There was nothing very interesting in Katherine P. Rankin’s
study of sarcasm — at least, nothing worth your important
time. All she did was use an M.R.I. to find the place in the brain
where the ability to detect sarcasm resides. But then, you probably
already knew it was in the right parahippocampal gyrus.
What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the
smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite,
requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social
relations: figuring out what others are thinking. Those who lose
the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal
dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankin’s study, just
do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, “Nice
weather we’re having.”
Michael Persinger is a neuropsychologist at Canada's Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. His theory is
that the sensation described as "having a religious experience" is merely a side effect of our bicameral brain's
feverish activities. He has attempted to create experiments to show that when the right hemisphere of the brain
is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, and then the left hemisphere is called
upon to make sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind generates what is felt as a 'sensed presence.'
Many of Persinger's studies detail the reactions that people have when their temporal lobes are stimulated with complex magnetic fields. Some of the subjects experience a 'sensed presence' in the form of the deity from the culture that they were raised in. They see the God (or spirits associated with their God - the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, etc) that they believe in. Others have had experiences that mimic the feeling that one would have during alien/UFO visitation - these people tend to be more agnostic.
In 2003 the BBC arranged for Prof. Richard Dawkins to be a subject in one of Persinger's experiments.
There are sites on the net that claim to
teach the ability, there's an International Remote Viewing
Association that even has conferences (there's one
starting on October 19th, apparently), the US government has funded
research in it (in the 1970's), we've even had customers buy
our mind machines to help them with remote viewing and claim great
success. I've never had any type of experiences that are anything
like remote viewing - and I'm not sure that I believe that it is
even possible - but I'm open to the idea.
What is it? I think a simple explanation for it is just the ability
for an individual to descibe locations not yet visited. The CIA and
the US Army spent millions of dollars on researching remote viewing
and other parapsychological activities and dubbed it 'Star Gate'. They began the program in 1970
(then called SCANATE - good thing they changed the name to
something that sounded cooler) at the Stanford Research Institute
in Menlo Park, Ca. This program continued in different forms using
both soldiers and civilians who were believed to posess natural
psychic abilities for over 24 years.
The remote viewing program was shut down by the CIA in 1994 because
they were convinced that remote viewing was of no practical value
to the intelligence community.
What is a sketpic supposed to believe? (That's a trick question)
There is so much controversy surrounding the people in these
programs, the programs themselves, the data from the programs, etc
etc etc - that there really isn't anything to go off of.
Unfortunately there have been no peer reviewed studies that prove
that remote viewing is a reality. darn. Research the links below
and see what you think.
Tor Wagner from Columbia University (and colleagues) used an fMRI
study to what parts of the brain are activated when patients
experience the placebo effect.
Click here to listen to an audio recording of Wagner
discussion the team's findings.
Prof. Olaf Blanke and his colleagues from the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at EPFL in Switzerland have been doing research on the neural-correlates of out-of-body-experiences since at least 2002. This new study is very unusual, as they claim to be able to produce an out-of-body-experience when the user of special goggles is shown a projected image of themselves while being poked with a stick.
Out-of-body experiences are most common in people who endure intense meditation practices, experience sleep paralysis, and following certain types of head injuries. Research such as this strives to discover exactly how the brain creates the out-of-body-experience sensation.
It is arguable whether these experiencies re-produce bona-fide NBE's, but it is an interesting effect nonetheless.
NewScientist just posted a video to YouTube featuring Olaf's group inducing out-of-body-experiences:
The New York Times just published an
article in their science section about 'priming effects'.
Psychological priming happens when subconscious stimuli can affect
our conscious choices. They discuss a few experiments, related
neuroscience research and more.
Neuropsychology 
