What is Telepathy?
Telepathy as a concept refers to the transfer of information from one person’s mind to another without using a physical channel. This phenomenon occurs without any known physical interaction or human sensory channels. The term ‘Telepathy’ was first coined by the classical scholar Frederic W. H. Myers (a founder of the coveted Society for Psychical Research) in 1882.
Telepathy experiments have been widely criticized for lacking proper controls and repeatability. There has been no significant evidence pointing at the existence of telepathy. The topic is generally considered to be pseudoscience by the scientific community.
Origin of Telepathy
Historians such as Janet Oppenheim and Roger Luckhurst have argued that the origin of telepathy can be traced to the late 19th century in Western civilization. This origin can be linked to the formation of the Society for Psychical Research, as all their advances in the physical sciences community were bound to be applied to mental phenomena such as animal magnetism. This application was developed while hoping to understand the paranormal experience better.
In Parapsychology
Within the concept of parapsychology, telepathy is often understood in addition to clairvoyance and precognition. It is primarily described as a factor of an individual’s extrasensory perception. The most common experiments parapsychologists utilize for testing someone’s telepathic abilities are Zener cards and the Ganzfeld experiment.
Zener cards
Zener cards are one of the most common experiments utilized by parapsychologists to test someone’s telepathic abilities. Primarily, Zener cards are marked with five different symbols. While using them, one individual acts as the ‘sender’ while the other becomes the ‘receiver.’ The sender chooses a card and visualizes a symbol, while the receiver tries to determine that symbol using telepathy.
Mathematically, the chances of a receiver randomly guessing the correct symbol are 20%. To validate telepathy, one must score a success rate higher than 20%. The only problem with the method is that, if not conducted properly, this method is vulnerable to sensory leakage and card counting.
Ganzfeld experiment
Ganzfeld experiment is another procedure for testing the existence of telepathy. During this experiment, the receiver is placed in a controlled environment, deprived of all forms of sensory input. On the other hand, the sender is placed in a completely different location. For this experiment to succeed, the receiver is then asked to receive information from the sender.
Even the Ganzfeld experiment had some possibilities of sensory leakage. These possibilities included either the receiver’s hearing everything happening in the sender’s room or the sender’s fingerprints being visible on the target object for the receiver to observe.
Ray Hyman, a professor of psychology and a noted critic of parapsychology, reviewed the autoganzfeld experiments and stipulated that the data pattern was too similar, which implied a visual cue. According to him, the most suspicious fact was that the hit rate for a given target increased along with the frequency of the target’s occurrence in this experiment. For the targets that occurred once, the hit rate was 25%. While on the other hand, targets that appeared twice had a hit rate of almost 28%. Similarly, for targets that occurred three times, it was 38%, and so on. Hyman postulated that the autoganzfeld experiments were majorly flawed because they failed to include a possibility of sensory leakage.
According to Hyman, a “reliance on meta-analysis as the only basis for justifying a claim of an anomaly’s existence and as a piece of evidence for it is consistent and replicability is false. It stands against everything that scientists understand as confirmatory evidence.” Hyman wrote that the ganzfeld studies cannot be replicated independently and thus have failed to produce any evidence for the existence of telepathy.
Types of Telepathy
There are several forms of telepathy known to us -
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Latent telepathy - Earlier known as ‘deferred telepathy.’ This telepathy describes a transfer of information from one person to another with a noticeable time lag between transmission and reception.
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Retrocognitive, precognitive, and intuitive telepathy - This form of telepathy describes a transfer of information about the state of an individual’s mind to another individual.
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Emotive telepathy - Also known as a remote influence, this form of telepathy or emotional communication is used to describe the transfer of kinesthetic sensations through altered states of an individual’s mind.
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Superconscious telepathy - This form of telepathy describes the utilization of the supposed superconscious. The subconscious is used to access the collective wisdom of the human species for knowledge.
Twin telepathy
Twin telepathy refers to the belief that has been primarily described as a modern myth in the studies of psychological literature. Critical psychologists such as Stephen Hupp and Jeremy Jewell have postulated that all experiments done in this regard have failed to provide any factual basis or scientific evidence for telepathy between twins.
According to Jewell and Hupp, even though various behavioral and genetic factors contribute to this myth, an accurate conclusion cannot be drawn on this basis alone. The twin telepathy myth argues that “identical twins typically spend a considerable amount of time together and thus, are usually exposed to very similar environments. Hence, the idea of them having similar behaviors is surprising. They act similarly due to their surroundings and are adept at forecasting and anticipating each other’s reactions to certain events. This adeptness, however, can be misunderstood as twin telepathy.”
A 1993 study by Susan Blackmore, a psychologist, lecturer, and writer, investigated twin telepathy claims. In this experiment, she worked with six sets of twins, where one will act as the sender and the other as a receiver. The sender was given a collection of selected objects, photographs, or numbers. The sender was then asked to attempt this telepathy by psychically sending the information to their twin receiver. Considering that most of the results from this experiment were negative, no evidence of telepathy was thus observed.
The skeptical investigator Benjamin Radford was another person who noted that “there is no credible scientific evidence that psychic powers exist, despite decades of research trying to prove otherwise. The notion that just because two people shared their mother’s womb—or even those with the same DNA- can have a mysterious mental connection is intriguing, but it is definitely not borne out of science.”