Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos 
And yet! here we are talking about neuroplasticity. If psi has a day to get, it will get its day.
~~ Paul
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I suspect it will, but like previous scientific changes of heart, it will only happen because a lot of people bang on about it and get scoffed at!
Rupert Sheldrake (who is hopefully recovering from his ordeal) and others are needed to pick away at the orthodox scientific position, and ask questions such as just how it is that dogs seem to know when their owners are coming home, or just how it is that pigeons can be blindfolded, or even anaesthetised, and released several hundred miles away, but still find their way home. It needs Rupert to point out that even if pigeons have a magnetic sense, that is not enough to guide them home from an unknown place (a compass only helps if you know what direction home is).
My sense is that physicists are far more ready to discuss radical ideas - if anything, they are hailed for their imagination, even if the idea doesn't turn out. However, in the biological sciences I sense that there is a different atmosphere. Possibly the physicist Roger Penrose encountered the different culture head on when he wrote his books about consciousness (without even a word about Ψ). Even the idea that some DNA that does not code for proteins, but for RNA that has a direct catalytic role was considered heresy, because there was a 'dogma' that genes code for proteins, full stop!!
Possibly biological experiments can have too many extraneous factors - such as the placebo effect - that researchers are left with a permanent sense of unease that chunks of their work will turn out to be wrong - I don't know.
David