Everyday Extraordinary : A Scientist Ponders a Lifetime of Magical, Bizarre, and Paranormal Experiences

Experiences with strange phenomena such as ghosts, UFOs, psychics, and miracle cures make for titillating stories. Many of us leave these stories as just that—stories—but for some people the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and otherworldly happenings leads down a dark path. Paranoia and the belief in the paranormal have real-life consequences. What is the science behind these scenarios? Everyday Extraordinary provides an antidote for the conspiracy theories, medical quackery, and science denial prevailing in today’s pop culture. People will always believe in the unbelievable. In this skeptical and scientific investigation, Barry Markovsky pushes back against harmful flights of fancy with down-to-earth and evidence-based explanations wrapped in compelling stories. Each of the chronologically ordered chapters has a Frontstage and Backstage section. The Frontstage recounts a personal experience: awakening from a night terror as a young child; having my fortune told by a psychic; the claims of an alternative medicine practitioner. The Backstage section explains in simple terms what’s actually going on— mechanisms and functions behind our dreams, how psychics use standard “cold reading” techniques, how quack doctors distort evidence. Each explanation is scientifically grounded, but with minimal jargon and softened with anecdotes, illustrations, and humor. Everyday Extraordinary makes sense of things that at first seem inexplicable. Many of these experiences feel special and unique despite being remarkably common. And evenwhen not experienced directly, most are all too familiar to readers through reality TV shows, tabloids, and social media. The stories gently encourage readers to ask questions rather than jump to conclusions; to consider alternative explanations for what happened; to distinguish good evidence from bad; to suspend judgment when the evidence isn’t there; to have a mind both open and skeptical; to consider that what we wish to be true may not always be so. Without being preachy, the scientific explanations prove extraordinary in their own right. Along the way, readers accumulate tools for thinking critically about all sorts of claims,extraordinary and otherwise.