Eliot sighting:
In the most recent issue of Scientific American magazine (April, 2010,
p. 34) Michael Shermer's monthly column, "Skeptic," is entitled
"The Sensed-Presence Effect" (How the brain produces the sense of
someone present when no one is there.) The article starts with:
In the 1922 poem The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot writes, cryptically:
Who is the third who always walks beside you?/When I count, there
are only you and I together /But when I look ahead up the white
road/There is always another one walking beside you.
In his footnotes to this verse, Eliot explained that the lines “were
stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions [Ernest
Shackleton’s] ... that the party of explorers, at the extremity of
their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more
member than could actually be counted.”
Near the end of the article Shermer writes: The sensed presence may be
the [brain's] left-hemispere interpreter's explanation for
right-hemisphere anomalies.
Shermer also mentions mentions the book "The Third Man Factor." An
issue of his www.skeptic.com website has a review of the book. See
Skeptic » eSkeptic » Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/09-04-22/#feature
Regards,
Rick Parker
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