Is telepathy possible? Shocking discovery

Is telepathy possible? Shocking discovery

Wait a minute before you start judging! I’m not talking about the sci-fi movie type of telepathy that Professor X has. And I’m not certainly talking about those con artists that you’ve seen (or heard) on TV shows. I assure you…it’s not what you’re thinking.

I’m referring to something called Quantum Non-Locality.

Hang on for a bit and let me take you for a ride.

First of all, what’s Telepathy?

The most basic definition of telepathy is:

The transmission of information by means other than the known senses between two or more people.

Basically, we are looking at some unknown form of communication that doesn’t involve our 5 senses. Oh and no cheating here. We have to disregard any other information transfer we know of (radio waves, infrared, etc.). So what in the world could make this communication possible?

 

Quantum Non-Locality

Quantum mechanics has been trending for a while now and there’s an interesting occurence in this field, quantum non-locality.

This effect refers to an instant transmission of information between two entangled objects regardless of their spatial separation.

This happens on an atomic or sub-atomic level. Particles become intertwined when they interact physically (e.g. two photon particles). They bump into each other and start behaving in symmetry, perfectly correlated. So when one action is performed on one of them, the other one is affected as well. And no matter the distance between them, they will react instantly. Even if they are on separate ends of the Galaxy! I wonder how would a long distance relationship be like in these conditions?

Anyway, is there a chance that we might see this quantum non-locality in human interactions as well? Well, there have been a couple of experiments that aim towards this possibility. Let’s see the research:

Quantum Non-Locality in Human Interactions

1. Inter-brain correlation [1]. There was a study in the 80’s that found out that when two people meditate together, their brains’ EEG shows a similar wave pattern. These aligned just after 20 minutes of meditating in the same room. Like a pair of synchronized dancers, isn’t it awesome?

Remember how we said earlier that 2 particles entangle when they interact physically? Well, group meditation might be a way to entangle two brains. Once we check that their brain patterns look symmetric we can try to distance them and see if this connection holds up. Well, that’s exactly what they did in this next experiment.

2. Transferred potentials [2]. So first, they set up pairs of meditators. They put them together for 20 minutes until their brain activity aligns and then they proceed to separate them. Each one of them is placed in a Faraday sound proof cage, 14.5 meters apart. An electromagnetic shield room. This means that no electronic devices can reach inside that “cage” and basically a mobile phone would have no signal inside.

Next, once they’re set up, they apply 100 brief light flashes to one of the participants, at random intervals. The other participant doesn’t know when this flashes will occur and just sits quietly in the other room, focused on trying to feel his partner being stimulated.

So for the participant receiving the flashes, you would expect small spikes in their EEG for each flash, right? Nothing out of the ordinary here. But that wasn’t everything they saw!

Since they were also recording the brain activity of the other meditator (the one just sitting around in silence), they saw changes in this subject’s wave patterns. Strange, right? If there’s no flash then nothing should cause these spikes. Well, something was happening and it came from the other room.

Photo by Public Domain Pictures

The researchers found that a high correlation (0.7–0.93) takes place in the first 132 microseconds (that is 0.000132 seconds). So when the stimulated meditator received a flash, there was a also a wave spike in the non-stimulated meditator’s brain in the following 132 microseconds. That is some instant transmission right there!

This happened in 25% of the cases and you could see a similar brain pattern in those pair of participants. Interestingly, when these partners didn’t get to see each other and didn’t know that their partner was in the other chamber, no transfer occurred. One might think you need some kind of intention and awareness for it to work (just like when a wave function collapses due to the presence of an observer). So consciousness has to be part of the equation.

All this yields interesting results but keep in mind that these are the first scientific experiments on this subject. There’s a long way to go.

It’s important to say that in these tests, the meditators are not aware of this communication even though their brains do seem to intertwine. Some just get a feeling that a connection happened, but that’s it.

So what would happen if we developed our minds to the point in which we are able to perceive more subtle changes in our physiology? I mean really become aware of this connection.

References

[1] Grinberg-Zylberbaum, J., & Ramos, J. (1987). Patterns of interhemispheric correlation during human communication. International Journal of Neuroscience, 36(1–2), 41–53.

[2] Grinberg-Zylberbaum, J., Delaflor, M., Attie, L., & Goswami, A. (1994). The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain: The Transferred Potential. Physics Essays, 7(4), 422–428.

How to understand locality and non-locality in Quantum Mechanics? Retrieved from https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/200642/how-to-understand-locality-and-non-locality-in-quantum-mechanics on the 12th of April 2020.

Standish, L., Johnson, C., Richards, T., & Kozak, L. (2003). Evidence of correlated functional magnetic resonance imaging signals between distant human brains. Published in: Alternative Therapies, Volume 9, Number 1.