[ExI] heaves a long broken psi

[Damien Broderick]

On 1/24/2010 3:01 PM, Stefano Vaj wrote:

> Much more perplexing and anedoctical sound the stories about drawing
> the blueprints of a foreign secret base, etc.

Eaxctly. I've had a lot of this directly from the scientists and 
military personnel in the now disbanded STAR GATE program, and it's 
hair-raising stuff. (And I say that as a largely bald guy.) An enormous 
amount about the process is now known, including a lot of the problems 
associated with it. As far as I can model it, the process is something 
like allowing the mind to meander through one's stockpile of images, 
some of which are then highlighted and reshaped by whatever this 
capacity is (I have no idea what its vector could be). It seems very 
visual and haptic, in that viewers sketch and report images, homing in 
on gestalts of the scene they are trying to apprehend. Sometimes their 
own evaluation of what they've "seen" turns out to be wrong, yet key 
elements of their drawings and reports stand out enough for blinded 
judges to identify which of four or five possible targets most closely 
matches the reported data. None of this is especially surprising (except 
the fact that it happens at all) because a lot of psychology experiments 
have shown that this is how memory works too, by construction rather 
than xerox copying.

("So why aren't they rich? Why was STAR GATE shut down?" Because psi is 
unreliable and skittish. If I can write award-winning fiction, why 
aren't I rich? Beats the hell out of me, it's just so wrong. And, you 
know, the Manhattan Project wasn't exactly discussed every day in the 
New York Times during WW2. For most of its tenure STAR GATE was highly 
classified, funded for some 20 years with annual reviews by high-level 
assessors; when some leaks started, and the story looked about to come 
out, the government probably had no option but to kill it publicly, and 
salt the corpse with ridicule. --But we know the government and military 
of this great nation would never do anything like that, don't we, children?)

Damien Broderick