of their family dies far away. They will know how to do something that the rest of us have forgotten. Perhaps we have lost this ability because the world around us has become so busy and noisy.

(from Strange but True by Alison Baxter, Oxford Bookworms Factfiles, Oxford University Press 2000)

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