Science
“It is the study of anomalies that drives science forward….The strange and compelling experiences that people have reported across the ages provide an important and fascinating field of study…We can only expand our knowledge of [human] functioning…and extend our theories of cognition by coming to understand the genesis of such experiences.”
- James Alcock, Professor of Psychology, York University
Our experience of life is never abstract. It is never divorced from feeling. Consciousness, indeed, is based upon feeling. It is the cognition of feeling. Any science that attempts to explain the human mind will be badly off course if it does so without according validity to sensations, perceptions, and feeling states rooted in the body.
As the study of emotion becomes ever more scientifically respectable, efforts must be made toward framing anomalous experience in this expanded context. Our fast-growing knowledge of the human animal can only benefit.