When I was a student at Pomona College, I took a Philosophy of Religion class at neighboring Claremont McKenna College from Stephen Davis. I remember him once remarking that it pretty much was only the people who'd been raised going to church who took seriously many of the problems raised in philosophy of religion. That comment struck me even then (I was 17 and am now 55) because, setting aside the question of whether any of the supposed proofs for the existence of God have any validity, the implication was that evidence isn't a primary factor when it comes to what people believe or changing their minds. Generally, people build a conceptual framework in their childhood and add bits to it as they grow older, but mostly within the paradigm of their existing framework. (Note that this does not imply the beliefs in these frameworks are coherent. People are quite good at compartmentalizing, and the part of my framework in this compartment may be totally at odds with the part of my framework in that compartment.)
So what changes a person's mind such that she has to adopt a radical new conceptual framework? The answer seems to be: not much. Some people, like Sobhani, may have been fortunate enough in their formative years to have incorporated a certain openness to conceptual rejiggering -- sort of like the amendment mechanism built into the Constitution. This, btw, is what a liberal education is supposed to do. It "liberates" the person so they are supposedly more able to think freely about subjects. And I ask...how common is a liberal education these days prior to college? It is extraordinarily rare, and it generally comes from the parents, not the school. If I were to bet, I'd bet Sobhani's parents, one or both, encouraged her to read freely and in quantity well before she went to college, and that, along with exposure to coffee-readings and the like, is what enabled her to be open to psi when her later experiences led her in that direction.
As I've gotten older, I've become quite cynical about *why* liberal education is so rare. Not to be coy, I think the education system (at least in America) has been under conscious attack for over a hundred years, and it is specifically for limiting most peoples' ability to think freely. I'm reading Harvard historian Carroll Quigley's "Tragedy & Hope," and I'd recommend looking at this for an understanding of the full scope of what's going on. Actually, I'd recommend Joseph Plummer's "Tragedy & Hope 101" as a starter, it being a mere 190 pages, compared to Quigley's 1380! Plummer relates the story of attorney Katherine Casey, tasked in the 1950's by Norman Dodd to investigate the dealings of the tax-exempt Carnegie Foundation. Prior to the investigation, Casey believed that the Carnegie Foundation was a force for great good. What she found, however, was that in 1909, the Carnegie directors determined it would be in their interest to involve the US in a war (there's a whole story behind that) and set about doing just that by taking over the diplomatic mechanisms of the US State Dept. Once the US was, indeed, involved in WWI, the directors then memo'ed the willing idiot Wilson to ensure the war was prolonged. According to Dodd, Casey's initial conceptual framework for understanding her world was shattered. She had incontrovertible evidence that the world she lived in was one of complete, amoral thuggery. She never returned to her law practice and, ultimately, lost her mind. As Dodd says, "It's a very rough experience to encounter proof of these kinds."
So, my guess is that coming to accept psi was something latent in Sobhani's conceptual framework. Despite appearances, it was not really so far out of the way she could understand the world. She did not so much change her mind as evolve a conceptual framework that was already open to the possibility. All of which is to say (again), people mostly do not fundamentally change their minds. To REALLY change someone's mind, you must (like the Carnegie directors and others did after WWI) control the person's early education.
![[[p]]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7 "Wink [[p]]")