Is Mind Reading Possible?

Mind Reading

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Ever wonder how those advertisements appear on the blog posts you are reading? Just yesterday, you were thinking about getting a new electric toothbrush. Stay with me; it might have been a new iPhone, television, or whatever. You were just thinking about it, and then you saw it advertised in your daily newsletter! Could it have been a chance happening, or did it come from an algorithm listening to your thoughts? Perhaps they are rarely explainable without truthful evidence of a connection. There are some accounts (mostly mythical) of lucky outcomes connected to predictions of such outcomes.

Then there are those meaningful coincidences of a hugely high degree of improbability. We might ask for a cause and look for meaning, but the cause, the principal reason that an event happens, and the meaning of that event are two different things. Causes are too deep to catch or too vague to understand because they have multiple layers of understanding.

I know several people who claim to use telepathy and clairvoyance as a tool to heal a loved one far away. One conveys Reiki action-at-a-distance mind transmission and reception of information through channels peripheral to current scientific knowledge. Some people believe in telepathic channels connecting the present to the past and the past to the dead. Despite almost a century of repeated negative results of statistical experiments on the existence of human ESP capabilities, parapsychologists have yet to abandon the idea of human ESP capabilities.

Many of the more famous psychics are well-connected to outlets for media attention. Back in the '60s, Kenny Kingston, “Psychic to the Stars,” hosted a radio talk show and was a regular guest of Merv Griffin and Entertainment Tonight. Kingston promoted his psychic hotline through infomercials claiming his connections with such celebrities as John Wayne, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Marilyn Monroe. He made millions from his $400-a-session contacts with the dead, including Errol Flynn and Orson Welles, who were still to be found at the Musso & Frank Grill, the Hollywood restaurant that had been around since Flynn frequented it when he was still alive. You will not catch me saying that Kingston was a fraud; he may have been or may not have been. Wouldn’t it be nice if mediums could perform séances to talk with the dead and predict the future?

Magnetic Fields

There was a time when people swallowed magnets, believing those magnets would attract love. Why not? Magnets have miraculous action-at-a-distance powers. In typical condescension and misunderstanding of outmoded lore, we think that to be nonsensical. But since the early 19th century, we have known that electric currents generate magnetic fields and vice versa.

Electrochemical activity generates magnetic fields around and outside the human head; could our thoughts be active outside the mind? Magnetencephalography (MEG) scanner experiments tell us that emotions expressed in human brains generate magnetic fields outside the head. Although brain magnetic fields are relatively weak, it is possible that they, along with brainwave activity, convey signals that piggyback on radio waves to transmit signals far from the source. I don’t doubt that that is possible. It may very well be that one person can communicate some signal of love outside the brain. Like cell phone signals, those signals could go far. The problem rests with our interpretation of the transmitted signals. Can they be decoded to communicate information to another person?

Telepathy is the ability to transfer information through some anomalous process of energy transfer unexplained by known physical or biological mechanisms. Such information could be about the past, the present, the future, or contact with the dead. The transference could be emotional kinesthetic sensations through altered states, or it could be through access to the subconscious collective wisdom of the species for the purpose of gaining some intelligence.

Psyche

If you read Dr. Bernard Beitman’s Psychology Today blog post, “The Psi of Coincidences,” you might ask if telepathy is truly psyche, as in mind or soul. Psi is the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet, though presumably launched as a phonemic resembling the first syllable of “psyche” to represent mental interactions that cannot be explained by established physical principles. Beitman seems to accept the telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis studies of the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina. Don’t get me wrong. I love his book, blog posts, and Coincidence Project podcasts. At issue is the clear debunking of Rhine Research parapsychology.

We are asked not to question how telepathized information gets from one brain to another. But science would ask for an account of how electrochemical activity in the brain converts to raw data signals capable of traveling through space and how those signals get reconverted back into electrochemical changes in neurons.

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While I hesitate to say that anything is impossible, given that I have lived through astounding scientific breakthroughs, I do still believe that the only statistical confirmation of psi seen so far has come from findings that are heavily dependent on clerical errors, inadvertent sensory inklings, and hyper-chance conditions. As a mathematician who has researched coincidences and the Rhine Research Center findings, I conclude that legitimate statistical confirmation of psi should consign to the world of magic where scientists are comfortable with coincidence and the accepted physical tools of the magician.

Although magicians can give their audiences mind-baffling performances that appear to conflict with the known laws of physics—levitating bodies, piercing them with sharp sabers, or knowing from a distance which card is halfway down a pack—we know they are tricks of trust, vision, awareness, and reliance on gullibility.

I can almost see that for transferring some electromagnetic information piggybacking on radio waves, but your toothbrush is advertised by algorithms coming from your online searches or the voice you used in saying the word “toothbrush” when you were aware of your phone being on.