Wanted: One object, haunted

There's something fundamentally irreconcilable about the materialist view of the world and the spiritualist view of the world, and this is summed up in how the exponents of these two schools of thought tend to view each other.  Spiritualists see materialists as hopelessly dull, missing out on the true wonder of the supernatural nature of everything; materialists, on the other hand, view spiritualists as making stuff up.

Guess which one I am.

I've never understood the criticism of my philosophical stance as dull.  For me, the science of how matter actually works is awe-inspiring enough.  But for spiritualists, apparently, that isn't sufficient.  I suspect a good many of them don't ever bother to learn the science, so it's no wonder they feel the need for something more.  This also explains their consistent misuse of words like "quantum" and "energy," a phenomenon I've commented upon approximately 485 times in this blog.

It also seems to be why they want to imbue inanimate objects with a spiritual nature.  Thus the recent upsurge in interest in "haunted objects."

The FSPP (Foundation for the Study of Paranormal Phenomena) has an informative article on the subject, even though in my opinion it falls clearly into the "making stuff up" category.  The author explains that objects may become haunted by a spirit of a dead person because the object was important to the individual when (s)he was alive, was present when (s)he died, or "for other unknown reasons."  But should that make you nervous about buying an antique?

Absolutely not. I personally love old things, be they furniture or trinkets. There is something about holding something that has been around much longer than I have. You can almost feel a powerful energy when you touch something old. What you are feeling is the vibrations of the object or of the person that owned it. Psychometry is the ability to interpret those vibrations. Unfortunately, I do not possess that particular gift to any usable degree. Even so, I still love old things and I would never abstain from buying something I liked simply out of the fear that a deceased someone may come with the object. Let common sense rule here.

My feeling is that if common sense ruled, you wouldn't believe in haunted objects in the first place.

Despite that, there are still many accounts of haunted objects.  One of the most famous is "Robert the Doll," a three-foot-tall straw doll given to a boy named Gene Otto some time around 1900 who is so renowned that he actually has his own website.  The doll supposedly had been cursed by one of the Otto family employees because of their mistreatment of her, and it proceeded to terrorize the family.  One has to wonder why no one thought of the simple expedient of destroying it, but apparently no one did, and Gene Otto kept the doll into adulthood, but did lock it in the attic once he got married.  There it remained until Otto died and a new family bought the house, discovered the doll, and it started to terrify their daughter.  ''Robert the Doll" is now housed at the Key West Martello Museum, where according to accounts it still "frightens visitors by changing expressions and shifting positions within seconds, and giggling maniacally."

Amazing what the power of suggestion will do, isn't it?  If the evidence was as clear cut as all that, we'd have an instant winner of the James Randi Million-Dollar Challenge.

We also have the story, related on the site "Wee Ghosties," of a "friend of the author" who bought a painting at an estate sale.  The painting's subject is nothing special -- a "red and blue abstract."  But as soon as the painting was hung in the friend's house, odd things started happening, including a spot on the bed depressing as if someone was sitting there, the television turning on and off spontaneously, and objects disappearing and reappearing.  The author concludes, "He bought a ghost along with his artwork."  The whole thing sounds vaguely fishy to me, the sort of thing that you almost always hear third or fourth hand -- "this happened to my mother's first cousin's husband's sister's gardener."  And once again, we have to wonder why, if things were this creepy, with invisible butts sitting on the bed and all, the guy didn't just give the painting to the Salvation Army or something.

Because, after all, there are options.  And if the "burn it" or "give it to a thrift store" choices don't appeal, there's always "Carnivalia's Asylum for Haunted Objects and Wayward Ghosts."  These folks, so the website says, "are dedicated to providing a safe space for all spiritually inhabited objects. If you have an object that you believe is haunted, or cursed, or simply unfetching, we seek to provide it with a good home."  They go on to say that they don't just care about the object, however:  "We will do our best to find a good home for your haunted object, and will work towards leading any spirits attached to it towards their final destination into the light."

From other parts of their webpage, you have to wonder if these people are entirely serious, though:  "We are not that picky, really, and will likely accept the following haunted objects: thingamajigs, doodads, gizmos, whatsits, thingumabobs, widgets, jiggers.  However, our standards prevent us from accepting possessed doohickeys, and we would appreciate you not asking us to do so."

So, okay.  Once again, we have that central problem, which is that we have a group of people who want to ascribe spiritual properties to plain old inanimate objects, resulting in further accusations from us materialists that they're just making stuff up.  And the result, of course, is that I would love to own a haunted object, and obtain first-hand data (or, more likely, not) about what its spirit companion can do.  So I'll match Carnivalia's offer from the website linked above; if anyone has a haunted object and would like to get rid of it, I'd be glad to take it off your hands.  I'll report back here of any disappearing objects, electrical appliance malfunctions, or mysterious ass-divots appearing on beds.  You'll be the first to know.

Dream weavers

All my life, I've been plagued with vivid dreams.  I use the word "plagued" deliberately, because more often than not my dreams are disturbing, chaotic, and odd, leaving me unsettled upon waking.  I remember more than once thrashing about so violently during a dream that I've found myself in the morning on the floor in a heap of blankets; I've also had the residuum of unease from a bad dream stay with me through much of the following day.  And given that I've also spent most of my adult life fighting chronic insomnia, it's a wonder I get any sleep at all.

Of course, I've also had good dreams.  A series of flying dreams I had as a child were so realistic, and so cool, that for a while I was convinced that they were true; that I could go into my parents' front yard, angle my body to the wind, and be caught up and thrown into the air like a kite.  I've had dreams of running effortlessly, dreams of winning the lottery, and the inevitable (but admittedly pleasant) dreams of the non-PG-13-rated variety.

Through it all, though, I've never had a lucid dream.  Lucid dreams are dreams in which you are aware you're dreaming -- and apparently, with some people, dreams in which you are able to control what happens.  If such a thing were commonplace, who would need virtual reality or computer games, when every night you could create your own reality and then interact with it as if it were real?

The first step toward making such a thing possible for ordinary schmoes like myself, who dream frequently but never lucidly, may just have hit the market.  Called "Remee," the product looks like a sleep mask, but on the inside of the mask are six red LED lights.  Even with your eyelids closed, your eyes receive enough light to remain aware of your surroundings, and when the lights activate -- late in the sleep cycle, when you are most likely to be in REM (Rapid Eye Movement, the stage of sleep in which you dream) -- your brain becomes aware of them.  At that point (so the theory goes), your perception of the red lights becomes a signal, alerting you to the fact that you're dreaming.  From there, the lucid dream is initiated.

So, the lights act a little like the totem objects in Inception -- giving you an anchor, something that clues you in with regards to what is going on.  But unlike the totem objects, whose purpose was to check to see if you were dreaming so you could get out, if need be, here the purpose is to let you know that the fun is about to begin.

The inventors of Remee, Duncan Frazier and Steven McGuigan, told The Daily Mail (read the story here) that their tests have indicated that the lights are unlikely to cause seizures or any other ill effects.  If they fire during non-REM sleep, for example, the brain simply ignores them -- as it does if a faint light (say the distant headlights of a car) shine briefly into your bedroom window at night.

Remee masks are priced at $95 each, and are available here.  Frazier and McGuigan report that since Remee masks first came on the market, they've received over 7,000 orders.

Me, I find this intriguing, but I do wonder about what long-term (possibly psychological) effects such a thing might have, as we still don't have much of an idea what dreaming actually does.  That dreams are important seems obvious, given their ubiquity amongst mammal species -- both of my dogs clearly dream, apparently about chasing squirrels judging by how their feet move and the little muffled woofing noises they make.  Features that are widespread amongst many different, distantly-related species are called evolutionarily conserved features, and the usual interpretation is that they have been maintained through evolutionary history because they serve some sort of essential purpose.  As such, you have to question the wisdom of monkeying around with something like dreaming until we know more about it.

Be that as it may, if I had a Remee mask, I'd definitely try it.  Whatever harm it might do, I would guess, is unlikely to happen from occasional use.  And if you decide to get one, do let me know by posting here what your results are.  Given the unsettling nature of many of my nightly forays into the dream world, it might be nice to have a strategy for taking charge and having a little fun.

Aural hygiene

Are you feeling grumpy lately?  Not sleeping well?  Irritable and nervous?  Forget stress as the cause of your problems; it also isn't insomnia, problems at home, or a crazy work schedule.

No, the problem is that your aura is dirty.  (Source)

Now, you may be asking yourself: given that auras don't exist, how did mine get dirty?  And however will I get it clean again?

Like with many things, the key to both is diligence.  According to the author of the above-linked article, there are many ways your aura can get dirty, to wit:

• Entering a room in which an argument had just taken place.
• Being shouted at by your boss.
• Accidentally poking someone on the street.
• Having someone wish that you were dead.
• Being cursed by an old lady because you have a tattoo.

There are several things that I find funny about this list.  First, these are the only five reasons listed, and they seem like an odd collection.  I mean, we have two things that probably happen on a daily basis (being near the site of a past argument, and being bumped on the street by someone) with something that hopefully never happens (someone wishing you dead).  And second -- an old lady cursing you because you have a tattoo?   What the hell?  I have two tattoos, and thus far I have escaped being cursed by old ladies, although I did have one once say to me, "I don't know why anyone would do that to his own body."  I came within a hairsbreadth of giving her a diabolical look and saying, "Because no one else's body was handy at the time."  I resisted, which is probably a good thing, because comments like that can be rather difficult to explain to the police.

But I digress.

So, we've established that it's all too easy, even if you have no tattoos, to get schmutz on your aura.  This can result in a variety of bad things happening, including:

• Your will could become weaker.
• You could become less sensitive to "energies."  Whatever that means.
• You could become a target for "astral attacks."  Whatever that means.
• You could be a source of contagious aura-schmutz for others.

As a result, it is "mandatory" (according to the article) that we all practice regular aura-cleansing.  And we're not talking about some Windex and a few paper towels, here; we're talking full-on woo-woo stuff, like burning incense, using a candle to burn away the "negative energies," or rubbing salt all over your skin.  (And if you do go with the salt, make sure to flush it down the toilet afterwards -- we can't have salt with psychic dirt on it hanging around in the trash, where anyone could touch it and get infected themselves.)  To me, though, this last one sounds a bit uncomfortable, but the article does say that if you have a mild case of aura-schmutz, simply visualizing your aura getting clean while you're taking a shower can be enough. 

And that's the problem with all of this, isn't it? All it requires is that you have a good enough imagination, and the whole thing works like a charm.  You don't have to make any real changes in your life, or (heaven forfend) get medical attention or help from a counselor; all you have to do is click your heels together three times and say, "There's no place like home," and you're all set.

Elf awareness

I should know better, by now.  I shouldn't describe someone's woo-woo belief, and then exaggerate it for humorous effect, and say something to the effect of, "well, at least no one believes this."  It always seems to backfire, somehow.

You may recall that in yesterday's post, we had the story of Arní Johnson, an Icelandic member of parliament who became convinced that he had been saved from dying in an automobile accident by a family of elves living in a rock.  To express his gratitude, he had the rock moved to his front yard, and an "elf expert," Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, said that was fine as long as the rock was placed in grass (the elves wanted some sheep, apparently) and that it was moved in such a way that the elves were "comfortable" during the journey.

And hoping for a laugh, I quipped, "How do you become an elf expert?  Do Icelandic universities offer a major in elfology?"

Well.  Like I said before, such comments often come back to bite me on the ass.  To wit: today in Iceland Review Online we have a response to Arní Johnson's actions in moving the elves' house, from a guy named Magnús Skarphéðinsson, saying that Johnson was acting foolishly in moving the elves, and in fact may have jeopardized his health in so doing.  And who is Magnús Skarphéðinsson, you may ask?

He is principal of the "Icelandic Elf School."  (Read about it here.)

Skarphéðinsson says that there are thirteen kinds of elves in Iceland, and that they aren't the same thing as the hidden folk; the hidden folk "are just the same size and look exactly like human beings, the only difference is that they are invisible to most of us. Elves, on the other hand, aren’t entirely human, they’re humanoid, starting at around eight centimeters."  His school offers certificate-earning programs on the subject of elves, but also "delves into the study of dwarves, gnomes, and trolls."  Because heaven knows we don't want to be ignorant about trolls, or we might get eaten by one while carelessly trip-trapping across a bridge.

Skarphéðinsson also says that there are gay and lesbian elves.  I'm probably indulging in unfounded speculation, here, but I bet that most of them are refugees from North Carolina.

I should mention at this point that Skarphéðinsson also offers courses in "auras and past-life regression."

Okay.  My first question was, is Skarphéðinsson kidding?  Or what?  There's part of all of this that sounds like he's pulling our leg a little.  But according to the article I read on Skarphéðinsson and his school, supposedly 54% of Icelanders believe in elves and the rest, and in fact public works projects are frequently altered, put on hold, or scrapped entirely if the proposed work looks like it's going to piss off the "invisible folk."  Construction of a big stretch of the Ring Road -- Iceland's main highway -- had to be halted temporarily while workers moved a big rock that supposedly housed a family of dwarves.

And honestly, who am I to criticize?  It's kind of a charming tradition, really.  Given the number of Icelanders who claim to have had encounters with the "shadow people," maybe there's something more to it than I realize.  I have a friend, also a writer, who swears she had some inexplicable experiences in a house that was reputed to be occupied by fairies -- and fictionalized the whole thing into a wonderful novel, called Away With the Fairies (which you can buy here).  The author, Vivienne Tuffnell, is in other respects a thoroughgoing skeptic, so maybe there's more to this legend than I'm seeing.

In fact, I can say with some certainty that if I ever return to Iceland, I will definitely take a class at the Icelandic Elf School.  It would be a proud day for me to hang up a certificate above my desk saying that I had successfully completed a course of study in elfology.  And I have, finally, learned my lesson, namely never to suggest that a particular belief is so silly that no one could ever consider it.

Dead sheep, live elves, and a stuck willy

Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, we've got our eyes on three stories from far afield.

Let's begin with a tragedy in Wales, and hope things get cheerier as we progress.

In our first story, we have reports that the Beast of Bont is at it again, so you might want to cancel that walking tour in the Cambrian Mountains.  (Source)

Sheep farmers in Pontrhydfendigaid, a small town near Aberystwyth, discovered last week that twenty sheep had been "massacred" in a spot near Devil's Bridge.  This immediately conjured up memories of past attacks, which reportedly have been going on since the 1970s, and have been attributed to a loathsome predator nicknamed "the Beast of Bont."

In this most recent attack, local resident Mark Davey and his partner Annette made the discovery.  "The whole area just stank of dead animals and was quite sickening," Davey told reporters.  "I could see that the inside of the animals had been ripped out and body parts were lying all around.  I thought it could have been foxes or badgers but it was just the increasing number of dead sheep that started the alarm bells ringing in my head.  As we walked further we saw several more sheep scattered closely together, again as though some large animal had attacked them.  We were getting quite scared and wondered what the hell was doing this."

Myself, I would have wondered to the extent that I'd have gotten right the hell out of there.

"Each time we saw them we thought that something had quite clearly attacked them because they looked like they had been ripped apart," Davey said.  "It was a very strange feeling when we saw the sheep because some of them were lambs with just half of their bodies, or just the rear or the back legs left on the field.  I could also see a small lamb which looked to me as if it had been carefully placed in the corner of some building ruins.  This one was untouched but it appeared that it had been put there for a reason - maybe to come back to it later."

Police say that the pattern of sheep-killings resembles others that have occurred in the area.

Despite periodic reports of "large, puma-like creatures" in the Cambrian Mountains, no one has been able to obtain any kind of reasonably reliable evidence to indicate what might be responsible for the killings.  Thus far, only sheep and goats have been attacked, but police have instructed locals to "be vigilant when outdoors."  That's putting it mildly.  If this had happened in my neighborhood, I might become vigilant to the point of never leaving my house again.  I'm just brave that way.


Of course, if you don't want to meet weird things away from home, you can always have the weird things brought to your doorstep.  This is the philosophy of Arní Johnson, an Icelandic Member of Parliament who decided to bring a boulder housing "three generations of elves" to his front yard.  (Source)

Johnson first ran into the boulder in a nearly literal sense, when he was involved in a serious car accident in January of 2010.  His car flipped, landing forty meters away from the highway, damaging it beyond repair -- but leaving Johnson completely unharmed.  Johnson decided that it couldn't just have been luck, so he started looking around for what could have saved him, and then he saw this great big rock.

Now, I've been to Iceland, and I can say with some authority that great big rocks are a dime a dozen.  Iceland itself seems, in fact, to be one great big rock, with a little bit of ice and grass to break up the monotony.  But this was no ordinary rock, Johnson said; no, it was the home of some elves, and the elves had saved his life.

"I had Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, a specialist in the affairs of elves from Álfagarðurinn in Hellisgerði, Hafnarfjörður, to come look at the boulder with me," Johnson said.  "She said it was incredible, that she had never met three generations of elves in the same boulder before.  She said an elderly couple lives on the upper floor but a young couple with three children on the lower floor."

My first question is: how do you become an elf specialist?  Do Icelandic universities allow you to major in elfology?  If so, how do you study them, being that even people who think they exist say that they don't exactly wait around for you to examine them closely?  Be that as it may, Johnson was tickled with what Jónsdóttir told him, and decided to have the boulder moved to his home in Höfðaból in the Westman Islands.  Jónsdóttir said that the elves were fine being moved, but that he had to do it right.  "(The elves) asked whether the boulder could stand on grass.  I said that was no problem but asked why they wanted grass.  ‘It’s because they want to have sheep,’ Ragnhildur replied."  So Johnson is having the boulder ferried across to his home, wrapped in sheepskin "so the elves are comfortable."

After the horrors caused by the Beast of Bont, you have to wonder exactly why the elves want to have sheep nearby.  But we're hoping that the elves have no ill intent, and the whole story will end happily.


And a happy ending is more than we can say happened for an adulterous couple in Kenya, who discovered during an amorous encounter that a curse by the woman's husband had left them stuck together.  (Source)

According to the story, the husband had gotten wind of his wife's cheating ways, and had hired a practitioner of black magic to cast a spell on the wife.  The next time the wife and her paramour went at it, the unfortunate man found that he had basically been making love to one of those Chinese finger-traps.

Once the couple realized that their hook-up had left them unable to unhook, they panicked, and their shouts of alarm attracted the attention of the police and an increasingly large crowd.  Finally the husband arrived, and after the adulterous man agreed to pay the husband twenty thousand shillings in reparations, a pastor was called in, who prayed over the couple, and the two were able to separate.  It is probably just my sordid imagination that pictures this as being accompanied by a sound like a cork being pulled from a wine bottle.

I do have to ask, however; do Kenyan pastors have special prayers for this kind of thing?  "O Lord, we beseech thee to call forth thy mighty powers, and help this sinner free his wang, that he might go forth and never more boink another guy's wife, for yea, I believeth that he hath learned his lesson."


So, those are our stories for today -- the sheep-eating Beast of Bont, transporting elf boulders, and adulterous men getting their willies stuck.  Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, we are constantly alert, bringing you only the finest quality journalism from the world of the weird.  "Ever vigilant," that's our motto.  That, and "Man, people believe some weird stuff, you have to wonder if we skeptics are justified in having any hope at all."  But that's kind of depressing, so we'll stick with "Ever vigilant."

What the frack?

Diane Tessman is at it again.  Yes, the woman who believes that clouds are camouflage for UFOs, who believes that organisms evolve, Pokémon-like, to obtain advanced powers, has now weighed in on another topic:

Hydrofracking.

If you're thinking, "Oh, this is gonna be good," you don't even know the half of it.  (Source)

Because it isn't, she said, Diane Tessman speaking; it's a superpowerful alien entity named Tibus who is speaking through her.  And boy, is Tibus annoyed with the way we've been treating Mother Earth.  He starts out, though, with a news bulletin meant to put us at ease:

 Star people, this is Tibus. I come to you in love and light.

I am smiling as I greet you, my star friends/co-workers! I am also smiling at a UFO report from North Carolina; a man was out looking for a good place to hunt (I hope we was sufficiently distracted by his UFO sighting and did not hunt), when he spotted a low flying rectangular craft with 4 amber lights. “Rectangular” is not aerodynamic but because of advanced propulsion (anti-gravity) methods, we can use rectangles, squares, tubes, and so forth. Usually, however, we like the grace and beauty of a saucer-shaped craft and have found we actually fly them more efficiently than the cumbersome-looking craft. I hasten to add that the craft this man saw belongs to a small group within Space/Time Intelligence, but not directly to any of those folk, nor their ethnic groups, who send messages to you through Diane.

Oh, good.  If they are operating within Space/Time Intelligence, I guess they're welcome to visit North Carolina.  If the craft was populated by gay aliens attempting to find a nice place to get married, however, they might want to try a different venue.

After assuring us that the UFOs we see are here on a peaceful scientific mission, and that their crews have no intention of strapping us to examining tables and implanting microchips in our skulls, Tibus/Diane goes on to the topic at hand: the natural gas industry.

Hydraulic fracking, a process which extracts natural gas, has added to the danger from the New Madrid Fault, to a huge degree. Old fashioned fracking was hurtful to Earth but not potentially catastrophic. However, modern hydraulic fracking creates a real earthquake danger and also gobbles up the water table over a vast area, right when earth needs every drop of her fresh water supply. What fresh water is not gobbled up, is left toxic and hopelessly contaminated.

So, Tibus, if we can't do natural gas extraction because hydrofracking is too dangerous, what do we do to find a source of energy?

Here is the answer: We offer Earth free energy, which was discovered by a human being, Nikola Tesla, so certainly humankind should benefit from it. Free energy was taken away from the human race very wrongly, by greedy (yes), humans who saw they could make lots of money through non-free forms of energy. We of Space/Time Intelligence now offer free energy again, freely.

Isn't that nice?  Free energy that's freely free!  Wouldn't that be freeing?  But how can we be sure that Tibus really knows what Tesla was up to, when he discovered free energy?

Tesla is with me and says that technically, alien races had discovered what he called free energy, eons before he did, but I respond to Tesla that he is being “too” conscientious, because we consider a new invention or creation to be brand new each time it is discovered by a different species on a different world. I remind him that there are wondrous ancient beings in the universe who have already discovered what we of Space/Time Intelligence have discovered, only eons before we did. Peel away the onion layers, and they are astoundingly endless. So, Tesla did discover free energy, which we use; it involves relatively simple anti-gravity techniques.

Oh.  Okay.  Simple anti-gravity techniques.  Since Tesla is right there with you, would you mind asking him how we're going to manage that?  The law of gravity, so far as I've noticed, seems to be strictly enforced in most jurisdictions.  But maybe that's just my perception because I'm stuck in the wrong layer of the Cosmic Onion.

The good news, though, is that we don't just have to rely on help from dead physicists in figuring all of this out: we also have the "God Cloud."  What, you might ask, is the God Cloud?

Some of you have asked about the God Cloud: It is a being, ancient and advanced, who offers to help. It is more ancient and advanced than any of us in Space/Time Intelligence. It is, for all intents and purposes, pure intelligence.

It traveled from a distant star cluster to help, and has “parked” near Earth. It is simply a stellar cloud of highly advanced particles of consciousness which/who function as ONE.

But how can the God Cloud, for all of its "advanced particles of consciousness," help us?

When the time is right (the micro-second when Earth reaches critical mass of enlightenment), it will throw its pure intelligence, pure enlightenment, into the electromagnetic field of Earth which will have just shifted (thus human minds will have just shifted upwards), and it will stabilize and enhance the new EM field on which human minds will function thereafter.

For those of you concerned if the God Cloud is committing “suicide” to do this, no it is not. It will remain a sovereign entity within the new EM field, and it will gather itself up as ONE, and leave when things settle down.

Whew.  I know I'm relieved.  I already had my hand on the Space/Time Intelligence Suicide Hotline.

So, anyway, that's today's hopeful message from the Land of Woo-Woo: we should stop hydrofracking because it pisses off Mother Earth, Nikola Tesla, and an alien named Tibus, but don't worry because free energy is just around the corner, not to mention an extraterrestrial super-intelligent cloud who is there to help us achieve a stable electromagnetic field of enlightened human consciousness.  I'm so glad we have Tibus around to advise us, aren't you? Maybe next time he could weigh in on such Universal Mysteries as why so many people these days seem to believe absurd, counterfactual nonsense.  I wonder what Tibus might have to say about that.

The power of vicarious experience

I find it curious how certain most of us are of our beliefs.  We all like to think of ourselves as basing our views of the world in reality; that we (and others who agree with us) are clear-headed, logical, perceiving the universe as it is -- and that because of that, our views won't change.

In reality, our attitudes are constantly shifting.  That even the most stubbornly doctrinaire amongst us can be pulled around unconsciously was just dramatically demonstrated by a lovely little experiment performed at Ohio State University.  (Source)

In this study, test subjects were given a passage to read, about a fictional character who was enduring adversity.  In one passage, the main character had to fight for his opportunity to cast his vote in an election; in another, a person is presented in a favorable light, and then at the end of the story is revealed to be a different ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation from the reader.  In each case, reading the story had a strong, and measurable, effect on the reader.  In the first instance, the test subjects who read the story about a man who overcame obstacles to participate in an election had a "significantly higher" likelihood of voting in the next election themselves; in the second, assessments given after reading the story resulted in more favorable attitudes toward the group in question, and a lower likelihood of stereotyping, as compared to a control group.

The researchers called this phenomenon "experience-taking."  We read a story, and in some way, we become the character about whom we are reading; we adopt his/her persona.  As a result, it becomes more appealing to do what the character does, and more difficult to stigmatize the members of the group to which the character belongs.

"Experience-taking changes us by allowing us to merge our own lives with those of the characters we read about, which can lead to good outcomes," said Geoff Kaufman, who led the study while he was a graduate student at Ohio State.  He is now a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College's Tiltfactor Laboratory. 

In each case, the effect was strongest when the story was told in first person, and when the main character was of a demographic most like that of the reader; for example, when the man who endured adversity to cast his vote was, like the test subject, a young male university student.  Third person stories, and ones where the demographic significantly differed from that of the reader, showed a lower -- but still measurable -- level of experience-taking.

"Experience-taking can be a powerful way to change our behavior and thoughts in meaningful and beneficial ways," said Lisa Libby, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University.  "(It is) powerful because people don't even realize it is happening to them.  It's an unconscious process."

The findings of the study appear online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and will be published in a future print edition.

What I find most interesting about all of this is how fluid our perception of the world is.  That memory is plastic, and highly unreliable, has been known for years; the rather alarming discovery that our senses are quite capable of overlooking the obvious followed suit soon after, with such classic experiments as the "Gorilla in the Room" video clip.  But all through this, many of us have clung like grim death to the idea that at least our convictions stay the same; we believe what we believe until we choose, deliberately, to change it.  Kaufman and Libby's experiment show that, in fact, our views of those around us are as mushy as the rest of our brain.

And all of this, of course, has significant bearing on the current kerfuffle over whether or not Mitt Romney bullied a kid in high school.  I'm not going to address the truth or falsity of the claim; predictably, the Democrats say he did it, the Republicans claim it's a slanderous falsehood.  Myself, I don't care.  The idea that a 65 year old man somehow has gone for fifty years with his attitudes about gays, bullying, and fair treatment unchanged is absurd.  We are all, all of the time, adjusting our beliefs based upon those around us, what we see, what we hear, and what we read.  Far from being a sign of flip-flopping -- that dirtiest of the f-words in the political arena -- shifting our stance based upon circumstances is inevitable, and universal.

To be up front: I'm no fan of Romney's politics, for the most part, and anyone who knows me will vouch for the fact that I'm very far from being an Ann Coulter-style apologist for conservatives.  But I much more care about what a political candidate says, does, and believes now than I do about an incident from five decades ago.  Those who focus on such things are implying a patent falsehood -- that humans don't, or can't, change.