Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

A technique, most often using hypnosis, to help people recall a previous life. For many years, hypnotism has been used as a tool to help people remember things that happened in their childhood. A few high-profile cases suggested that it could also be used to regress people back beyond their present life into a life…

Foundation cofounded in 1951 by the well-known trance medium Eileen Jane Garrett (1892-1970) and Congresswoman Frances Payne Bolton (1885-1977), who was its financial backer. It was to be a “nonprofit educational organization to support impartial scientific inquiry into the total nature and working of the human mind and to make available the results of such…

The subsection of physics (not recognized by the professional institutions) to which para- physicists subscribe. Paraphysicists are professionally qualified physicists who investigate claims of the paranormal in the belief that their expertise as physicists gives them a special ability to examine such claims. For approximately 100 years, there have been a number of physicists who…

Name given to the consideration of the most paranormal cryptozoology reports and to the paranormal world posited to contain them. Modern cryptozoology is largely confined to accounts of sightings of unknown species that exist in exotic environments, especially remote jungles and mountains or the middle of oceans and deep lakes. The major subjects of cryptozoological…

German chemist who worked to reform medieval medicine. Philipus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, had trained as a physician and surgeon and held degrees from several universities in Italy. He theorized that illness was not caused by an imbalance in an internal system of humors, as medieval practitioners believed but was…

Some curious fossilized footprints that were discovered during the 1930s in the bed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas, by Roland Bird, a field researcher for the American Museum of Natural History. Some of the prints were dinosaurian and dated to the Cretaceous period about 100 million years ago. Others looked almost human.…

The practice of telling a person’s character and fortune by interpreting the lines and undulations on the palm of the hand, also known as chiromancy or chirosophy. A version of this art is called podoscopy, where fortunes are read from the soles of the feet. The origins of palmistry go back to antiquity, there are…