(HOST) A big fan of used bookstores as well as libraries, Vermont Humanities Council executive director Peter Gilbert found a fascinating book amidst the miscellaneous volumes on the for sale-shelf at Burlington's Fletcher Free Library. And it has given him and his family a lot to think about.

(GILBERT) The book, published last year, is called Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind by the late Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer. I bought it for a few bucks it because it related to a family dinner table conversation we had had just a week before. We were discussing whether we believed in ghosts. In short, the conclusion of several of us at least, was that we weren't so sure about ghosts, but we did believe that the human mind had remarkable abilities to understand and even communicate across great distances - abilities that science does not now understand; just because frauds and charlatans abound does not mean there's nothing to the countless credible incidents of extraordinary knowing whether they're called ESP, telepathy, intuitive knowing, paranormal phenomena, mind-matter anomalies, or distant viewing.

The book caught my eye in part because the cover noted that it contained forewords by Freeman Dyson, one of the world's most eminent theoretical physicists, and renowned psychologist Carol Gilligan, who has specialized in women's moral development. Their essays, which I read standing at the library checkout counter, assured me that the book wasn't just bunk.

Professor Dyson, in short, puts forth the hypothesis that ESP is real but belongs to a mental universe that is too fluid and evanescent to fit within the rigid protocols of controlled scientific testing. He doesn't claim that the hypothesis is true, only that it is consistent with the evidence and worthy of consideration.

These anomalous phenomena relate to learning across the board including, for example, the holistic theories of Gestalt psychology; complementarity in physics, in which two descriptions of nature may both be valid but cannot be observed simultaneously; and the mind-blowing notion in quantum physics of entanglement, which has confirmed that an electron in Tokyo that was once related to an electron now in London appears to compensate instantaneously for a change in spin of the London electron. Could that have something to do with how a person in Tokyo could know what someone in London is thinking ?

Professor Gilligan accurately calls Mayer's book an invitation to think . . . about the inexplicable powers of the human mind. It's exciting - terrifying, actually - to consider such paradigm-shattering notions. It's a personal and intellectual challenge to be open to the implications of countless credible examples of anomalous knowing that we can't explain. We know that the scientific method is committed to proof. But, the author observes, if you have to discount significant amounts of scientifically gathered data because they're inconsistent with your world view, you may, in fact, not be a careful scientist, but rather one blinded by that world view. After all, as Mayer notes, they laughed at Galileo, too. It just may be, as Hamlet tells his friend Horatio, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.