Can Other People Read Your Most Secret Thoughts?

This week I saw a press release announcing that The Amazing Kreskin was back. He bills himself as a mentalist, but when cornered says he's just an entertainer. The news item brought to mind some of the ways eCommerce technology is reading our thoughts. Here's a blog post from 2011 about the degree to which we're being watched by the machinery of the Internet age.

It Doesn't Require Mental Telepathy Any More

Magicians have always been fascinating to me, and no doubt to many others as well or there wouldn't be so many sold out magic shows in Las Vegas every week. Much of the magic is simply technique and trickery, illusion and misdirection. But what about the mind readers? How real is mental telepathy? Can one person read another's most secret thoughts?

Actually, now that we live in the Facebook age there's very little hidden any more about many of us. A 2011 UPI story stated, "The social networking site, whose profits come primarily from advertising, had been vague about its collection of tracking data. But it now acknowledges it can use cookies to create a 90-day log of where each of its members have gone on the Web after visiting a Facebook page, USA Today reports."

Privacy advocates want to stop this practice, but the ad agencies love it. It gives them the ability to target specific rifle shot ad messages to people who by their behavior have revealed their hot buttons.

This explains why the day after I was looking for a hat on eBay there appeared ads for hats on my Facebook page. What's scarier is that people are having their emails scrubbed for hot-button words so that ads can be thrown their direction via their browsers.

How much do the computers know about us? The UPI story goes into great detail on exactly how many details they own on us. The ad industry doesn't need mental telepathy to know who we are or what we're about. Our social media and Internet activity proclaims all.

The article is thought provoking and worth checking out. Be sure to take two minutes to watch the video, What Facebook knows about you.

Just a little something to think about. (And yes, I know what you're thinking.)

* * * *

EdNote: I do not know the most current policies and practices of Facebook, Amazon, Google and the like. I only know that they're better at mind reading than Kreskin.

The Mandela Effect: Is There Another You in a Parallel Universe?

This weekend a friend of mine asked if I noticed that "something has changed." I didn't understand the question. He went on to state that the world has changed in some very subtle ways and that if you weren't attuned to it you might not notice. He referred to it as The Mandela Effect.

Naturally I was curious. Google has answers for everything, so I inquired because inquiring minds want to know. Here's the first link I found, with twenty examples of the phenomenon.

Reading about The Mandela Effect brought to mind our seemingly eternal fascination with things inexplicable, from the Great Pyramids to flying saucers and UFOs. When I was young I was drawn to books like Frank Edwards' Stranger Than Science, and its sequels. The universe does have some rather baffling features, so it's only natural that our curiosity attracts us to that which appears inexplicable.

Films like The Matrix provide lingo with which we're able to talk about these things. When someone suggests that there's been "a glitch in the matrix" we have a mutual understanding of the concept that doesn't require any further explanation.

Magicians and mentalists have long known about the tricks our brain plays on us, hence they are able to pull sleights of mind that manipulate memory and sometimes unsettle us. In recent years neuroscience is just now catching up to what these mesmerizing professionals have been tapping into for ages.

So where did the term "Mandela Effect" come from? Obviously it could not have preceded Nelson Mandela so it's of fairly recent vintage as an name or title of a concept. It turns out that the relatively new tag originated with a blogger named Fiona Broome. She described the phenomenon as "what happens when someone has a clear memory of something that never happened in this reality." Ms. Broome proposes that it's not our memories that are faulty here. Rather, she suggests that there are alternate realities, parallel histories, and that our minds are crossing over through tears in the veil. For some, the Mandela Effect is a curiosity, and for others it's apparently becoming a quest.

Philosophers and mystics have long grappled with the nature of reality. How much of these current currents are just mind games? According to this article in The Sun, there are even scientists exploring the possibilities of parallel universes.

If you enjoy this kind of speculation, you might enjoy my story An Unremembered History of the World, which is the centerpiece of my book of short stories titled Unremembered Histories.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Maybe even more than you realize.