Dr. Larry Dossey The Power of Premonitions: How knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives Vs Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

From an interview with Dr. Larry Dossey: Your book sounds a lot like the bestselling book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. He says we can know something is going to happen and make accurate snap decisions without knowing why.
LD: You’re right. I love the examples Gladwell uses. Many of them are what I’m calling premonitions — firemen who leave a burning room before the floor collapses, without knowing why they are doing so; George Soros’s predicting world markets without rationally knowing why; Vic Braden, the famous tennis coach, who can predict double faults with extreme accuracy without a clue about how he does it. Gladwell regards this kind of knowing as a big fat mystery. He says we should “accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments….[W]e’re better off that way”. I don’t think we’re better off that way. Gladwell literally endorses ignorance, which I find baffling. He completely ignores research such as the presentiment experiments. The term “premonition” does not even appear in his book. There is a great deal of evidence — an entire chapter in my book — that can shed light on what Gladwell dismisses as a total mystery. Why he won’t go there is unclear to me. Like many other science journalists, he’s reluctant to acknowledge that consciousness can operate outside the present and beyond the body. Although I agree with Gladwell that there’s mystery in all this, it’s not as dense as he says. We know a lot about premonitions — their characteristics, what favors them, andwhat purposes they serve. Some outstanding scientists are willing to consider premonitions as an explanation for the kind of knowing that Gladwell describes. Among them is Paul Drayson, Britain’s science minister. In discussing Gladwell’s book Blink, Drayson says he has personally known in advance that something is going to happen. He says, “In my life there have been some things that I’ve known and I don’t know why…like a sixth sense.’” “Sixth sense” is a common term for premonitions.

Download the whole article – Questions and answers on The Power of Premonitions with Dr Larry Dossey

Listen to an interview with Dr. Larry Dossey about his book on premonitions (12 parts) – this is the 1st part – the rest you can follow on YouTube

5/5 - (3 votes)
Posted in #1 Blog On Speed Reading & PhotoReading, Summaries of Books, Good Books to Speed-Read, News, Research On Speed Reading and tagged , , , .