Paul The Psychic Octopus

My favorite story lately is that of Paul, the Psychic Octopus. Go ahead and giggle—that was a ridiculous sentence, the kind of thing that gives all this New Age spiritualism the shove in the pants it so often and so frequently deserves. Also, as a business owner who promotes the transformative and healing power of intuitive readings and energy work, a psychic octopus is exactly the kind of farcical, trivializing news story I hope goes away fast.

Now let me tell you why I love it. Paul the Psychic Octopus  lives in the Oberhausen Sea Life aquarium in Germany, where, for the past two years, he has predicted soccer results for the German national team with astonishing accuracy. He has been wrong only once in two years. For you non-statisticians out there, let me assure you this is not a statistically insignificant figure. His predictions have become so famous and correct that they are now carried live on German television.

To get his predictions, Paul’s keeper puts two glass cube containers of mussels in his tank. Each container has one of the two competing team’s flags on the front: the German flag on one, the national flag of the opponent in the other. Whichever nation’s mussels gets eaten first is his ‘predicted’ winner. Again, using this method, Paul accurately predicted (well, ate) every game but one for the 2008 UEFA Euro Championship. He has been accurate 100% of the time in the current 2010 World Cup. He received a death threat (I will sauté him with garlic and olive oil!) from an Argentinean chef who was upset that Paul correctly foretold Argentina’s loss to Germany the quarter-finals. More intriguingly, the Huffington Post speculates that if you had placed accumulator bets based on Paul’s predictions at the start of the current World Cup, you would have earned 131 times your money.

Seriously, what are we to make of this? There is the chance that the psychic octopus  is just randomly, freakishly statistically right. I mean, he doesn’t ‘know’ that he is making soccer predictions. He’s just chowing down on briny, delicious mussels that his human keeper has correlated to soccer teams. Statistical anomalies do happen and maybe this is one. However, there are some other, intriguing possibilities.

1) Native cultures have used animal totems and animal signals for thousands of years as messengers. Now,
an octopus in a Sea Life Aquarium tank receiving a message from Spirit about a soccer game is nowhere near as romantic or compelling an image as an eagle dropping a feather into your lap after you ask about your life purpose. But how many of us live in a place where Nature in its most exotic forms are easily accessible? If Spirit is using animals to communicate with us, Spirit isn’t going to care what animals it uses or where that animal lives. It is going to use the animals that surround us. For many of us, this most likely means household pets, squirrels, the occasional deer, and all the animals we have access to in zoos and aquariums. (come to Lee Channing’s talk on animal communication at Ananda on August 5 for more on this). Using zoo creatures and National Enquirer-type headlines might upset our preconceived notions of who and what Spirit should use, but this brings me to my second point…

2) Spirit wants us to lighten up. It is important, when dealing with intuitives, predictions, energy healing and the unseen world, to rigorously apply our skepticism and critical thinking to the information we receive. We are vulnerable when we are seeking. At the same time, why in the world shouldn’t we have some fun with this? I certainly hope that the Source of All Life has a sense of humor. Maybe this is a reflection of that, a way to both poke fun at those of us who take the unseen so seriously, and at the same time awaken curiosity in skeptics who can best be reached by a large scale, kind of ridiculous but freaky accurate sports related story that hints at a larger scale to life than we can possibly imagine. This story went global. It’s one of the most widely reported news reports out there right now. And why not—I don’t need a psychic octopus to predict that more of you are reading this piece than the last article I wrote on chakras and auras. This is much more fun.

3) A friend suggested this one, and it’s wonderfully intriguing. Those of us who live with animals know how connected we can become with our pets. Maybe Paul the Psychic Octopus and his keeper have this kind of connection and the accuracy of Paul’s predictions are a reflection of their bond. If the keeper is somehow tapped into a precognitive knowledge of soccer results through his deep caring about the game, then the octopus is simply reflecting the nature of the animal-human bond, and his keeper’s intuitive capabilities that he might not even be aware of.

I don’t have any final conclusions about all this. I love thinking about it. I love that the world is more wonderfully weird than we can possibly comprehend. The only thing I know for sure here is that I deeply, deeply wish I’d put $1000 on that accumulator bet following Paul’s predictions at the start of the World Cup soccer tournament. By the time Spain defeated Germany in the semi-finals, and Paul retired from current World Cup prognostication, I would have earned $131,000.