TELEPATHY

We all tried to play mind games right, when we were small kids !!! Trying to predict what other person is thinking by observing their facial gestures and physical motions. It was fun how sometimes we get it right and at that moment it feels like we have super power, not just the normal one but royal super power that runs in a blood line. Power that can propagate through hierarchy which has innate purpose to protect humanity. Crazy right !!! But this thought process happens for a few minutes and with obscene confidence we try to read our mothers mind,a kind of deadly activity which has so many repercussions, five finger slap is one of them. Its really bizzare how our parents can sometimes correctly predict whats in our mind and before saying them they already knew what we are gonna say. But the one and only instant when I really feel like my parents have telepathic powers is the moment when I try to hide out a lie, and without uttering a single word I got caught. So does our parents have telepathic power, specifically mother have telepathic powers, lets see if we can conclude this question towards the end of the blog, but I think these are the kind of moments we are going to cherish when we will grow progressively older. This is the closest I ever came to a telepathic event.

Lets dive deep into the rudiments of telepathy, and lets unravel it from its roots. Telepathy can be defined as a vicarious transmission of information from one person to another without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. The term was first coined in 1887 by the classical scholar Frederic W. H. Myers, founder of Society of Psychial Research. Telepathic experiments have been historically been criticized for a lack of proper controls and repeatibility. There is term for those experiments that are repeatable and reproducible, guess what, its called Science. There is no good evidance that telepathy exists, and the topic is considered by scientific community as pseudoscience. The history of telepathy goes back to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. Egyptians believed that a spirit would send messages from one person to another in dreams. The Greeks also believed dreams were a way to send messages. Ancient knowledge as dreams, telepathy etc was preserved by many indigenous people. According to historians such as Roger Luckhurst and Janet Oppenheim the origin of the concept of telepathy in Western civilisation can be traced to late 19th century and the formation of Society of Psychial Research. Historically, mind reading has been seen as so important that it has often been associated with the gods. One of the most fundamental powers of any god is the ability to read our mind and hence our deepest prayers. A true telepath who could read minds at will could easily become the wealthiest, most powerful person on Earth, able to enter into the minds of Wall Street bankers or to blackmail and coerce its rival. He could effortlessly steal nations most sensitive secrets. Like the slans, he could be feared and hunted down.

The enormous power a true telepath was highlighted in the landmark Foundation series of Issac Asimov, often touted as one of the greatest science fiction epics of all time. A Galactic Empire that has ruled for thousand of years in on the verge of collapse and ruin. A secret society of scientists, called the Second Foundation, uses a complex equation to predict that the empire will eventually fall and plunge civilisation into oblivion. The scientist draft an elaborate plan based on their equation in an effort to reduce this collapse of civilisation down to just a few thousand years. But then disaster strikes. Their elaborate equation fail to predict a single event, the birth of a mutant called Mule, who is capable of controlling over minds over large distances and hence capable to seize control of the galactic empire. The galaxy is doomed to thirty thousand years of chaos and anarchy unless this telepath can be stopped. Although science fiction is full of fantastic tales concerning telepaths, the reality is much more mundane. Because thoughts are private and invisible, for centuries charlatans and swindlers have taken advantage of the naive and gullible among us. One simple parlor trick used by magicians and mentalists is to use a shill - an accomplice planted in the audience whose mind is then read by the mentalist. Gamblers also are able to read peoples minds in a limited sense. When a person sees something pleasurable, the pupil of his eyes usually dilate. When he sees something undesirable ( perform a mathematical calculation ), his pupils contract. Gamblers can read the emotions of their poker faced opponents by looking for their eye to dilate or contract. This is one reason that gamblers often wear coloured visors over their eyes, to shield their pupil. With this simple trick one can determine a persons emotional reaction as he scans a picture, all without his permission. Let me take you back to beginning of 20th century when Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, began the first systematic and rigorous study of psychic phenomena in United State in 1927, founding Rhine Institute at Duke University, North Carolina. For decades he and his wife, Louisa, conducted some of the first scientifically controlled experiments in United States on a wide variety of parapsychological phenomena and published them in peer reviewed publications. It was rhine who coined the term “extrasensory perception” in one of his first book. Rhine during his research years encountered with a horse called Lady Wonder. This horse could perform dazzling feats of telepathy, such as knocking over toy alphabet blocks and thereby spelling out words that members of an audience were thinking. Rhine apparently did not know about the Clever Hans effect. In 1927 Rhine analysed insome details and concluded, “ the only explanation left is telepathic influence, the transference of mental influence by an unknown process”. Nothing was discovered that had failed to accord with it, and no other hypothesis proposed seems tenable in view of the results. Later Milbourne Christopher revealed the true source of Lady Wonder telepathic power: subtle emotional whip carried out by the horse owner. The subtle movement of the whip were cues for Lady Wonder to stop her hoof. When Rhine was on the verge of retiring seeking a successor with an untarnished reputation to carry on the work of his institute. One promising candidate was Dr. Walter Levy, whom he hired in 1973. Dr. Levy was a rising star in the field, reporting sensational study results seeming to demonstrate that the mice could telepathically alter a computers random number generator. However, suspicious lab workers discovered that Dr. Levy was surreptitiously sneaking into the lab at night to alter the results of the test. He was caught red handed doctoring data. Further test shows mice has no telepathic power whatsoever, and Dr. Levy was forced to resign from the institute in disgrace.

Electroencephalogram

Lets try to understand some physics behinds working of the brain. In the nineteenth century scientists suspected that electrical signals were being transmitted in side of the brain. In 1875 Richard Caton discovered by placing electrodes in the surface of the head it is possibel to detect tiny electrical signals emitted by the brain. This eventually lead to invention of Electroencephalograph(EEG). In principle brain act as a transmitter over which our thoughts are broadcasted in the form of tiny electrical signals and electromagnetic waves. But there are few complications in using these mediators to read someones thoughts. First the signals are faint and extremely weak in the range of milliwatts. Second, the signals are gibberish, hardly indistinguishable from random noise. Third, our brain is not capable of recieving similar messages from another brain due lack of an antenna. Using ordinary Newtonian and Maxwellian physics, telepathy via radio wave seems impossible. Some believes that telepathy is mediated by a fifth force called the psi force. But even advocates of parapsychology admits that they have no concrete, reproducible evidence of this psi force. So what about telepathy using quantum theory. Ok I will go scientific now, I will try to keep it as simple as possible so try to keep up with me. In the last decade, new quantum instruments have been introduced that for the first time in history enabled us to peer deep into the thinking mind. Leading this quantum revolution are PET ( Positron Emission Tomography ) and MRI ( Magnetic Resonance Imaging ) brain scans. A PET scan is created injecting radioactive sugar into the blood. Sugar gets concentrated in the ares of the brain that are activated by the thinking process, which required energy. The radioactive sugar emits positron which are easily detected by instruments. Thus by tracing out the pattern, one can trace out the patterns of thoughts, isolating precisely which part of the brain engaged in which activity. The MRI scan operates at the same way except the fact that it is more precise. Patients brain is placed inside a large doughnut shaped magnetic field. The magnetic field makes the nuclei of the atom of our brain align with magnetic field. A radio pulse is send into the patient making these nuclei wobble. When the nuclei flip orientation, a tiny radio echo can be detected thereby signalling the presence of a particular substance. Positron is an anti form of electron, Richard Feynman stated that positron are electron moving backward in time.

MRI scan of human brain

PET scan of Human brain

PET scan of human chest cavity

With MRI machines, there may be a possibility one day that scientists might decipher the broad outlines of human thought. The simplest test of mind reading is to determine wheather or not someone is lying. The idea of looking into brain activity to ferret out lies dates back twenty years, to the work of Peter Rosenfeld of northwestern university. The EEG data excavated by examining different activity during the process of lying is that the pattern of P300 wave showed a different on those who are lying than those who aren't. P300 is often stimulated when brain encounters something novel or out of the ordinary. Since I mentioned about brain waves, there are different type of brain waves : Delta wave ( below 4Hz ) occurs during sleep, Theta wave ( 4 - 7 Hz ) are associated with sleep, deep relaxation and visualisation, Alpha wave (8 - 13 Hz) occur when we are relaxed and calm, Beta wave ( 13 - 38 Hz ) are seen when we are actively thinking and problem solving and Gamma wave ( 39 - 100 ) involved in concentrated mental activity such as reasoning and planning. Our overall brain activity is a mix of all these different frequencies, but depending on what we’re doing we’ll exhibit some more than other. In 1999 Daniel Langleben of University of Pennsylvania conjectured that the brain, in telling a lie, first had to stop itself from telling a truth, and then create a deception. He says “ when you tell a deliberate lie, you have to be holding in mind the truth. So it stands to reason it should mean more brain activity". In layman terms lying is hard. Through experimenting college students Langleben found that lying creates increased brain activity in frontal lobe ( where higher thinking is concentrated ), the temporal lobe, and the limbic system ( where emotions are processed ). Well in particular he noticed unusual activity in the anterior cingulated gyrus ( which is associated with conflict resolution and response inhibition ). Now there are ethical implication of these kind of technologies, some critics claims that a true lie detector, like a true telepath, could make ordinary social interactions quite uncomfortable, since a certain amount of lying is a social grease that helps to keep the wheels of society moving. Our reputation might be ruined if for example the compliments we paid for our parents, friends, teacher or superior authority were exposed as lies. A true lie detector, in fact could expose all family secrets, hidden emotions, suppressed desires, and secret plans. Science columnist David Jones claimed this type of lie detector is like an atomic bomb. If widely deployed in the outside world it would make social life quite impossible.

Types of Brain waves

But will some futuristic MRI one day be able to read precise thoughts, word for word, image for image, as true telepath could? I am not so sure. Some have argued that it can decipher only vague outlines of our thoughts, because the brain is not really a computer at all. Computation on a digital computer is localised and obeys a very rigid set of rules. A digital computer obeys the ‘Laws of Turing Machines’, a machine that contains a central processing unit, an input and an output. The central processing unit ( pentium chip or the intel i chips or the new M1 chip of macbook ) performs a definite set of manipulations of the input and produces an output and thinking is therefore localised in the CPU. Our brain, however is not a digital computer. Our brain have no Pentium chip, no CPU, no MacOS operating system. If you remove a single transistor from a CPU of a computer it will start to crumble. But there are recorded case in which half of the brain is removed still the person survives since the other half takes over the function. So it barely made any dent. Our brain is more like a learning machine, a complex neural network constantly rewrites itself learning new task. MRI scans had confirmed that thoughts on our brain are not localised like the turing machine but spread in much of the brain. MRI scans showed that during the process of thinking different parts lightened up sequentially, with electrical signals bouncing around the brain.

All the human brain across earth creates a network and act like a common consciousness. Imagine what it would be like to sit ideally and doing nothing. Its merely impossible to sit ideally for a long period of time because we are social animals. Interaction and communication with fellow species is required or you can say a dying need for survival. Our brain cannot actively function, if we stop being socialize with others. The manoeuvre of brain to brain connectivity will be a herculean, tedious and cumbersome task to execute. From all the researches through out years, we can conclude that nature had given us a transmitter but not a receiver. A receiver that can recieve signals without any filtration. In certain instances we can communicate without using vocal ability through the aid of eye movement or facial expressions we can send or express thoughts to other person but then these thoughts gets filtered through our senses. World would have been very different if humans had possessed the power of telepathy or if somehow conjured the power of mind reading. Laws of nature doesnt allowed us to read each others mind. Its really appreciable how research is progressing on mind communication but we are far from claiming victory over nature. I will be overwhelmed and damned if scientist of our generation able to reach this feat. We are limited by our current technology which is really really primitive compared to cosmological time scale. To have new ground breaking tech, new physics is obligatory. Elon Musk neuralink programme shows some fuzzy positive signs but the technique he proposed of interface technology i.e putting a microchip into human brain sounds like science fiction and may be it is but lets see what happens in the coming decade. I agree that telepathy is now vaguely possible by aid of technology but telepathy without having any technological middle man is just a part of our wildest fantasies. We dont know specifically how our thoughts emerge in our mind. Able to see and perceive our own thoughts is like having an internal eye to see all those thoughts as if its happening in front of our eyes. In my opinion for telepathy to emerge biologically as a feature of human brain, evolution have to strike in and not just a small change but a drastic change in brain functionality. But honestly, I am not sure wheather evolution will trigger this operation. It might trigger if circumstances changes and a situation comes when telepathy becomes first hand need for survival. But its highly unlikely as far as current senerio of humanity is concerned. Now does our mother have Psychic powers, absolutely not. But mother are mother, what can we say. They know us more than we know ourselves.

What are your thoughts on this ? Comment down below.

Thanks for reading this blog. Means alot for me.