randy faustino

Empathy is the “intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.” But claims exist that some individuals take this innate human capacity a step further into the paranormal, and are able to precisely synchronize their emotional state with that of another person, or alternatively, project their own emotions onto the psyche of others around them. This is distinct from telepathy, in which an individual is believed to literally read another person’s thoughts, much as one would read this article. Paranormal empaths would be individuals who are able to forcibly alter someone else’s emotional registry. Can any evidence of such a phenomenon be found?

Human beings have evolved a highly sophisticated capacity to receive and process information from their surrounding environment. While most of us take our traditional five senses for granted, there are individuals who function with fewer than five, yet what they are able to achieve with the senses they do possess borders on a precociousness that seems superhuman. Take for example the case of Ben Underwood. Born with a form of cancer that necessitated complete surgical removal of his eyes at the age of 2, Ben learned how to see without sight using human echolocation. Similar to the ability of bats and dolphins, he was able to gain detailed information about his immediate environment using a series of audible clicks that served as a type of sonar. A battery of tests determined that his hearing had not increased in sensitivity or range; in fact, his audible range was not distinguishable from sighted human beings. What had changed was his ability to process the sounds he heard to provide information about the

Sometimes the things that go bump in the night are more terrifying if they’re not in your closet. It is estimated that there are hundreds of undiscovered species out in the wild, but the stories that captivate the most interest describe creatures that are the most elusive… and sometimes dangerous. Where mainstream science is concerned, some of these monsters are often an undiscovered species that have branched off from the main trunk of their evolutionary kin and have remained hidden by virtue of the fact that human beings have not explored their habitat. The discovery of many varieties of marine life that exist in the depths of the world’s oceans fall into this category, and quite often look like creatures that would terrify the regular person outside the context of marine biology. As well, certain tropical regions of the world are recognized as biodiversity hotspots that contain hundreds to thousands of species of uncharacterized microfauna. So while a new species of sea plankton is not as sensational as a fanged

Fans of fictional characters such as Cyclops from the X-men, or Sookie Stackhouse from TrueBlood will appreciate the fantastic human ability to generate light, whether as concussive optic beams, or ambient mystical flashes. Nothing quite this spectacular exists in the real world, but humans may have evolved a subtle, but complex system of light detection and generation beyond what is normally expected. Light detection is an expected characteristic in biology. Vision and photosynthesis are the most common manifestations of this ability, but there is now evidence that some of the molecular machinery related to sight can be found deep within the body, without an immediately apparent evolutionary rationale as to why it would be in tissues other than in the eyes. In a series of experiments on a species of eyeless fish, animals exposed to light consistently demonstrated avoidance behavior, termed negative phototaxis, despite the fact that they had no eyes. Maybe this ability to detect light within the body can be related to the notion that the body emits