One of the most basic assumptions about intention is that it operates according to a generally accepted sense of cause and effect: if A causes B, then A must have happened first. This assumption reflects one of our deepest beliefs, that time is a one-way, forward-moving arrow. What we do today cannot affect what happened yesterday.

However, a sizeable body of the scientific evidence about intention violates these basic assumptions about causation. Research has demonstrated clear instances of time-reversed effects, where effect precedes cause. Indeed, some of the largest effects occur when intention is sent out of strict time sequence.

How inherent is human spirituality – even among non-believers?  Is it there all along, but simply buried under conscious doubt and skeptical analysis, waiting to surface when we confront our own mortality?

The answer is a resounding yes, according to new research examining what happens to atheists when they approach death. A new study from University of Otago in New Zealand recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, discovered that when religious people think about their own deaths, they grow consciously and unconsciously drawn to greater religious belief.

We are a society gripped by constant pain of one sort or another—and life appears to be getting more painful by the year. In the UK alone, according to government statistics, at least a third of all households—representing some eight million of us—have one or more members suffering from moderate-to-severe persistent pain of some variety. This is two to three times more than the number of such sufferers in the 1970s.

Matters are even worse in the US. According to the American Pain Foundation, more than 26 million Americans ages 20 to 64 experience frequent back pain alone. Almost a third of all adults aged 65 or over report some variety of knee pain, and more than one-sixth report having hip pain or stiffness. Staggeringly, some 25 million cases of pain have to do with migraine, or lower facial pain or jaw pain such as a temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorder.

I know first-hand about a falling-down world. My father, the bright youngest child of working-class Irish, was more an inventor than a straightforward engineer. At the end of the Second World War, he designed a revolutionary kind of heating system for all the new homes being built for returning vets. In order to fund the start-up, he found two partners willing to invest. They would handle the sales and finance, while he would focus on the designs and shop floor. They even gave their company a name that sounded a little like America, a nod to the patriotic mood of the times.

I’m one of those people profoundly saddened by the publication of Go Set a Watchman, not simply because I think everyone will benefit from it but Harper Lee, but also because it defaces an important and enduring hero who has given America hope over the years even during its worst moments.

It saddens me that Lee’s lawyer, her agent and her publishers preferred to put first the prospect of earning millions over literary judgment or their charge’s literary reputation.

Today, while watching a barn raising during an episode of Living with the Amish, the British Channel 4 series I’ve blogged about earlier which arranged for six British teenagers to live among the Amish and Mennonites for a summer, (watch it here on: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/living-with-the-amish, I was moved by the simplicity of the message and struck by how many our current problems could be sorted out by some modern form of barn raising. And apparently, according to the reaction of thousands of British viewers, I am not alone. 

In this episode, the three British boys join 40 male members of the community to do all the carpentry, while the three girls joined dozens of women in cooking a vast lunch for the 80 neighbors. Within five hours the main body of the barn had been raised, and by sundown, the last nail was put in place. But even more astonishing to the teens was the simple reminder, as the Amish narrator Jonathan puts it, of ‘what can be achieved if we all stand together.’

In 1992, after rediscovering a network of neurotransmitters in the gut that act in a similar way to ordinary neurons, Dr Michael Gershon, chairman of the department of anatomy and cell biology at New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, an expert in the new field of neurogastroenterology, christened this phenomenon ‘the second brain’.

He and others have since found that the enteric nervous system, as its technically known, consists of some 30 neurotransmitters and vast sheaths of neurons embedded all along the nine meters of our alimentary canal—100 million of them in all, more than are present in either the spinal cord or peripheral nervous system. In fact, the self-same genes involved in the formation of synapses between neurons in the primary brain are also involved in the formation of synapses in the gut brain.

On Thanksgiving evening, while pondering all the things I could be grateful for, I and our family watched the first part of a series called ‘Living with the Amish.’

Britain’s Channel 4 had selected six typical British teens to fly over to the US and live among the Ohio Amish for six weeks last summer. The kids were a sociological pick-‘n’-mix: posh Etonian George, spoiled and pampered party-girl Charlotte, trendy Jordan, who was looking forward to spending time among the ‘minimalist’ Amish, sassy Siana, who has three fashion blogs, and James, who’d lived in foster care and hostels ever since his mother had been put away for arson.

The terrorist attacks on Tunisia, Kuwait and France have awakened a renewed desire of our leaders to use force to overwhelm the Islamic extremists. I have a small experience of what may be an alternative, based on the Intention Experiment I did for the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

I carried out this experiment largely because I was tired of seeing the videos of the burning towers replayed, as had been done every year since it happened. With September 11, 2011, looming I was determined to offer up an alternative.