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Telepathy

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Telepathy, from the Greek τηλε, tele, "distant", and πάθεια, patheia, "feeling", is the claimed innate ability of humans and other creatures to communicate information from one mind to another, without the use of extra tools such as speech or body language. Considered a form of extra-sensory perception or anomalous cognition, telepathy is often connected to various paranormal phenomena such as precognition, clairvoyance and empathy.

Though many scientific experiments into telepathy have been conducted, including recent ones by respected universities (some claiming significant positive results), telepathy remains controversial and is not widely accepted by scientists.


Telepathy in history

Very few anecdotal accounts of telepathy have been noted in many ancient cultures since historical records have been kept. In the Bible, some prophets appear to have the ability to see into the future (precognition). This seems to be a common claim from ancient and primitive people. But the sending and receiving of messages from individual to individual by mind alone is never mentioned at all. As with all psi phenomena, there is wide disagreement and controversy within the sciences, even within parapsychology, as to the existence of telepathy.

Western scientific investigation of telepathy is generally recognized as having begun with the initial program or research of the Society for Psychical Research. The apex of their early investigations was the report published in 1886 as the two-volume work Phantasms of the Living. It was with this work that the term "telepathy" was introduced, replacing the earlier term "thought transference". Although much of the initial investigations consisted largely of gathering anecdotal accounts with follow-up investigations, they also conducted experiments with some of those who claimed telepathic abilities. However, their experimental protocols were not very strict by today's standards.

In 1917, psychologist John E. Coover from Stanford University conducted a series of telepathy tests involving transmitting/guessing playing cards. His participants were able to guess the identity of cards with overall odds against chance of 160 to 1; however, Coover did not consider the results to be significant enough to report this as a positive result.

Perhaps the most well-known telepathy experiments were those of J. B. Rhine and his associates at Duke University, beginning in the 1927 using the distinctive ESP Cards of Karl Zener (see also Zener Cards). These involved more rigorous and systematic experimental protocols than those from the 19th century, used what were assumed to be 'average' participants rather than those who claimed exceptional ability, and used new developments in the field of statistics to evaluate results. Results of these and other experiments were published by Rhine in his popular book Extra Sensory Perception, which popularized the term "ESP".

Another influential book about telepathy in its day was Mental Radio, published in 1930 by the Pulitzer prize-winning author Upton Sinclair (with foreword by Albert Einstein). In it Sinclair describes the apparent ability of his wife at times to reproduce sketches made by himself and others, even when separated by several miles, in apparently informal experiments that are reminiscent of some of those to be used by remote viewing researchers in later times. They note in their book that the results could also be explained by more general clairvoyance, and they did some experiments whose results suggested that in fact no sender was necessary, and some drawings could be reproduced precognitively.

By the 1960s, many parapsychologists had become dissatisfied with the forced-choice experiments of J. B. Rhine, partly because of boredom on the part of test participants after many repetitions of monotonous card-guessing and refusing the suggestion by magicians of adding cards that were totally blank, partly because of the observed "decline effect" where the accuracy of card guessing would decrease over time for a given participant, which some parapsychologists attributed to this boredom.

Some parapsychologists turned to free response experimental formats where the target was not limited to a small finite predetermined set of responses (e.g., Zener cards), but rather could be any sort of picture, drawing, photograph, movie clip, piece of music etc.

As a result of surveys of spontaneous psi experiences which reported that more than half of these occurred in the dreaming state, researchers Montaque Ullman and Stanley Krippner at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, undertook a series of experiments to test for telepathy in the dream state. A "receiver" participant in a soundproof, electronically shielded room would be monitored while sleeping for EEG patterns and rapid eye movements (REMs) indicating dream state. A "sender" in another room would then attempt to send an image, randomly selected from a pool of images, to the receiver by focusing on the image during the detected dream states. Near the end of each REM period, the receiver would be awakened and asked to describe their dream during that period. The data gathered suggested that sometimes the sent image was incorporated in some way into the content of the receiver's dreams.

While the dream telepathy experiments results were interesting, to run such experiments required many resources (time, effort, personnel). Other researchers looked for more streamlined alternatives, such as the so-called ganzfeld experiments.

To date there has not yet been any satisfactory experimental protocol designed to distinguish telepathy from other forms of ESP such as clairvoyance.

There have been rare claims of shared of visual hallucinations in folie a deux – shared psychotic disorder. These are beyond the scope of science at this time. The phenomena cannot be produced or reproduced on demand.

Recent experiments

Ganzfeld experiments have received widespread attention in recent times, and some believe they provide strong experimental evidence.

Other experiments have been conducted by controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who claims strong results. These include experiments into:

  • The 'sense of being stared at', in which the subject guesses whether or not he/she is being stared at by another person
  • Whether a subject can tell who is phoning them before picking up the receiver
  • Whether dogs can tell when their owners are about to return home.

Telepathy and science

Telepathy proponents point generally to controversially scientific concepts such as psychology and quantum mechanics, as areas of research that are considered to be deeply based in the scientific method, but have equally problematic and unexplainable links to the exclusively physical description of reality. blobah

Quantum mechanics

In seeking a "scientific explanation," some telepathy proponents have claimed there to be connections between scientific quantum theory as a basis for telepathy. Such modern concepts of telepathy have attempted to draw both legitimacy and scientific curiosity, by making both general and specific analogies between the "unaccepted unknowns" of religion and parapsychology, and the "accepted unknowns" in the quantum sciences, where the classical and understood concepts of physics (time and space) don't generally apply. The clear example is in quantum mechanics and its inherently theoretical cousin, string theory. Both have radically changed modern concepts regarding the nature of time, space, energy, and matter, and the relationships between each.

In general the concept is that the mind (human or otherwise) is simply evolved physical scaffold for an entity of electrical and quantum impulses. This system, in turn is claimed to have been developed abilities to influencing and receiving "quantum fluctuations" from other minds. In essence, proponents claim that telepathy is not "extrasensory", rather that the brain is the telepathic organ, its connections to other brains are not physical, but psychic, and the very definition of the psychic medium is the localized inertial frame of reference which is affected by the mind.

This new and "scientifically-grounded" concept of telepathy provides the context for further speculations. However, physicists and skeptics state that quantum mechanics does not show classical effects until objects are at sub-nanometer scales, and since the physical components of the mind are all much larger, these quantum effects are considered negligible. Proponents counter that the scientific statements carry two flawed assumptions, namely that the experience of telepathy need be a classical effect, and that the mind is sensitive to only classical effects.

Some physicists, such as Nick Herbert [1], have pondered whether or not quantum mechanics' "non-locality" (or "spooky action at a distance") principle would permit instantaneous communication such as telepathy. Experiments have been conducted (by scientists such as Gao Shen at the Institute of Quantum Physics in Beijing, China) to study whether or not quantum entanglements (connections allowing instantaneous information exchange) demonstrated at the level of electrons can also be verified between human minds. Such experiments usually include monitoring for synchronous EEG patterns between two hypothetically "entangled" minds. [2]

Technologically-assisted telepathy

Some, for example the science-fiction writer Spider Robinson in the book Deathkiller, have envisioned neurological research leading to technologically-assisted telepathy, also called techlepathy. As of 2004, scientists have demonstrated that brain imaging can be successfully used to recognise distinct thought patterns, and tell, for example, whether experimental monkeys thought about juice or water, and whether a human participant thought about a rotating cube or moving his paralyzed arm. Both implanted electrodes recording neurons' activity and outside electrodes recording electromagnetic activity of the brain can be used.

Telepathic communication between humans and animals

Some people believe that it is possible for humans and animals to communicate through telepathy. In the past, this type of interspecies communication was thought to be a normal part of life, such as in Native American culture. For more information on this subject, see books by Rupert Sheldrake (Dogs who know when their owners are coming home), and professional animal communicators Penelope Smith and Marta Williams.

Telepathy in fiction

Comic books and role-playing games take greater liberties with telepaths, giving them the ability to not only control minds (through hypnosis-like capabilities, illusion etc.) but actually turning telepathy into an offensive weapon by overloading the mental communication channel with a "mind-blast" which causes great pain, unconsciousness, and sometimes even death. More broadly, telepathy has been the subject of much other science fiction and particularly soft science fiction.

See also

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