THE ONLY thing I know about an octopus is that it has eight tentacles, which gave it its name, and that it looks weird. But an octopus that picks winners of big sports events with great accuracy is something else.

Last week, a two-year-old octopus named Paul, which lives in Oberhausen Sea Life aquarium in Western Germany, hit the world headlines by correctly predicting the winner in all of Germany?s World Cup 2010 matches, seven times in a row. That high predictive accuracy rules out pure chance or coincidence, statistically speaking.

How does octopus Paul make his choice of the sports event?s winner? According to the newspaper item, in a contest between Spain and Germany: ?Two plastic boxes, one with a German flag and one with a Spanish, were lowered into Paul?s tank, each with a tasty morsel of food inside.

?The box which Paul opens first is adjudged to be his predicted winner.?

When Paul picked Spain as the winner in last week?s World Cup game, many could not believe it, because Spain has never won in the series before. But Paul turned out to be correct again, to the dismay of the Germans and elation of the Spaniards. And it took Paul only three minutes to make up his mind, whereas at other times it took him as long as 70 minutes to decide, according to newspaper reports.

Because of his sudden rise to world fame, Paul has gotten business proposals, has thousands of Facebook fans and the attention of world leaders.

Although Paul is not infallible; he made one wrong call out of 11 in 2008. Still, his record is so extraordinary, and it cannot be explained on purely rational or scientific grounds.

Psychic power

Researchers have long known that some animals have very strong psychic powers. For example, many years back, I read a book entitled ?The Psychic Powers of Animals.? Unfortunately, I no longer have the book and had forgotten who the author was. But I remember the book citing case after case of domestic pets reading the minds of their masters, knowing when the master decides to come back from a long trip and even saving their lives from fire or disaster. There are also many cases of dogs or cats being able to trace their way back home after being taken away or getting lost hundreds of miles from home.

But an octopus predicting the outcome of a sports event with great accuracy, which could not be attributed to chance, pushes the sciences of neurology and psychology in a quandary. There?s just no rational explanation for it. According to freelance writer Khrysta Rara, an animal lover and researcher, ?scientists discovered recently that the brain of the octopus is distributed among its tentacles, unlike the human brain, which is concentrated in the head.?

If only they had researched further, the scientists might have discovered also that many Filipino politicians? brains are concentrated in their mouths and pockets rather than in their heads.

But kidding aside, I am thankful that Paul is not able to predict the winners in the Lotto; otherwise, some might not hesitate to kill to kidnap him!

Some people have asked me how I can explain Paul?s unusual ability to pick the correct winner in the World Cup. Actually, I am also completely clueless to explain it. However, what I can say is that psychic ability is not a question of rational knowledge or intelligence. It is a question of intuition, using the nonrational side of the brain, or the right hemisphere of the neo-cortex. Therefore, even if a creature does not have a well-developed intellect, it can still pick up psychic signals. Therefore, it is neither unbelievable nor impossible for animals, and even lower forms of creation, to exhibit some sort of psychic ability, just like the octopus Paul is apparently able to do.

In the ?70s, for example, American polygraph expert Cleve Backster proved through extensive scientific experiments that plants can feel, and they react to intentions of people around them. Later, a scientist from IBM Corporation, Marcel Vogel, confirmed these findings of Cleve Backster.

The nearest parallel I could find in the history of prediction techniques using live animals was the practice of early Greek soothsayers who read the signs of future events by allowing birds to eat grains placed on the letters of Greek alphabet, drawn on a circle. Words were formed from the letters left without grains, and the words formed gave the answer being asked.

But the practice of using an octopus to predict future sports events is really unique in the annals of psychic phenomena.

Note: The next Basic ESP & Intuition Development seminar will be held July 31-Aug. 1, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. at Rm. 308, Prince Plaza I Cond., Legazpi St., Greenbelt, Makati. Call 8107245; telefax 8159890; e-mail jaimetlicauco@yahoo.com.