The Trouble With Telepathy

Do you believe in telepathy? If so, do you think it will ever be “scientifically proven”?

I’ve been reading Ghost Hunters by Deborah Blum, a history of the British and American Societies for Psychical Research. Loads of interesting stuff – and fascinating reading for anyone else keen to bring edgy psychological ideas into the mainstream.

From the 1840s, these guys were investigating all kinds of strange phenomena, from talking tables and ectoplasm, through to a bizarre automatic-writing correspondence between three recently-deceased ex-members, speaking in Greek and Latin via mediums worldwide, and apparently still coming up with innovative experimental techniques to try and prove that they really were the spirits they said they were.

Nowadays a lot of it sounds pretty barking.

But several of the ideas they championed have entered the mainstream. Hypnosis, for example. And the idea that people have a subconscious mind, which may have greater awareness than the conscious mind. The SPR was first to publish Sigmund Freud in the UK, because of his interest in the subconscious.

But the aspect of their work and thinking that struck me most related to their experiments with telepathy. Test results often seemed slightly wrong. A man might try to “send” the taste of Worcestershire sauce, but what was “received” was the taste of vinegar.

Investigator Edmund Gurney theorised: “Perhaps the information might be sent in one form, but it might then be altered – bent even – by the mind of the receiver….

“Like a thousand everyday conversations: Henry and Nora Sidgwick talking about their garden, her mind calling up images of glorious roses and starry lillies, his mind flinching from memories of pollen-dusted air and hay fever miseries. The same subject filtered through different experiences – even between two people who knew each other well. Why should anyone expect the sharing of a thought to be easy or predictable?”

In fact, in language, we’re constantly misunderstanding one another. In almost every word we use, each of us has a slightly different understanding from anyone else’s (see my blog post here for more on this). One of the benefits of X-Ray Listening (and the Clean Language on which it is based) is to help people get clear about what they actually mean by a spoken word or phrase, metaphoric or otherwise.

So I’m definitely with the guys from the SPR on this. Why should sharing a thought using telepathy be any easier or more precise than using words? Maybe language evolved because telepathy wasn’t quite precise enough?

For what it’s worth, my own experiences suggest that there’s something in telepathy (in contrast to the “mind reading” involved in a Clean Language session, which is based on careful listening, observation and modelling, with a dose of experience-based intuition thrown in.)

But in each of my “telepathic” experiences, the sender has been in a heightened emotional state, the receiver in a very relaxed state, and what was received was pretty vague. Not the stuff that leads to reliably repeatable experiments.

As the SPR pointed out, the mainstream scientists didn’t ask for a shooting star or a meteor shower to be replicated. Perhaps the interesting messiness of life and death was the point.

What do you think? Any experiences to report? Please comment below.