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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 1782853" data-attributes="member: 177">I'm sorry, but these days we can measure brain activity.  We have machines that allow us to watch brain activity in nearly real-time!  The old saw that we don't use some large portion of our brain is myth.  I imagine it probably started with cases of people with massive brain injury still miraculously managing to survive and lead something akin to a normal life.Don't believe me?  <a href="http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articleID=000B077E-AD46-1047-AD4683414B7F0000&catID=3&topicID=3" target="_blank">Ask the Experts!</a>Now as for psychics solving crimes...If you pick up a set of tarot cards, or runes, or any other divination tool, and do a casting, what you get is a set of symbols and relationships.  It is then up to the caster to figure out how those relate to a person's life.  But the symbols are vague, so that rarely to they actively clash with the person's experience, and most are flexible enough to be relevant in some way to amost everyone at any time.And that's the key.  Tarot and runes and other divination tools are useful because they make you think about what's going on, and reinterpret what you are looking at from another angle.  It isn't that they predict the future, so much as they make you re-examine the facts and relationships around you.I am strongly tempted to say that psychics work similarly, if they really work at all.  I've not seen any study that says that psychics are any more effective than a Magic 8 Ball.  But if they do work, it is probably not so much that they solve the case as that they lead the investigators to look at the case diffferently, thus bypassing the normal mental ruts everyone finds themselves in.  They become willing to look in places they'd otherwise not consider, and so on.  If so, they'd still be a useful tool, but not because they can actually see the future, or read auras, or what have you.</blockquote>

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