The study of telepathy using psilocybin, the study of the skin "vision" of Rosa Kuleshova and the mystic in the creation of artificial intelligence in the USSR. Conversation with a cyberneticist and leading specialist in the field of biophysics of vision M.S. Smirnov.

Translated with Google Translate

Mikhail Sergeevich Smirnov is an amazing old man. In the late fifties, he, along with Michael Bongard, became one of the fathers of the theory of artificial intelligence. And then for two decades he was the leading authority among physicists and physicians engaged in the study of the paranormal. There were several laboratories in the Soviet Union that dealt with these issues until the 1980s, when the press made the topic unequivocally controversial. However, even before perestroika, most physicists, for irrational reasons, refused to believe the results of these studies, which raised unsolvable questions. It was almost impossible to publish these results in academic journals, and their authors (including prominent physicists, for example, Academician Kobzarev) were ostracized by their colleagues. Mikhail Sergeevich - a very good person and a scientist of utmost honesty - has long been philosophical about this and talks about those experiments only if asked.

The mansion of Mikhail Sergeevich Smirnov is hidden in the side streets near Chistye Prudy. At first glance, it is impossible to guess that someone lives in this house: it seems that this is some kind of former stable, warehouse, or just an abandoned building, in the place of which some office center will soon be erected. You ring the bell - and you do not believe that they will open it to you. But after a while a stirring is heard behind the shabby wooden door, and the eighty-year-old spirit of this house, a researcher of clairvoyance and poltergeists, appears on the threshold. In the atmosphere of this otherworldly abandonment, at first I want to accept Mikhail Sergeevich himself as a messenger of some mystical spheres - but after talking with him, you see a typical physicist of the sixties with very sober scientific attitudes, not at all inclined to play esotericism, but on the contrary, inclined to subject it doubt and check.

In his apartment, even by the smell, you immediately feel that a hermit scientist lives here. Here are collected all the interesting books that were in the Union before perestroika. Various rare stones brought from mountain expeditions. Some funny branches and twigs, bizarrely bent in the form of mermaids and dragons. An excellent collection of stereo slides - you look with two eyes through an optical device like binoculars and in the same second you immediately find yourself in the dazzling volumetric mountains. From the refrigerator Mikhail Sergeevich takes out several tiny pieces of cheese - of different types. Several dozen more samples of cheese breeds are stored in the freezer. There is a note on the table with some strange letters, icons and colons. "Calculating chances?" I ask. Mikhail Sergeevich shyly removes the piece of paper from the table: “I try to record what has happened in the last hours. Otherwise, it flies out of my head, "he explains," several events in memory merge into one, and then you no longer know what was and what was not. "

Much becomes clear from the stories of Mikhail Sergeevich: where did the Strugatskys' novels come from, what is the basis of the dispute between physicists and lyricists, how the type of consciousness was born in which not only we, but all our computers, telephones, and cameras still live. He speaks very slowly, with huge pauses, carefully thinks over every word, always refrains from evaluations and in general from emotions: he, like a real scientist, knows how to express himself only by facts. Sometimes his story resembles a science fiction novel, sometimes - a lyrical author's song. Sometimes the incredibleness of what he is talking about simply does not fit into the head - and sometimes everything is suddenly touchingly familiar, as if your own grandfather was telling.

Strange boy

I sat at some lectures, read textbooks and realized that I was still completely out of work. I feel that this thick book chews everything up to the details (it was "Analytical Geometry"). But I do not understand. I open the textbook - I understand this phrase, I understand this, I understand this, but I don’t understand the entire paragraph. I reread it again - I understand all the phrases, but I don’t understand a large piece. I decided that I still want to do something useful. I went to the Steinberg Astronomical Observatory, which was not far from my house - I was then living in Krasnaya Presnya. And he said: “Here I am a first year student of the Faculty of Physics. Do you have something to do for a dunno like me. " They gave me this case. I looked through many hundreds - I think even counting thousands - of photographic plates on which there were images - in the form of small dark specks - of the starry sky. They told me: “This speck is such a star that is variable. But this, this, this, this - remember and draw your location on a piece of paper. These are stars that constantly shine. And you will compare this variable with these stars by eye and, on some subjective scale, evaluate the brightness of a variable star. And then we will build graphs of the dependence of the brightness of the star by the variable from time". I asked: "Do you really need this?" "It is necessary, it is necessary." That academic year I passed only astronomy. And he failed all the other exams. There was an excellent student at school - but here I don't understand, that's all.

Young Mikhail Sergeevich did a lot of chemistry - or rather, not so much chemistry as ordinary children's pyrotechnics: he made rockets from saltpeter and sulfur found on railway tracks, heated something in a test tube to get stinking hydrogen sulfide, which caused great indignation among neighbors in a communal apartment. These classes were interrupted due to a lung disease: “The doctors said: have you been doing chemistry? Stop immediately. This is deadly for you. You have brought yourself to tuberculosis with this harmful chemistry. Well, okay, I looked around, saw that there were stars above me, and began to study astronomy. Of course, my mother did not have the money to have some real astronomical instruments, but you can make a very good telescope out of spectacle glasses, cardboard and paste. At least not worse than Galileo's.

After school, Mikhail Sergeevich entered the physics department, and after completing the first course in 1941, he was sent to fight in the Yoshkar-Ola region. There a bunk fell on his head. Or maybe it was an overstrain of the thyroid gland - in any case, it became extremely difficult to work. It was necessary to dig dugouts in the 30-degree frost, but the shovel was getting heavier and heavier: “I said that I was doing something bad, my company foreman. He also said: “Something I see, you have become so dead. You know what, in an hour a few of our soldiers will go to the medical unit, because they obviously have some kind of fever, and they also get sick. Here you go with them. " I went, and I remember that tears were running down my face, because these guys are very dangerously ill, they had pneumonia, which then did not know how to properly treat, there were no suitable antibiotics. They go and chat merrily. And I try to keep up with them, but my legs do not move as quickly as theirs. "

After lying in the hospital for several days, Mikhail Sergeevich was demobilized. He says that before that, a commissioner came to the hospital, who was supposed to send everyone back to the front. "And then he asked:" And what are you holding? " The doctors are whispering something in his ear, and I understand what they are talking about: the doctors think I'm crazy. I didn’t mind that, because I understood that if I’m a nutcase, then it’s not for me to judge. "You can't do anything - after all, it is clear that he is not good for anything, only skin and bones are left of him." And they wrote: the fourth article of the schedule of diseases, which means - schizophrenia, paraphrenia, paranoia. This group of diseases is united by one article "

Mikhail Sergeevich was released from this diagnosis only fifteen years later, for which he had to lie for a while for examination in a psychiatric hospital. “I had to free myself from this diagnosis in order to get to the mountaineering camp, because psychos are not taken to the mountaineering camp either. I went to the psychiatrist, who looked at me very suspiciously: “Tell me, please, did you come to our clinic like that? It's very cold now, and you are almost naked. " I said: "Well, I am so trained, I am not cold." And then the doctor began to talk to me in such a way that, I see, he wants to say something, but somehow he cannot get it out. Finally I realized what he needed: “Oh, you cannot make an outpatient diagnosis, that I am healthy, you think that for this I will need to lie down in your clinic, and that I will not agree with this - so I agree! That's what I came for ”. "Oh, so - then everything is all right." I had fun there. A week later, the doctors figured out that I was not their patient.

The diagnosis was removed, and after that I went in for mountaineering for a number of years, and then my wife, already deceased, told me: “You know, Misha, I can't stand it anymore. Too many of your company have remained in the mountains. They died there. And every time when you are not, I strain - you see that when you then return from the mountains, all this my stress falls out on you. " "I see, so what's the matter?" “So that's it. Either you stop going to the mountains, or let's get divorced. " "But what a question, well, I will not go to the mountains as a climber." After that, my wife, and I, and my children, and other friends of all sorts for many years went mountain tourists in the Caucasus. My wife did not mind this, and she herself, when her legs were dragged, walked with us, and let me go on tourist expeditions. Even one. "

Mikhail Sergeevich studied well at the Physics Department, but somehow strange - sometimes he suddenly stopped understanding the simplest things from the textbook, sometimes for no reason at all he flunked exams: “I then suffered from terrible insomnia, which began while still in the army. And somehow it so happened that when my period of the most acute insomnia came, it was time for the winter exams. I remember how I broke down. I took a ticket, wrote everything I needed, logical formulas, came to the teacher, he said: well, show what you wrote here, well, well, well, now tell me. I tell, I tell I tell you, then - hop! - and I got jammed. “Why did you stop,” asks the astonished teacher. He sees that I understand everything. I said: "I have ceased to understand what I have written here." "But you wrote everything correctly, so you understand." “When I was writing, I understood, but now I don’t understand.” "And what, can't you tell it further?" "No I can not". “Okay, let's put it off. Take your record book and, as you can, come. " As a result, I had to take an academic leave, and I graduated from the university a year later than my fellow students, but with honors. "

How does a person think?

“Mishka, hello, I haven't seen you for a hundred years and haven't even heard of you. What are you doing now?" I said: “Here I am making an anode battery of thermoelements for powering the Rodina battery receivers. So that without a vibration transducer, but just so that a thermoelectric battery would give one hundred volts. " "But that takes a thousand elements." “I figured out how to do it and now we are doing it. And you what do you do?" I ask Mika. And he answered me with a question to the question: "Bear, tell me, would you like to know how a person thinks?" I said: “Well, of course, it's very interesting to know how he thinks. But are there any ways to find out? " Mika said, "I think there is." "And which ones?" "Let's start by studying the vision of the frog." "But the vision of the frog is one thing, and the man is completely different." “Why do you think that other - the mechanisms of thinking, I think, are about the same as that of a frog, that of an earthworm, that of a monkey, that of a man. After all, there are some kind of nervous systems. " “Okay, frog vision. And what will it give you? " “Here's what. The frog's eye can be irritated in ways that are quite adequate for the frog itself. The frog's eye can be irritated with light of different spectral composition to see if the frog can distinguish colors, whether it recognizes colors. "How does she say about it?" “So you have to stab her - you can't do anything. We will get to the optic nerve, we will apply electrodes to this optic nerve, and then on the oscilloscope we will see what electrical goes along this nerve ”. "Will it help?" "Should help."

At the university, Mikhail Sergeevich made friends with Mika Bongard (full name Michael Moiseevich Bongard-Polonsky). This man later became one of the brightest scientists of his time: his name is well known not only to physicists and biologists, but even to linguists and programmers. Legends circulated about him: they said that "soon Mika Bongard will prove to us that a machine can think: it will open a window in its stomach and show all its gears." Together with him, in the same laboratory, Mikhail Sergeevich worked for many years, trying to answer one of the main scientific questions: how does a person think? It all started with the frog: scientists tried to understand the mechanisms of the brain, relying on the simplest reactions of the frog's eye. Then the world's first electronic computers came to the rescue, of which there were only three in Moscow at that time. Starting from the basics, by the steps Bongard and Smirnov taught these machines to distinguish between the letters A and B, cats and dogs. Then they began to write the first programs for doctors and geophysicists: “The doctors who looked at radiographs and all kinds of other analyzes, they were too often mistaken. Just like the geologists who looked into the instruments they lowered into the drilled wells and said, “Most likely oil. And here, probably, water ”- they too often made mistakes. And when they used the programs that came out of our basement, there were several times fewer errors. "

But, doing these utilitarian things, friends Bongard and Smirnov did not forget about their main goal: to understand how a person thinks. And one day they had such an idea: to write a program that would completely reproduce a person's thinking, based on his main needs and behavior. The program was codenamed "Animal". This "Animal", a small figure on a two-dimensional chessboard, had to move on it as a human would do. Well, for example, he is experiencing, say, a feeling of hunger. It should be measured by a certain number in a memory cell - a number that increases over time. And until the Animal finds something edible on one of the cages, it cannot do other things. And as soon as it is saturated, the figure is reset - the feeling of hunger is equated to zero. And so gradually, step by step, friends began to teach the Animal to evaluate the world around them, recognize and classify images, analyze, draw conclusions, build the simplest statements - in a word, they were engaged in what has now grown into a whole field of science called "artificial intelligence". Bongard's book The Problem of Recognition, published in 1967, was translated in the USA and is still well known to specialists.

Then mysticism began: after working on the program for five years, Bongard and Smirnov thought about whether to continue doing this. What if she falls into the hands of the "powerful of this world"? What if they start using to use it for their utilitarian purposes? In the end, they decided not, while the development of the program is at such a stage that none of the "mighty of this world" will be able to figure it out. Even with the help of other scientists. Therefore, the work continued.

It was in the spring of 1971. And in the summer of the same year, Bongard and Smirnov were going on vacation: “I said:“ As usual, I will go to the mountains with my family, and there we will be engaged in tourism. And you, Mika, where are you going? " And Mika answered me - slowly, clearly, weighing his words: “You know, Mishka, we have planned where our company will go this summer. But it's a strange thing - now I'm 71 years old, every year I went to the mountains, starting from 48 years old. And now for the first time I don’t want to go to the mountains ”. Then I resolutely said to Mika: “If you don’t want to go to the mountains, then you don’t have to go to the mountains.” Mika thought and replied: “You know what, perhaps you're right. I have already applied for a vacation, I will take it back. " "And when and how will you rest?" “You know, Mishka, I'm working so well right now, I don't want to go on vacation now. I’ll work, and in winter I’ll take two weeks off and go skiing. ” I put a point and turned to my notebook. I realized that now the conversation was over for him, turned to my notebook and worked. Two or three days later, remembering our conversation on this topic, I turned to him and asked: "Mick, and Mick!" "Well, what do you want?" "Did you take your vacation application back?" "No, I didn't." Point. "Why didn't you take it?" He said just as briefly: "We must go." And turned to his notebook. What could I do? It's up to him to decide. "

In early August 1971, Mika Botgard died in the mountains of the Pamirs. He walked in conjunction with the climber Oleg Kulikov, they slipped on the ice slope - a canopy, but the ice was very smooth - fell off this slope and flew down the vertical 500 meters, and 800 meters down the slope and flew to the bottom of the valley already dead.

“So for Mickey Bongard, work on The Animal ended. I tried to work on this topic for several more years, but somehow it didn't work out for me. It went with my younger friend, who in the last year of Mika's life was his graduate student - such was Ilya Losev, now he lives in the United States. From time to time Ilya got interesting results, and then he came and said to me: "You know, Mikhail Sergeevich, I can no longer work on this topic." "Why?" “Every time I manage to get even a small, imperceptible result in this topic, an accident happens in my family. This has happened so many times that I cannot consider it accidental. I can not". But a lot of the "Animal" remained in my head, a lot. And - we even talked about this with Mika Botgard, who was still alive - the relationship between the future animal and the programmer turns out to be strikingly similar to the relationship postulated in different religions, the creator and the intelligent creations of this creator. "

Skin vision

Bongard insisted that pure experiments in telepathy could not be done, because there was no good lot that would determine the sequence of assignments. And if the lot is bad, then by what the subject knows about the results of previous experiments that can be discovered, he will be able to guess what will happen next. Why not a good lot? Because that takes a real random sequence. Bongard turned the conversation off to the fact that there are no real random sequences, and therefore it is impossible to make a pure experience in telepathy. Bongard asked a straightforward question: "How much do you bet for the fact that telepathy is?" What are the fair bets of two literate scientists in this dispute? “So I know, Mishka, that you are for the fact that telepathy can be and is, but I insist that there is no telepathy. It seems to me that fair rates in our dispute will be as follows: I am betting a million against a penny! " I said, “My God! One against ten to the eighth power! "

At one time they talked and wrote a lot about Rosa Kuleshova, but few people know anything reliably about her. Mikhail Sergeevich is one of the few who can tell only the pure truth about her.

She was born in that dead year when all healthy men in Russia were at the front. Rosa Kuleshova's father did not return from the front. His wife gave birth to a daughter in the absence of her husband, then married another. The girl was somehow not close to her stepfather. And the mother, too, did not really need her, so her grandmother was mainly involved in raising her. For the first decade and a half, Rosa seemed like an ordinary girl, in the summer she was a pioneer leader in the camps. Then my grandmother died. When it dawned on the granddaughter that the grandmother was not there, something in the girl was severely disturbed and she began to arrange - for the first time in her life - large epileptic seizures. It turned out that it became much more difficult for her to study. She did her incomplete forty years and lived with incomplete secondary education. Rose went to work at a shelter for the blind. There, she saw the blind read bulging letters in Braille. Rosa was a poorly educated person, and, as is expected of epileptics, she was very stubborn. And somehow it got into her head y: what's the difference whether the letters are convex or not. After all, perhaps, simple text can also be read with your fingers, as the blind read their letters. And she began to stubbornly try to read ordinary typographic signs, deciding to start with a children's alphabet, in which there were large letters. At the same time, her eyesight was no worse than that of all of us.

And it worked. Did it work or not? Rosa was admitted to the laboratory of Mikhail Sergeevich for examination: “We saw that Rosa perfectly distinguishes the color of the ray that falls on the third and fourth fingers of her right hand, she reads texts, but if the text is covered with glass at least seven millimeters thick, she is no longer small letters reads, but large drawings or large letters - please. What's the matter? She needs the image to be on the skin of her fingers. Compare: when you closely press the photocell to a dark place, it says: there is little light, and if to a light one, it says: there is light. And if at a distance, then here and there the same amount of light falls, and he does not distinguish. It looks like Rosa Kuleshova just has light-sensitive areas of her skin. Moreover, when we sent a mighty stream of infrared light to her hand, she said: I see nothing. This means that her fingers do not sense infrared radiation, but light. "

The problem was that sometimes Rosa suddenly did not succeed, and then she, like a child, tried to twist, guess, peep under the bandage, which, of course, caused great distrust of skeptics. “She was in states when she could not do this, but she wanted to demonstrate her abilities. Then, if I take, say, a playing card that has a face here and a shirt here, I turn my back to it and say: what card? She probes, and if she fails, she begins to turn my hand, which holds the card, by force so that I show her face. I say: “This is not necessary. You can’t do this. ” Some experiments were for money: with the correct answer, Rosa received 20 kopecks, with the wrong answer, she paid a nickel. At first, Rosa thought it was not profitable if she made a lot of mistakes. But Mikhail Sergeevich said: “Even if you are an absolutely mediocre person and only every fourth time you guess what the suit of the card is, you will still lose three times a penny, guess once and win 20 kopecks. There will still be income. " Rosa could not learn this mathematics, but took her word for it. At first she was embarrassed to take money, but Smirnov and Bongard lied to her that they were playing for the state. She agreed - especially since, as a rule, she won confidently.

Interestingly, in the presence of negative skeptics or just strangers, Rose was lost and could suddenly lose her abilities. “We said: 'Get out of here everyone, except those who were from the very beginning, about whom Rosa knows that they are benevolently disposed.' Rose was already in her bandage. Her hand was behind the shield, there was a black sleeve. All went out, except for the deputy head for science, who both sat and continued to sit. We looked at each other and decided that we would try: suddenly, in this situation, Rose will succeed. She didn't know he was here, because she heard us say that everyone but the three of us would leave. And that deputy leader was silent and did not move. We made one try, the second, the third, the fourth - Rose almost always succeeds. Then we saw the deputy commander getting up from his chair and, loudly creaking new leather boots, walked behind Rosa's back. Rose hears it. He tries to see if anything is visible here, straightens Rose's sleeve, Rose feels that it is some kind of someone else's hand and the creak of someone else's shoes. But we pretend that it's okay, that nothing is happening, and we keep trying after trying. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Then we said: "Further we feel that it is useless to conduct the experiment, we invite everyone back here for discussion."

So, scientists were able to prove to everyone, including the most notorious skeptics, that Rosa, roughly speaking, sees with her fingers. In this, from the point of view of science, there is nothing supernatural: there are more than two hundred species of animals with such light-sensitive skin. In fact, we are all photosensitive: after all, our skin reacts to light when we sunbathe, and if someone has these photocells built into the skin send signals to the brain, then this is his own business. Later, Rosa found many followers in Russia and abroad: skin "vision" has even become something familiar to researchers. The effect has been found in hundreds of people, and many scientific papers have appeared describing the experiments.

A few years later, Mikhail Sergeevich had another question: does Rosa have real telepathic abilities? It turned out that it was as if she could sometimes guess the colors and letters without touching them at all - for example, through a black sealed envelope. This is no longer just an unusual property of an organism that can be explained by the laws of physics, but something that physics, generally speaking, should not do. On this topic, Smirnov and Bongard had a serious dispute: “I had a conversation: is it worth it for me, Mishka Smirnov, to spend time eme and strength for parapsychological research. Bongard believed that there was no point, because these phenomena, of course, do not exist. Why not? Because physics does not allow this. She does not allow them because there are only four main types of interaction that explain everything. Strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, gravitational. These are all interactions. None of them, and no combination of telepathy can explain. " But after all, in the nineteenth century, for example, people still did not know anything about electromagnetic waves, respectively, within the framework of the then physics, they also "could not exist." It turns out a vicious circle: "physics should not do this, because physics does not know it."

Such controversies were extremely relevant to young scientists of the sixties. Mikhail Sergeevich continued his research; what happened next with Bongard, we know. And Rosa Kuleshova died in 1978 from a hemorrhage associated with a brain tumor.

Persian king head and magnifying glass

“We talked out loud in front of the tape recorder who was participating, what was the purpose of the experiment, we checked that the subject agreed to this experience - he said it on the tape recorder.

The subject was then given an intragastrically active dose of psilocybin and asked how he felt. About 20 minutes later he was asked: what do you see here? It was a wallpaper on which a light gray color on a darker one - or vice versa, a dark gray color on a lighter one - was just an ornament. The subject said: “Oh, oh! If it was just wallpaper before, now it is a war scene. Here are ours, and here are the Germans, and they are fighting. " We asked: "You can circle the places on the wall where they are, these figures are." He quickly, quickly, quickly circled everything - he did not need to think, because he saw it. And after he identified those lines that are important to him, we also began to see. Naturally, because these were well-chosen lines depicting straight or bent people fighting with each other, shooting.

And then at the top of this wallpaper, he, no longer paying attention to the lines of the ornament - those figures were tiny, 3-5 cm high - and here he painted with a wingspan of about 30-40 centimeters - a winged devil. It was already a free pattern, not related to the pattern on the wallpaper. "And he is in charge of all this."

After experiments with Rosa Kuleshova, Mikhail Sergeevich struck up a relationship with a French hypnologist named Lev Grigorievich Shertok. He was a renowned specialist, theorist and practitioner of psychoanalysis and hypnosis. They corresponded a lot, Shertok came to Russia, he wanted to meet Kuleshova himself, but for some reason it didn't work out. Then the French scientist asked how he could help Russian science in the person of Mikhail Sergeevich. He replied that he would like to do experiments with psilocybin - a substance that underlies the action of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The fact is that under the influence of psilocybin comes what is called an "altered state of consciousness" - namely, in this state, people have telepathic abilities. Mikhail Sergeevich wanted to find out if this works in the opposite direction - if you arrange an altered state of consciousness for a person, will he not become a telepathic?

After a while, Shertok contacted a Swiss company, which sent 10 person doses of psilocybin to Moscow. This was 1965, the last year before the use of hallucinogens was banned. "Except for special cases," says Mikhail Sergeevich, "for which it was necessary to obtain permission separately, and not everyone was given such permission, not everyone, but only those who worked on the instructions of the ruling organizations."

At the institute where Mikhail Sergeevich worked, there was already a whole laboratory, which was engaged in attempts to "make telepathy." In this laboratory, the first experiments with a hallucinogenic substance took place. “One experiment was done on one person with a half dose. There were moderate changes in perception, no hallucinations. And we did not notice any paranormal phenomena. There was a second experience: we gave two people a full dose in the hope that we would be able to organize a telepathic connection between these two people within the same laboratory. No, it didn't work. "

Then there was the third experiment: the scientists invited another subject, an artist by profession. “We think that you are a suitable person because you are an artist,” they told him. The test candidate agreed. He was given one full dose of psilocybin.

The essence of the experiment is as follows: the subject was offered five boxes from under the photographic film. They contained various things: in one - a coin, in the other - a bike rag, in the third - a magnifying glass, in the fourth - a needle from a syringe, in the fifth - a bunch of tram tickets. These boxes were randomly shown to the artist, and no one, including the scientists themselves, knew what was in the box. The subject had to guess what was there, if not exactly, then at least at the level of associations.

The answers were as follows: 1. “Anything can be here: the head of a Persian king, or a falling bomb. What I want is and I will see, because in this world everything can be, but in this world I mean something ”. To this Mikhail Sergeevich said: “Good. I will stop asking you what is there, because you are carried somewhere, you are unfit for purposeful experiments. Bear in mind that now the contents of this box will affect your condition, - and showed the box number 2, - and you kept going. "

The answers continue: 2. "And there is something rustling here." 3. The subject drew a knight on a horse and said: "And now the armor on the rump of this horse has become resonant." 4. "I feel like I have a warm, soft, fluffy coat on my arm." 5. "Oh, and now I am inside a tunnel or a well, and I am flying forward with my head and arrows, spears, knives are flying towards me."

Mikhail Sergeevich numbered all the boxes according to the order of the answers, and, without opening, took them to his home. A few days later, scientists gathered to find out whether there was clairvoyance or not. Only now the boxes have been opened, and scientists have established correspondences to their taste: “Arrows and spears” is, of course, the same needle from a syringe. "Fluffy wool" is a fleece cloth. “Something rustling” - a handful of tram tickets. "Resounding armor" is probably a coin. And, finally, “the head of a Persian king or a bomb” - it can only be a magnifying glass, a magnifying glass that, when open, really slightly resembles a head, and when closed, it resembles a flying bomb.

It is difficult to say how accurate these associations are. But, in any case, two out of three judges decided so, and their answers coincided with what the subject decided without opening the boxes. And the order was exactly the same.

“It’s not so much,” Mikhail Sergeevich comments. “The fact that we guess what was in one box is one-fifth of the likelihood. We have 4 numbers and 4 sets of items left - the probability is one fourth. If we guessed 4 and 5, then the probability remains one third. Then one second. And, if all the previous ones are guessed, then there is no choice. So the probability of such a guess when you only need to choose the order is 1x2x3x4x5 - that's 120. Just think, one percent. And we can do nothing better. True, if you look at it in detail, then not just we guessed, but very good coincidences - for example, a syringe needle. We didn’t repeat this experiment with psilocybin anymore - after it was banned ”.

After a conversation with Mikhail Sergeevich (from each of which, by the way, you get terribly tired), an altered state of consciousness occurs without any hallucinogens. You walk, already at night, along Chistoprudny Boulevard, look at colorful ravers and black-and-white gothic girls, walk past tram stops and shops - and you feel that all this is just a shell, a two-dimensional picture, schematic, like in a school physics textbook. And you understand that in science, as in nature, there are thousands of paths, beautiful back streets and abandoned mansions.

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