Thanks Rick,

I subscribed to the mail list. It seems a failure of imagination to be  
skeptical of everything though. I would hate to think as the review  
suggests that some of the sublime visions in biblical literature are  
nothing more than oxygen shortage.

Diana

Sent from my iPod

On Mar 23, 2010, at 5:15 PM, "Rickard A. Parker"  
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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 “we 
> re
>   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
>