Far Out: Extraordinary Human Capabilities

In what is being hailed as a Christmas "miracle," a young mother died during labor with a still-born baby on Christmas Eve but both mom and baby came back to life just minutes later, before the eyes of the nearly heartbroken, stunned father.

When J. Langdon Down first described savant syndrome in 1887, coining its name and noting its association with astounding powers of memory, he cited a patient who could recite Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire verbatim. Since then, in almost all cases, savant memory has been linked to a specific domain, such as music, art or mathematics. But phenomenal memory is itself the skill in a 54-year-old man named Kim Peek. His friends call him “Kim-puter.”

The man who inspired the title character in the Oscar-winning movie 'Rain Man' has died.

A Belgian thought to have been in a coma for 23 years has told of his "second birth" after doctors realised he was in fact conscious.

Here is the problem. Not only are we not exploring optimal expression within each of these three spheres of activity, in our modern culture we have separated them and have consequently lost sight of the wholeness that exists between them. We’ve turned the Transpersonal and Spiritual sphere either into a fantasy with no reality in a materialistic world or we’ve confined it within narrow religious dogmas. We’re reduced the World sphere into being simply a resource pool to feed our insatiable needs for energy and raw materials and a backdrop for the dramas of humanity. In so doing, we have elevated the Personal dimension over the other two in ways that have brought us to ecological, economic, and social disaster. To make matters worse, we have so narrowly defined what it means to be a person and what we’re each individually capable of that we’ve robbed even that dimension of its wholeness and full potential for engaging and integrating with the other two.

Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks brings our attention to Charles Bonnett syndrome -- when visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations. He describes the experiences of his patients in heartwarming detail and walks us through the biology of this under-reported phenomenon.

Arison -- billionaire ($2.7 by Forbes's most recent estimate), perhaps the richest woman in the Middle East, a major force in Israeli philanthropy -- claims that she can see the future. This is much bigger than a parlor trick. In her new book published this summer in Israel, the 51-year-old Miami native says she felt the Indonesian tsunami sweeping over the land two months before it happened and sensed Hurricane Katrina pummeling New Orleans. In an interview, Arison says she also "saw the writing on the wall" before the global economic crash. Reading about Arison's extrasensory perception makes you ache for a heads-up, maybe a blog entry or a tweet or a phone call to Brownie or Greenspan or somebody who might have helped.

Numerous medical cases point to a relationship between brain injury and creativity.

“Musical Minds,” the season premiere of “Nova” on PBS, is based on the neurologist Oliver Sacks’s most recent book, “Musicophilia," a collection of case studies of people whose brains have unusual relationships to music, cases in which, as Dr. Sacks puts it, “music gets them going to an extraordinary degree.”

Here's another great interview with Esalen Co-founder, Michael Murphy. For those of you who continue to wonder what all the commotion is about "integral", this informative interview helps fill things out...