If this cat crosses your path your creative idea is doomed.
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
There’s a cat written up in a recent edition of The New England Journal of Medicine that can foreshadow death. The feline, Oscar, hangs around the halls of the advanced dementia unit in a nursing home in Rhode Island. If Oscar camps outside a patient’s door, well, that patient isn’t long for this world.
How accurate is this cat at predicting death? According to the nursing home’s staff, he’s never wrong. Never.
When I first read this, not to make light of the fate of these patients, nor this animal’s gift, but I thought, “wouldn’t it serve many of us if we got a strong signal that one of our ideas were doomed before we proceeded to put a lot of effort or money into it?”
That was my first thought. My second thoughts were, “don’t we already have too many death cats?” and, “aren’t they wrong a lot.” (more…)
