I’d like to alert everyone I know to a vital new voice (new to me, at least):  Julia Mossbridge.  Here’s what she says about herself:

“I’m a Research Associate in the Dept. of Psychology at Northwestern University. My background is in neuroscience and perceptual psychology (esp. auditory temporal perception and perceptual learning). My current work is in cross-modal perception, sex differences, and physiological bases of working memory. As scientists go, I’m unusually open to spirituality, as long as the approach is pragmatic and non-dogmatic.”

Mossbridge recently published a remarkable paper (with Patrizio Tressoldi and Jessica Utts) that has drawn unusual media attention.  They demonstrated with meta-analysis a robust effect:  emotionally significant events that will soon transpire in the future, but that cannot in any way be rationally predicted, can nevertheless be responded to implicitly by people at a subtle, physiological level.  Various indications of arousal can be seen to increase prior to the event, as if the person is unconsciously apprehending the coming thing and beginning a response to it.

Mossbridge is a bold scientist to put forth this finding.  I hope it does not do her too much professional harm.  On the positive side, she may be doing our science a lot of good.

Her thoughts are worth following.  First, you may be interested in her book:  Unfolding.  Here she shows a scientist’s carefulness of thought combined with a mystic’s sensibility, and gently teaches ways to think about one’s own spiritual depth, and ways to nourish it.

In Her blog, she displays the continuing adventure that can come from not artificially separating the research one does in the laboratory from the more existential research one does in pursuing the implications of new spiritual assumptions.  I think you will find her thoughts as stimulating as I do.