Is it Possible to Send Our Thoughts by Telepathy?

 

Thank you, Tan Sri, for your article on transcendental meditation and its benefits. 

Thank you for sharing, and also for your question to me on any possibility on long distance communication using thoughts? Hmm! 

I shall try to answer this question. Bear with me.

 

Ever since humans evolved some 315,000 years ago, they have been communicating.

The earliest civilizations between 4000 and 3000 B.C.E., during the rise of agriculture and trade to allow people to have surplus food and economic stability they need to communicate. In earlier years humans communicated using cave paintings, smoke signals, symbols, carrier pigeons, and telegraph.

Our modern methods are more convenient and efficient. We communicate from far using postal services by writing letters, later by telephones, television, Internet, e-mails, later mobile and smartphones, social media, text messaging and through WhatsApp.

Communications has now reached a stage that has become easier and easier, and faster and faster too and knowledge using computers and the Internet has increased tremendously.  

 

But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased

(Daniel 12:4)

 

However, since I was an innocent boy in school I have heard of the word “telepathy” that we can send our thoughts by long distance to a friend, but I had no clue how this can be achieved.

 Today, I have often thought if it was possible.  Can we really communicate by just thinking and the other person at the other end just receives the brain waves of our thoughts, just like we hear voices and music through a radio where radio waves from a transmitter are transmitted long distances and the signals are converted and amplified into sounds?

Let’s have a look at this possibility by using brain waves we call telepathy.

In 1924 an Austrian psychiatrist by the name Hans Berger placed electrodes on the human scalp and was able to detect wavering electrical spikes and waves using a very sensitive galvanometer. He was frightened by this finding.  

He dared not publish it until 1929. Ever since this discovery, techniques in recording brain waves have been refined for them to be recorded on paper. 

Today, we call this electroencephalography from the Greek word to mean “electric writing from the brain.” We abbreviated this as EEG.

 

EEG shows certain electrical activities or rhythms going on in the brain. For instance, when we are asleep the EEG shows a large, slow delta rhythm. 

On waking up, but with eyes closed, the rhythms change into alpha rhythms. But when we open our eyes the rhythms accelerate, but become smaller into beta rhythms with occasional slow, smaller theta rhythms seen.

There are two types of sleep, non-rapid eye-movement (NREM) sleep and rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep. NREM sleep is divided into stages 1, 2, 3, and 4, representing a continuum of relative depth. Each has unique characteristics including variations in brain wave patterns, eye movements, and muscle tone.

 

Normally when one goes to sleep, the low-voltage fast EEG pattern of wakefulness gradually gives way to slower frequencies, as NREM sleep goes from stage N1 (decrease in alpha) to stage N2 (spindles, K-complexes) to stage N3 (increasing amplitude and regularity of delta rhythm). 

When we dream, our brains are filled with noisy electrical activity that looks nearly identical to that of the awake brain.

 

We can hook up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) to monitor our brain activity as we progress from wakefulness to deep, slow-wave sleep and on into REM sleep. But EEGs alone will not be able tell whether or not we are awake or dreaming. 

But we can only distinguish REM sleep by recording rapid eye movement (REM) and muscle tone, since our bodies relax in a general paralysis to prevent us from acting out our dreams. But it is not possible to use EEG to read a person's thoughts.

Neuroscientists cannot tell us exactly what these rhythms mean and why the electric potentials change their variations in various stages of wake, sleep and dreams? 

However, we know that every nerve in the brain transmits a tiny bit of electric impulses. But the human brain has something like 100 billion nerve cells, and with each contributing a bit of their own electric impulses.  We can only take an average of the sum of them to show them collectively as EEG patterns. But can we use EEG to listen? In some ways, the answer is yes. 

We get all kinds of mixed and confusing radio signals all the time including a collection of all the electrical signals coming from our brains.

Using the EEG is similar to listening to human activities the world over. All we hear is like trying to listen to millions of radio signals all over the world plus radio signals from outer space. All we hear is a collection of confusing signals. 

The noise would be louder by day in certain spots and softer by night. There would be fainter rhythms showing evening hilarity and cheerfulness, and twice daily rush hour human activities, and stress signals from them at work, and probably only slow delta rhythm on one side of earth when everyone is at sleep.

 

In such a general average, only large and serious disruptions such as war, social and political unrest would make a difference in the EEG patterns of humans all over the world or only in certain locations. In this way we can use the EEG to detect human noise and their activities the world over.

But what about our individual thinking inside our brain? Could someone use EEG to listen to someone’s thoughts?  As I have already explained it is not possible to use EEG to read a person’s thoughts. 

An EEG is not like an electrocardiogram (ECG) that records the electrical activity of the heart. An ECG can help diagnose certain heart conditions, including abnormal heart rhythms and coronary heart disease such as angina, a heart attack or a heart block from some anomaly in the electric transmission through the heart muscles. 

An ECG recording can even be transmitted over long distances to a cardiologist through telemedicine who can interpret the PQRST waves in the ECG for abnormalities. 

So far, we cannot use EEG for long distance transmission to read thoughts, but probably for diagnosis of abnormal brain electric patterns such as an epileptic seizure.

  

That would be very useful for silent communications that could be amplified like a radio transmitter across the entire world. So far, we can use telemedicine to transmit ECG readings to a cardiologist remotely or the provision of remote clinical services, via real-time two-way communication between the patient and the healthcare provider, using electronic audio and visual means. 

We can of course use telemedicine to transmit EEG readings long distance by wire or wirelessly. But still the other person at the other end, even if he is an expert on EEG recordings cannot tell thoughts from these brain waves unless we have develop some means, such as using AI to analyse subdivisions of these recordings which I shall explain shortly.

 

This is a question in telepathy for which I do not have a definitive answer. It is very difficult to understand how we can use such weak electric signals from the brain against a barrage of all kinds of other extraneous electromagnetic noises and signals in the background. 

How would it be possible even if we can identify certain patterns of the EEG as thoughts or certain messages to send and receive them electromagnetically against the general background of brain noises from other humans, let alone the much more powerful radio and electrical noises that overwhelm our single feeble brain signals when the overall electric potential of our single thinking brain is only in less than a millionth of a volt.

 

Perhaps if our thoughts can be highly isolated coming from a single person, amplified and carried by some radiation, somewhat like a laser light of a particular wavelength and beamed across the world, maybe just to another nearby receiving brain for thought communication. Would this be possible? I don’t know. My brain is not advanced or scientific enough to comprehend this possibility with certainty.

 

But let’s look at this another way.  Perhaps we can use computers and AI to help. It is possible for us to use them to analyze these vague signals of thoughts emitted from our individual brains, differentiate them from all other electrical signals and carry them to a receiving brain. 

In order for this to be possible the EEG readings need to be split by a computer or by AI into many subsidiary rhythms, part of which are our thoughts. See my article on Artificial Intelligence (AI) written just last night hours ago here:

https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/2023/

If we can do this, that would be a single thought from a single brain. It might be possible for us to amplify these specific subdivisions of brain waves as thoughts to be carried across the oceans like short waves radio signals to a friend to listen or to interpret living on the other side of this world. Such an amplified rhythm might produce a pulsing electromagnetic that can be received electromagnetically and later translated into writing.

Alternatively, the receiver can also use a similar device placed on his scalp to read the thoughts of someone else who sent them. In that case telepathy becomes possible through some electronic devices, but not directly without being aided. Just think of a radio or a television and you can understand my thoughts.

 

However, scientists at this point of my writing are not that advanced. So, they do not use EEG for monitoring human activities, their thinking or for silent communications. Scientists gave their discovery to medical doctors to diagnose brain diseases such as epilepsy, seizure disorders and brain tumors.  

But let us say we have made a scientific breakthrough to be able to use a computer or Artificial Intelligence to decipher the EEG brain patterns by sub dividing them into differential patterns, one of which is thoughts.  In that case there may be a possibility of telepathy coming into reality. 

We can apply them in the same principle as we do for radio by translating voice or music into electrical impulses, which are then decoded into electromagnetic radio waves for long distances for transmission where the reverse is done to change them into voice and music we can hear and understand. That is a possibility.  

 

But there is one problem. Like a radio or a TV broadcast, anyone can receive them using a receiving device like a radio or television set. How then are we going to make this electrical rhythm of thoughts private, meant only for a specific person?

Then we also have another problem: how do we activate the device only for that specific person with whom we wish to communicate telepathically and no want else?  

Yet any question we need to answer. What advantage then would telepathy have over ordinary speech, the telephone, emails, letters by postal services, or even through WhatsApp messages or even what you are reading right now I send in my blog? You too can read my thoughts right now in this article without telepathy.

 

Perhaps the only advantage of telepathy is to break the language barrier. We all think in different languages, and we can express our thoughts in a language someone can understand. 

Hence even if we can translate brain activities into thoughts and try to transmit them in a language only, we can only understand how we would expect the receiver to understand our thought language, unless we can also translate these brain activities into a language the other person can understand.

However, there is one hope. We can transmit images and pictures of our thoughts, but not foreign languages. As the Chinese proverb by Confucius says, “a picture is worth a thousand words". 

We can then imagine a picture and have it sent telepathically, and the entire world with so many races and languages would have understood it at once.

 

I think our only difficulty with telepathy is that we think of all kinds of unsavoury things in our mind all the time, but we keep them to ourselves most of the time not to offend others by not wanting to express them into words. 

But how are we going to prevent ourselves from thinking all kinds of offensive and unsavoury thoughts all the time, which would then be automatically broadcasted to everyone who wishes to receive our hidden secrets. Then telepathy becomes free for all who have a receiver. It would be no different from a radio broadcast.

 

But it would also be a blessing to the Police and crime busters who would be able to read the minds of criminals instantly without needing to have a lie detector.

But on the other hand, such a scientific discovery may be a blessing in disguise so that we can control our minds and transmit only good and kind thoughts to the rest of our fellow citizens. But this may or may not be an advantage to politicians for sure. 

But you can be sure I have good, kind thoughts to all of you, my gentle readers here, not through telepathy, but my thoughts written in words you are reading right now. 

But I cannot tell if you have the same for me. 

 

Thank you for reading my thoughts.

jb lim