Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

A theory pertaining to Noah’s Flood that attributes certain geological features of the earth to this specific Deluge. Stories that describe a universal deluge that obliterated mankind and changed the earth’s surface are found in many religions. The best known are the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, and the story of Noah in Genesis.  

A system for understanding the human mind developed by well-known 20th-century science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986). Hubbard speculated that the true human being (which he termed the The-tan, analogous to the soul of Greek philosophers) inhabits the body. Hubbard taught that the natural ability of the The-tan to express itself positively in the…

Located off the southeastern coast of Japan, it is considered to be a Japanese equivalent of the Bermuda Triangel Like its parallel region in the Atlantic Ocean, it is supposed to be a section of the ocean that periodically swallows planes and ships without a trace usually before they have a chance to put out…

A simple device used to measure psychokinetic power. It was invented by the Count de Tromelin at the beginning of the 20th century. It is similar in operation to the Biometer developed by Hyppolite Baraduc just a few years earlier. It consisted of a paper cylinder with crosspiece of straw that revolved on a fine…

Often shortened to DOP, a claim for eyeless sight, whereby blind or blindfolded people are said to have the mysterious ability to read or recognize and describe colors without using their eyes. Sometimes the ability is said to be clairvoyance, but usually the claim is that parts of some people’s skin, especially fingertips and toes,…

Spirits beneath the status of gods and subject to them. Belief in such spirits has existed in all religions throughout history, but not all imagined them to be evil. In ancient Greece, for example, the word daimon meant a divine power, usually an individual protector who intervened between the gods and mortals. During the Hellenistic…

A number of bones uncovered in the summer of 1856 by quarry workers removing limestone from a pit in the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf, Germany. The bones were discovered in a small cave about 18 meters (about 60 feet) above the river, and some of them were saved for a local scientist named J. K.…

A fictitious, large, New World ape. The discovery of the previously unknown mountain gorilla in 1903 set the stage for the acceptance of reports by oil geologist Franqois de Loys in 1920 that he had discovered an ape in the hinterlands of Venezuela. The importance of the discovery was underscored by the fact that no…

Out-of-body experience that are associated with near-death events. People who have been resuscitated from cardiac arrest or have had life- threatening accidents have later made graphic claims that they have floated upward into a second body and were able to observe what was happening to their physical body on the bed below. Because of recent…