I have made this point before, but feel the need to make it again, slightly differently. Science is not a discipline which separates plausible–“ordinary”–claims from implausible, extraordinary claims. There quite simply is no room, formally, for deciding in advance what is possible and impossible. There can be no extraordinary truth claim. There can only be claims for which evidence exists, and claims for which no evidence exists. Empirical/non-empirical. This is the only divide.
That pictures, as an example, can be communicated from one mind to another is an empirical claim. It can and has been done, repeatedly, and in scientifically quantifiable ways. This is not an extraordinary claim. This is simply a fact.
To say, therefore, that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is to betray a FUNDAMENTAL misunderstanding of the NATURE of science. That this is possible is not extraordinary to me at all: I have experienced it. And whether or not this is the case, the only reason to ever try and sift one from the other is practical: finite amounts of funding exist, and it is not irrational to want to study things which are generally agreed to exist.
As I have said, though (I am sensitive to repeating myself, but find that I rarely if ever frame things exactly the same way twice, making some repetition useful, since new insights sometimes emerge), the most useful approach to increasing useful human knowledge is not investigating what is known, but rather finding and investigating all known outliers which have the potential to falsify general paradigms.
For example, evolution plainly cannot be explained by reference to Natural Selection, if we posit that mutations are random. The fossil record simply doesn’t support it. Nor do Gould’s contributions become scientific simply because he has layered a theory onto what we actually found.
Who, anywhere, has tried to measure evolution in response to environmental challenges? What I believe will be shown, if and when this happens, is that living organisms react as WHOLES, as conscious entities. This fact, when eventually shown as I believe it will be, will enable a useful understanding of the nature of life to emerge.