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i was just thinking about this... if placebo works just as well as the real medicines, don't you think all of us have psychic abilities?

i was watching the history channel one night and they said stigmatas are created by the brain. and most of the wound patterns on the believers are identical to some pictures theu have seen in a church or a painting. hence they think about the wounds, the wounds physically appear on their body.

one professor was conducting a study on stigmatas. one of his experiments was he told one of his test subject was going to burn his wrist with a hot iron rod. he blind folded him, touched him with a cold rod, then a blister started to appear.

are we all psychics to a certain degree?

Auto-suggestion, or mind-over-matter, seems to be just two of the ways that these phnomenon are possible.

The placebo effect is well documented and in many cases terminal illnesses even have been cured by positive-thinking. The religious will say that it was the power of prayer or a miracle or some such nonsense but I have always been of the opinion that the power of our minds has not even started to be harnessed yet.

In fact I have personal experience of this effect:

One day I was sitting in my officer's club while abroad and we were filling in some spare time and a guy said that he could do telekinesis. He tore a piece of silver paper from the back of a cigarette packet and folded it with some theatrical patter into a triangle. He then asked any of us to hold it in our hands and close our fingers on it. I tried it first and after he helped to close my hand on the little triangle he looked straight into my eyes and said forcefully that the silver-paper triangle was getting hot. He held my hand closed with his and repeated the suggestion a few more times. After about a half a minute I started to feel the thing getting warm. A few seconds later it was too hot to hold but the drunken sod that was doing the trick kept my hand closed until I forced him to let go.

I dropped the tiny triangle of silver-paper on the floor and a blister was raised in the palm of my hand. When the piece of ciggy-paper foil was picked up by another bloke it was completely cold.

I am not a weak-willed person that would normally be effected by auto-suggestion but I seemed to be that day.

The punter who did the trick received a slap from me as an instinctive reaction to him burning me.

On other nights I saw him repeat this trick on many others in the mess.

I never could do it !