When babies are born, they undergo all sorts of tests to make sure they’re fit and healthy. There’s the standard APGAR test, which checks for Activity, Pulse, Grimace, Appearance, and Respiration. Then there are blood tests to check for a variety of syndromes that can’t be detected during pregnancy. All throughout the first two days, the baby is weighed, measured, poked and prodded, and passed from doctor to consultant to specialist to midwife dozens of times.
The most interesting test Fiona had, though, was an optional one: psi testing. Not everyone wants it, and it’s certainly beyond the scope of the NHS to provide it for all parents. However, the Remillard Institute (a privately funded Canadian research body) is currently sponsoring a trial programme at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, and we were offered the opportunity to take part.
It was all very sophisticated. Dr. MacDonald, the pediatric parapsychologist, attached a set of sensors to Fiona’s head, neck, and throat, and hooked her up to a so-called “cerebro-inductive rig.” The rig stimulated Fiona’s brain directly, and measured the response immediately. Her results showed no reaction for for Psychokinesis or Farseeing, but strong potential for Creativity, Redaction, and particularly Coercion. Cool!
I hadn’t realised that the field of pediatric parapsychology was so far advanced. We chatted to Dr. MacDonald about psi and Milieu Theory for a while afterwards, and she explained how the cerebro-inductive rig is only a very recent development. Until just a few years ago researchers couldn’t test babies or young children, because they had to rely on spoken, facial and physical reactions from the subjects themselves. Babies are obviously not capable of giving that kind of feedback.
It turns out the trial programme at ERI still has another three weeks to run, so we’ve set up an appointment to get Alex tested as well. It’s not something we need to do (we’ve already found out the hard way that he’s high-Coercion), but it’ll be interesting to find out if he has the same combination of psi abilities as Fiona, or if he’s likely to wreck the house with emergent PK when he hits adolescence.
I’m surprised the Remillard Institute wasn’t able to make these assessments while Fiona was in the womb. Don’t they have redactors on staff?
They do have pre-natal redactors, but not many, and they’re all based at the Institute itself in Ontario, Canada. We would have had to travel there ourselves to get it done.
The advantage of the CI apparatus is that it automates the whole process. It’s cheap, and above all it doesn’t take a fully trained redactor to operate. If the current trials are successful, pretty much *any* hospital could start offering metapsychic testing.