Telepathy
Telepathy is the concept of transmitting information between individuals without relying on the conventional senses such as speech or hearing. Often categorized as a form of extrasensory perception (ESP), telepathy is thought to involve the transfer of thoughts, emotions, or images. Despite its intriguing nature, the scientific community remains skeptical due to the challenges in proving its existence. The term "telepathy," originating from Greek words meaning "distant feeling," has roots in ancient practices, such as the Egyptians' dream incubation, where they sought insights through dreams.
The phenomenon gained popularity in the 19th century with the establishment of organizations dedicated to psychic research, like the Society for Psychical Research. Various experiments have attempted to validate telepathy, including well-known tests like the ganzfeld experiment, which aimed to isolate participants to enhance potential telepathic communication. In recent years, studies have explored the idea of telepathy through advanced technologies, including brain imaging and EEGs, hinting at the potential for mental messaging. While definitive proof remains elusive, interest in telepathy persists, with some anecdotal evidence suggesting that certain individuals, such as identical twins, or even animals, may share a unique communicative bond that hints at telepathic abilities.
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Telepathy
Telepathy is the transmission of information from one person to another without using the senses normally associated with communication. Telepathic messages may be in the form of words, emotions, or images. Telepathy is an extrasensory perception (ESP), a kind of sixth sense. Individuals believed to have ESP can transmit information without using the physical senses of speech, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Because it is difficult, if not impossible, to scientifically prove the existence of telepathy, many doubt its existence. However, telepathy was being increasingly studied in the early twenty-first century, with researchers believing in its existence under certain circumstances.
Background
The term telepathy is derived from the Greek tele (distant) and pathe (occurrence or feeling). Telepathy is not a new phenomenon and has existed since ancient times. However, ancient peoples believed that it existed only in dreams. Around 2000 BCE, the ancient Egyptians engaged in what they called “dream incubation.” They slept in religious temples, hoping to receive dreams inspired by their gods that would give them insight into the future or help them solve existing problems. They also tried to communicate with others through their dreams. The ancient Greek philosopher Democritus theorized that people could transmit emotionally charged images into the brains of sleeping people via their pores.
The first recorded telepathic experiment is believed to have taken place in 550 BCE, when King Croesus of Lydia asked seven famous oracles to reveal what he was doing on a given day. One, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, was able to answer correctly—Croesus was making lamb and turtle stew in a bronze kettle.
Interest in telepathy peaked in the nineteenth century, when the term telepathy was coined by historian Frederic Myers in 1882. Myers was also a cofounder of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which investigated telepathy along with other unexplained psychic phenomena. During the early 1880s, members of SPR performed many trials to try to prove the existence of telepathy. They asked a sender in one room to transmit a two-digit number, a taste, or an image to a receiver in a different room. Their trials occasionally succeeded.
Also in the 1880s, Washington Irving Bishop (1855–1889) performed “thought-reading” demonstrations, in which he would ask a member of the audience to hide an object in a secret location. He then asked the person to recall the location of the object while he held the person’s hand or wrist. He claimed to be able to find the object after doing this. However, Bishop did not believe that this was a paranormal phenomenon. He said he could do this by reading an individual’s unconscious body cues. Bishop published his findings in the book Second Sight Explained (1880).
The famous neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) expressed an interest in telepathy, which he theorized was a primitive sense that had been lost during evolution but could still emerge at times. While at a 1911 meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, Freud described three cases involving the transfer of thought.
The first “scientific” experiments to prove the existence of telepathy began in 1927 and were conducted by J.B. Rhine, a botanist who founded parapsychology as a branch of psychology, and his associates at Duke University. Rhine’s experiments differed from those of the past because the procedures were systematic, and the participants were “average citizens” rather than people claiming to have telepathic abilities. Rhine tested his subject using Zener cards, which have different shapes printed on them. During experiments, one person views a card while the second person tries to guess the shape printed on the card. While the findings seemed to support the existence of mind-reading capabilities, Rhine felt that it was difficult to differentiate whether they were evidence of telepathy, clairvoyance, or precognition. In 1934, he published a book about the experiments, Extra-Sensory Perception. Much of Rhine’s work was eventually discredited, however, when it was discovered that his subjects may have been able to see the shape on the front of a card by looking at the back.
In 1971, a telepathic experiment was reportedly conducted during the Apollo 14 mission to prove that distance was not a barrier in sending and receiving telepathic messages. Astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell (1930–2016) concentrated on sequences of twenty-five random numbers. After doing this two hundred times, two of the recipients on Earth guessed correctly fifty-one times. Mitchell’s study was not authorized by NASA, however.
In 1975 the US government launched Project Star Gate, also called Scanate, a secret US Army unit operating at Fort Meade, Maryland. The project’s goal was to investigate the potential of military personnel to use remote viewing, which would enable them to locate enemies through visualization. The project began after reports during the Cold War of the Soviet Union investigating psychic research. According to declassified US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents, the CIA contacted Uri Geller, a UK television personality who became famous bending spoons with her mind. Congress funded Project Star Gate until 1995 when it concluded that it was unsuccessful in military operations. While not mentioned by name, Project Star Gate was featured in a 2004 book and 2009 film titled The Men Who Stare at Goats.
First conducted in 1974 by parapsychologist Charles Honorton (1946–1992), the ganzfeld experiment has become one of the most popular tests for telepathic abilities. During this type of experiment, a receiver is seated in a comfortable chair in a soundproof room. He or she listens to white noise through headphones. Two halves of ping-pong balls are placed over the receiver’s eyes, and a red light is shone on his or her face. This is all done to create a feeling of sensory deprivation. The sender, who is in a different room, is shown an image and asked to transmit it to the receiver over a period of about twenty minutes. Then the receiver is shown four images and asked to choose the one that was sent. After conducting about seven hundred experiments, Honorton and his colleagues concluded that the correct image had been selected about 34 percent of the time, which is a significantly higher percentage than the 25 percent expected by chance.
Overview
Research to prove the possible existence of telepathy continues into the twenty-first century. Some experiments seem to suggest its existence, at least in some individuals.
In 2005, Rupert Sheldrake (1942 – ), an English author and parapsychology researcher, used an employment website to recruit fifty participants. Researchers showed the participants four email addresses and asked them to guess which one would contact them. Of 552 trials, 43 percent of the guesses were correct, a percentage much higher than expected by chance.
In 2008, Ganesan Venkatasubramanian (1975 – ), an Indian psychiatrist, and his colleagues conducted a study with a mentalist, someone who believes he or she is telepathic, and a control subject. Each was placed in a different room. A researcher in a third room drew an image in the presence of other researchers. Then both the mentalist and the control subject were asked to draw the image. The mentalist was able to draw a similar image, while the control subject was not. Through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the experiment also revealed that when the mentalist was successful, the right parahippocampal gyrus (PHG), a region of the brain, was activated while it was not activated in the control subject.
In 2014, a research team, which included researchers from Harvard University, used modern technology to send a mental message from a person in France to an individual in India. The sender thought of the word “ciao.” Then an EEG (electroencephalogram) was used to pick up the signal from the sender’s brain. The researchers translated the signal into binary code and sent it via the Internet to a computer on the receiving end. The message was turned into impulses and transmitted into the receiver’s brain. While the receiver saw only flashes of light and not the word “ciao,” researchers considered the experiment successful and believed it may lead to people being able to send email messages using their brain.
Researchers defending their continued experimentation into the existence of telepathy point out that some identical twins appear to routinely read one another’s minds. Animals also seem to be able to communicate telepathically, which, if true, would explain how a dog knows when its owner is about to come home and a flock of birds all change direction at the same time.
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