Gifted

Chapter Thirty

Fredrick

It is quite late in the evening now, and I still have not begun our reading for tomorrow’s class. Instead of reading the chapter from Physiological and Psychological Adaptation: An In-Depth Examination into People with Special Abilities, I stare glumly out my second floor window. From my building, located right at the south edge of campus, I have the faintest view of the river. It is not helping curb my procrastination.

Finally, I focus on the book propped open on my knees as I recline on my bed, willing myself to beginning reading Chapter Nine—Mental Abilities: The Mechanics of Psychokinesis, Telepathy, Precognition, and Power-Sensing. Slowly, tediously, I begin to read, taking notes here and there as I go along:

Introduction

In this next chapter, you will learn about the abilities of psychokinesis (the ability to manipulate physical matter with the mind), telepathy (the ability to receive and transmit thoughts between two or more separate minds), precognition (the ability to perceive future events before they occur), and power-sensing (the ability to distinguish those with powers from those without).

Mental abilities are particularly fascinating, as they directly involve the human brain, perhaps the most complex system within the entire body—if not the entire world (or even universe, perhaps). The brain controls thousands of different functions in the body, from those involuntary actions like breathing and the heartbeat, to such voluntary actions as moving your arm to grab a ball from the ground.

Concerning special abilities, the brain acts no differently: Psychokinesis involves the primary motor cortex and the somatosensory system, using these two regions within the cerebral cortex to manipulate the external environment in a manner that is still not fully understood; telepathy likewise uses the primary motor cortex and the somatosensory system to create a form of passive psychokinesis in order to connect with the target’s mind; precognition engages the visual cortex and the somatosensory system to recall all subconscious impressions and fragments of information the subject may not have actively realized they were receiving, and then configures them into a coherent image or idea upon the application of an intuitive catalyst; power-sensing is activated primarily within the olfactory bulb of the forebrain (also called the frontal lobe) when the chemical 'bibelot' emitted in the sweat of powered persons—which, curiously, smells faintly of citrus to those who can sense it—is inhaled through the receiver’s nose, and a more detailed picture of their abilities comes when simultaneously touching the skin of the target, in a kind of passive telepathy.

Mental abilities are wonderfully intriguing: They dazzle us as we wonder at what causes them to happen, what mechanism brings forth this power within us. These abilities teach us, with each new experiment, the workings of our own brain, whether we are powered or not.

Psychokinesis

The following describes an experiment which took place on 24 November, 2010, at 8:30 a.m., at Paris’s Institute of Parapsychology: Pierre Trey, twenty-two, of Tula, a suburb nineteen kilometers outside of Paris, lies inside of a large machine. For the purposes of the experiment, he has been placed inside an fMRI unit (a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging system, which uses a weak magnetic field to momentarily align the polarity of the nuclei of the atoms within his brain; when they return to their previous polarities, a faint electrical pulse is given off, which the machine interprets to form an image of the functioning brain), which will monitor the blood flow, in real-time, to various areas of his brain, thus tracking which areas of his brain are used for certain tasks, and the sequence in which they are activated—both of which are important if we are to understand how precisely the phenomenon of psychokinesis works within the brain.