1. From the realm of personal experience to new knowledge

By Dr Dianne Cartwright

Telepathy our Lost Sense

Telepathy and extrasensory perception (ESP) intrigue millions of people all over our world. Surveys show that belief in these phenomena is widespread and stories concerning them permeate our culture in books, film, and television.

However, people rarely talk about their personal experiences for fear of ridicule or worse. In previous centuries, those with abilities in these areas faced accusations of witchcraft, punishment and death. Until recently, the Wikipedia definition of telepathy was derogatory, equating it with ‘hearing voices’, suggesting that it was symptomatic of a severe mental illness or brain disease, such as epilepsy. Disclosing an interest in these topics in the world of scientists is taboo and funding for research in this area is virtually non-existent.

Personal experience

My curiosity was sparked by personal experiences which commenced in my teenage years, and those of friends who confided in me. While my personal experiences have been few and far between, they are incredible and unforgettable. As I became more comfortable discussing this topic with friends and hearing their equally amazing stories, I asked myself two very simple questions:

How many people have these experiences? 

Were we odd or was this a normal part of the human experience?

Surveying telepathic experiences

To find the answers, I surveyed the patients attending my general practice in Cairns, a coastal town in far north Queensland, Australia. Almost 170 patients were eligible and willing to take part in the survey.

In medicine, an illness is considered common if it occurs in ten percent of a population, while a rare illness is present in fewer than one in 1000 people.

The results of my survey were surprising. Just under fifty percent of the participants had at least one extrasensory experience and over eighty percent had received or sent a telepathic message to one other person. This astonishing number of positive responses indicated to me that telepathy and extrasensory perception were common in my patient population. This suggests that telepathy and extrasensory perception should not be dismissed as natural human abilities, nor should they be thought of as rare or a manifestation of illness.

My patients shared over 200 of their experiences, ranging from straight forward telepathy — the transmission of information from one person’s mind to another — to having had ‘visits’ from loved ones who were dying, or seeing the future while awake or in dreams, and seeing or feeling ghosts.

There must be an explanation for this ability.

A biological approach and the science of electromagnetic radiation

Both my study as a scientist and profession as a medical doctor led me to think that there could be a biological process involved in the reception of information from one individual to another — without the use of the ‘normal’ senses of sight, hearing or touch. If I was correct, this process must be rooted in our physiology and conform with the laws of physics, in the same way as our normal senses do.

One of my scientific heroes is William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood and published his work in 1628. By observing the flow of blood in the veins towards the heart and the volume of blood in the left ventricle of the heart, he was able to calculate the amount of blood pumped out by the heart in half a minute, thereby deducing that the blood must circulate around the body and back to the heart. It took another two centuries, the invention of the microscope and the discovery of capillaries connecting the veins and arteries, before scientists proved Harvey’s hypothesis.

In collecting and analysing an immense amount of data from the survey, I aspired to emulate Harvey and shed some light on how a person can receive and send telepathic messages. For many years, research into ESP consisted of collecting anecdotes from interested people and conducting guessing games using Zener cards. These experiments were severely criticised for faulty design and improper use of statistics, not to mention possible fraud. Later research used more rigorous methodology, such as the Ganzfield experiments, where participants’ sight and hearing were shielded while attempting to guess which card of five possibilities had been chosen. While some of the results were statistically significant, they were hardly likely to set the world on fire. It is not awe-inspiring to show that participants choosing between two options correctly guessed fifty-three percent of the time – instead of fifty percent.

Research into ESP has languished in the doldrums since the 1990s. With one or two rare exceptions, no serious experiments have been carried out since then. The US government provided funding through the CIA for experimentation with “remote viewing” by some adepts and psychics in the 1970s and 80s at the Stanford Research Institute in California. Edgar Mitchell, one of the astronauts on the Apollo missions, was a founder of the Noetic Sciences Institute, which conducted research into some aspects of presentiment – that is, “feeling the future”. Psychologist Daniel Bem was soundly criticised for his research into precognition that using students who preferentially remembered words from a list that they would later learn in the future. Finally, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the late Dr Michael Persinger – a psychologist – and his coworkers at Laurentian College in Canada studied the brainwaves of an expert while he was “mind reading.”

A plausible hypothesis and new knowledge

The BRAIN Initiative

I took my two signature stories of a telepathic message – one I had received and one I had sent – to a friend who is a quantum physicist. She listened patiently and then said, “I think your brain is acting as an antenna for telepathic messages carried by electromagnetic radiation.” This idea had been proposed in the past, by a Russian researcher and by Dr Persinger, but was unable to be developed for lack of a plausible mechanism.

Now, exciting new knowledge is available that enabled me to research my friend’s idea. In 2013, President Barack Obama announced the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), designed to investigate how the brain processes information into thoughts and consequent behaviour. The BRAIN initiative has paid off in myriad ways and has filled many gaps in our understanding of the brain and its neurones.

We have developed new technology with quantitative electroencephalographs (EEGs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI scans) to study the working brain and designate the areas and pathways the brain uses – for example while we do mental arithmetic. Lastly and most importantly, Brain–Computer-Interfacing (BCI) can transmit thoughts from one brain to a computer and can also facilitate transmission between one human mind and another. Also, a whole new world of research has described the interaction of Earth’s magnetic field and living organisms, to prove that many animals have a magnetic sense.

It follows that natural telepathy, without the interposition of a computing system, is theoretically possible.