The brain to brain connections that we all sense when we think that telepathy must really exist, do not function like the thought transfer of early experiments on telepathy. Science is often inspired by technology, and those early experiments may have imagined the mental equivalent of the telephone. As if our minds could call up other minds on a kind of invisible or microscopic telephone receiver. I think that the better metaphor is that of the internet. All of our internet-enabled computers get viruses and malware, emails pushed to our webmail box, updates to our programs, and other background activities as a result of our computer interfacing with other computers acting as servers. We are often unaware of these happenings except sometimes as distractions because our computers seem to have slowed down. But they affect everything that our computer does, for good or ill, and occasionally they generate a pop-up message that does come up on our screens and we become conscious of. The vision that comes out of recent research into how one brain influences another through nonverbal communication is so like the internet, that I have called it the interbrain. In fact the sub-title of my most recent book is "Nonverbal communication, Asperger syndrome, and the Interbrain". I give much of the scientific basis for the points made in this blog in that book.
The interbrain is pervasive, and for me it accounts for many other features of life that seem mysterious, like telepathy. How, for example, do so many of us know what is in fashion, and what is out of fashion? Or who is the latest up and coming celebrity? Or which person is most popular? (that one is easy, that is the person who gets most friendly smiles) Or most important? (easy too, that's the person who gets looked at the most). These things bypass our minds, and go straight to our brains. We don't know them explicitly, we know them by a different process of ‘commonsense'.
So where has all this new information come from? How come no-one has talked about the interbrain before now?
The answer is partly technological. We did not have the model of the interbrain until recently, and we did not the functional neuroimaging methods to show that brains influence each other until recently, either. But another answer is implied in the wording of the sub-title of my book: "nonverbal communication, Asperger syndrome, and the interbrain". That answer is the explosion of interest in Asperger syndrome, and the recognition that impaired nonverbal communication is a common feature in all of the autistic spectrum disorders. I argue in my book that people with Asperger syndrome have a ‘low bandwidth interbrain connection'. Their brains, like all our minds, are much more stand alone than the rest of us ‘neurotypicals'. That is a cause of great difficulty, but can also be a source of strength, particularly in explaining why many people with Asperger syndrome are able to be so original and why many of them seem so intuitively knowledgeable about machines: unlike the rest of us, they don't think try to treat them as if they were people (although some people with Asperger syndrome may make the opposite mistake, and treat people like machines).
The title of my book is "Can the world afford autistic spectrum disorder?" I do not mean can we pay for autistic spectrum disorder, even though it can cause a lot of disorder including expensive psychiatric problems, but can we make a place for people with Asperger syndrome. One way to do that is for the neurotypicals amongst us all to become more aware of our reliance on the interbrain, and that reliance is both a strength and a weakness. After all, telepathy may be great when you're with someone you love, but what about encountering a telepathic sales person; someone who could use their knowledge of your thoughts to persuade you to spend more than you have? In later blogs, I intend to discuss how we defend ourselves against hazards like the salesman who reads us too well and what, if anything, we can do if we are just the opposite, and we feel that other people are like a closed book.
