How can telepathy be possible in perspective of science?

[HydrogenBond]

Telephathy if possible should work according to Special Relativity. The mind enters a new distance reference, one of contracted space. This allows two brains to overlap and share the same brain space. One possible way to measured it, might be to see if parallel brain waves appear to two test subjects. Both test subjects should be placed in a different environments to scramble the brain via sensory input. The brain waves should overlap independant of sensory inputscramble, when telephathy occurs.

[alxian]

so far as such tests have shown similar stimulation is required

 

much the same as entanglement it could be that similarity, uniformity even an imperfect similarity breeds (or is enable by) a form of instantineity?

[Dark Mind]

Welcome Nad :D.

 

And very good posts from both of you, Nad and alxian.

 

I have no idea how to treat your claims scientifically, Nad. I think science would just treat all of those occasions as coincidences, even if managed to mind read a person who was thinking of a one hundred and fifty digit long number... It's all coincidence to science because it cannot be proved through the scientific method (Fully) that you aren't just getting REALLY[/i] lucky :eek2:.

 

Do you have to see the person in order to do it? Or could you just be near them, like back to back with someone?

 

alxian, I also believe that the true potential of the human mind lies dormant waiting to be unlocked. This has been proven by science, but what are the full implications of this? This is where science has left us once again.

 

Reflexes and instincts are, by definition, not conscious acts so your assertion of this is not of much importance. Your question afterwards, though,

could there be a way to exercize it to achieve a sort of maximum potential? (that being the full repetoir of all known and theoretical weird brain powers at our command?)

serves to bring more importance. I believe you can exercize your ability to unlock "the full repertoire" of "weird brain powers" (;)), but not consciously.

 

To use as an example... I got interested/hooked on a game called Dance Dance Revolution while watching MTV a while back. They were showing videos of a contest that was held locally where people were supposed to show who was the "best" DDR player. The game consists of a percussive dance club beat, a "Dance Pad" (in the arcades it's a metal platform with arrows on the ground, for home use they have a ply-foam base that connects either to a PS2 or XBOX), a weird collage of images in lieu of an actual music video, and arrows scrolling from the bottom to the top of the screen. The goal is to step on the appropriate arrow once it reaches the marked area on top of the screen. I watched these people doing it on it's hardest difficulty, "Heavy"(There are three difficulties, Heavy, Standard, and Light), and thought it would be easy. I thought I'd try it and got the game and dance pad about two months ago... I could barely do the damn thing on it's easiest difficulty on some of the "easier" songs (Less BPM's-- Beats Per Minute) :D. I unplugged the pad and stuck in the controller to try it with my thumbs... Still sucked, but I was better. I got to the point I could get a "AA" on a song with 180 BPM's on Heavy. I could only do this by letting my sub-conscious mind control where my thumbs went since the arrows were scrolling by WAY too fast for me to keep up with consciously. After learning this nifty little trick I am now able to get an "A" on Standard using the Dance Pad... working my way up to Heavy again :).

 

Kind of a long example, but I think it gets the point across that "Yes, you can train your mind to use those dormant abilities it has tucked away." ;).

[Dark Mind]

Telephathy if possible should work according to Special Relativity. The mind enters a new distance reference, one of contracted space. This allows two brains to overlap and share the same brain space. One possible way to measured it, might be to see if parallel brain waves appear to two test subjects. Both test subjects should be placed in a different environments to scramble the brain via sensory input. The brain waves should overlap independant of sensory inputscramble, when telephathy occurs.

I see I took a little longer than I thought searching for an image for my above post :)... And still came up empty handed ;).

 

Please explain the bolded... It just doesn't make sense to me :eek2:.

[Nad]

thanks for that post alxian... it certainly gives you something to think about

 

Do you have to see the person in order to do it? Or could you just be near them, like back to back with someone?

That's a good question. As far as I can remember, any time I've 'read someone's mind I was looking at them. I'm not always looking at their face or making eye contact, but I can always see them. Generally I 'read minds' while in conversation with the person though, so that could be the reason for it- I usually look at people when I'm talking to them. I've never been able to read someone's mind over the internet or phone though, so I'll at least assume that I have to be near them.

 

That's an interesting story with your DDR. Have you ever considered that musicians might do the same? :eek2: I played saxaphone in music class a good few years ago, and it felt the same. Eventually you stop consciously reading the notes on the paper and you train yourself to let your body see them and react accordingly on its own.

[Dark Mind]

Hmmm, maybe it might just be the old addage "Practice makes perfect." that's coming into play in these scenarios...

 

...But, also, it might be practicing to use our "dormant abilities" :eek2:.

[HydrogenBond]

Special Relativity distance contraction is an artifact of traveling near the speed of light. This causes the distance to contract, mass to increase and time to dilate. Einstein wrote it as three separate equations imply each can act independantly. With distance contraction, there is not a physical overlap of the brains in the rigid sense, only the observed distance appears closer such that distant events ,out of sensory range, become close enough to be seen. The brain works by positiive charge is motion due to sodium pumps and neutron firing, etc. The distance dilation implies magnetic fields getting closer. The overlapped field induction will cause parallel neuron firing, triggering simlar memory.

[paultrr]

Some of you have asked the question about how does one treat these claims. During a certain period the Government examined and explored telepathy( we did this about the same period the Russians played around with it. ie-Cold War) a bit as to its possible usage as a weaphon, etc. With no concret physics to go on the best they could use is experiment control methods, etc to begin to study this. If they in random testing discovered someone that appeared to have such abilities, they tested that individual further making each test harder to be the result of pure random chance. Certain individuals did perform way beyond the level of pure chance. However, to my knowledge no one to this day has ever discovered exactly how any of these abilities does function even though speculative theories abound.

 

I've noticed references to SR and Quantum theory here before. The problem with the quantum ideas is we do not have a solid quantum theory in the way of a working unified field theory today. That leaves a lot to guess work and speculation there and puts most of this outside of sciences ability to even begin how to further test such.

 

Left with all that documentation and duplication are the best I could suggest.

[CraigD]

… However, to my knowledge no one to this day has ever discovered exactly how any of these abilities does function even though speculative theories abound….

My impression, due mostly from Skeptical Inquirer, is that CSICOP has made a number of systematic investigation of several claims of telepathy, astral projection, and remote viewing from organizations and individuals once sponsored by the US and USSR governments, and in most or all of the cases, were able to either forensically reconstruct each claims validating experiments, or obtain first-hand descriptions from the original participants, arriving at the conclusion that these cases were forms of “stage magic”. Government and military officials, it appears, are no or not much less susceptible to persuasion using such techniques than is the general public.

[CraigD]

(:lol: sung to the tune of Cole Porter’s “Lets fall in love”)

 

One of the simplest proposed explanations for telepathy is that it is a kind of radio reception of the low-power changing electromagnetic fields of human and animal nervous systems. It’s demonstrated and explained fact that several kinds of bottom-feeding cartilaginous fish (eg: sharks and rays) are able to do just this to detect prey hiding on the ocean floor, using special organs present on their undersides. There’s no evidence that these fish sense more than the presence of other fish, or that the effect works beyond a distance of a few centimeters.

 

These limitations aside, if pressed to answer this thread’s initial question,

How can telepathy be possible in perspective of science?

 

Does the brain emit electric pulses?

 

If so then is telepathy plausible?...

I feel compelled to answer a qualified “yes”, stressing that the “telepathy” in question bears little resemblance to the “mind reading” that most proponents of telepathy mean by the term.

[HydrogenBond]

Science is funny sometimes. Nobody has ever seen strings or a dozen dimensions yet mainstream science will embrace that. Whereas ESP type phenomena happens all the time yet it is pushed to the sideline by science. The litmus paper here appears to be mathematics instead of experimental, since strings have no experimental proof but good mathematics. If one can calculate the probability of a series of consecutive coincidences, such that these should not occur, but they do anyway, that proves that it did not happen by chance. There is some type of orderring principle.

[Erasmus00]

Science is funny sometimes. Nobody has ever seen strings or a dozen dimensions yet mainstream science will embrace that. Whereas ESP type phenomena happens all the time yet it is pushed to the sideline by science. The litmus paper here appears to be mathematics instead of experimental, since strings have no experimental proof but good mathematics.

 

The litmus test is actually reproducibility. Most "spectacular" ESP claims aren't reproducible in controlled environments. The effects one can reproduce usually fail to excite the imagination, and aren't what is typically considered ESP by the public at large (ganzfeld procedure, etc). A 35% chance (vs 25%) of guessing the right answer in a choice of four is a far cry from bending spoons(a la con man Uri Geller) or communicating with the dead (a la con man John Edwards).

 

As for string theory, string theory has a tremendous potential to tie together previously seperate areas of physics, just as special relativity tied together electricity and magnetism. People believe it because they believe these unifications are more then just a coincidence. Wether or not they are right remains to be seen.

-Will