Coming across this link to an article and comments regarding the findings of ESP, and more specifically the teachings of ESP, my mind jumped back to a spot in our textbook regarding the thoughts centered around ESP. Our textbook shows scholarly information regarding ESP, does this article contradict it or simply state that the information is a waste of space? The article as well as the books state, ESP is an extraordinary claim and there is still yet to be extraordinary evidence to prove the theory. So do we have enough information to allow us to believe? According to surveys from Haraldsson and Houtkooper in 1991 and Greely in 1987, American adults seem to have some belief. These findings of the belief of ESP, as brought up in one of the comments on the article, may be due to pop culture through the media. Films, books, and stories are filled with super-natural findings. 
Has this had a major impact on the belief of the unknown? If we do believe the teachings are relevant that may lead us down a different path, but ESP being featured in our book is not there to let us know the truth behind it but further more the reasoning of the crazy phenomenons people seem to have. Illusory correlation, recalling striking evidence as coincidences and ignore the other events that may harm this thought, may be an explanation to this extraordinary claim of being able to "predict" the future. Is this an intensive enough explanation? Have you ever had ESP feelings whether they be through a dream or a feeling of an event that occurred? And back to the article, does this topic have the solid evidence to be printed in scholarly text books and given to students as useful information? Those may be questions for us to answer ourselves depending on the extent in which we believe in ESP.
strom393: February 2012 Archives
After reading the blog based off of nautre/nuture a strong question arised. How much blame do a childs parents really deserve, are their parents to blame? Where does the line stop? And what do we constitue it as, nature or nurture? This is always a conversation that will bring debate into full swing within a group of people. Whether its through nature or nuture your parents have had influence throughout your life. When reviewing this concept my thoughts constantly went to a story of nuture, or possibly nature, from my sisters childhood. We were sitting in the line at target and my sister around 5 at the time, Madison, continued to ask my mom if she could get this candy and that lipgloss and that pack of gum, my mom tended to be a push over in my younger years and let her continue to dish stuff on the belt which eventually led to the cashier and into the bag. The young boy behind us, approximately my sister's age, saw her greedy intentions and proceeded to ask his mom the same questions, of course replacing lipgloss with matchbox cars, but his mom being more strong willed than mine did not let him put a single item into their cart explaining that he already had gotten enough treats and toys for the day.
Growing up, in my family, the word no was never very strong and has led me to reality shocks throughout my high school and short college career. I would imagine that the young boy who was told no about 10 years ago, has had less of a culture shock during his years of maturity. I found an article reviewing the possibilities of spending habits being passed down from their parents to their kids. It brings up essential points in the argument of nature vs/ nurture showing the impact of a parents habits on their children. So this leads us back to the question, is my childhood of push-over, unconscious money spending parents to blame for my culture shock in my years of maturity or was this simply always bound to happen because of the nature of my mind?
