Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: CliffordK on 22/01/2013 05:35:24
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The original poster had posted that he felt the ability to sense, or even manipulate others thoughts, as well as causing noises in walls as he passed by. He has since chosen to remove all of his posts from this thread.
Let me start with saying that you will find many people who treat ESP (extra sensory perception) and related phenomena with great skepticism. That doesn't mean that what you are experiencing isn't real for yourself.
Have you discussed these feelings and abilities with a physician? There are certain individuals that perceive reality differently than others, and it may be related to treatable medical issues. So, the first thing I would suggest is that you discuss what you are perceiving with your physician.
Certainly you can influence others with your speech, posture, expressions, and actions. Some of these may in fact be very subtle, that you may not be truly aware of, and the others may potentially not be fully aware of them.
When I was in college, and listening to lectures, sometimes I could reach the conclusion that the professor was leading to, perhaps 30 seconds before he actually got there. And, I'd even, at times, write my notes in my notebook before it was mentioned in class. This doesn't necessarily mean a special ability, but rather good preparation, and perhaps an element of foreshadowing in the derivation of the point. This may be similar to other predictable events. You might see a child somewhat wobbly on a bicycle, and conclude the kid will likely crash soon.
Anyway, I would again mention that it is worth following up with your physician to see his (or her) opinion about these phenomena you've been experiencing.
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No-one is capable of telepathy or telekinesis. Those who sincerely believe they are are invariably suffering from a mental illness.
If someone could read minds this could be proven by them telepathically reading a hand of cards visible to another person but hidden from the alleged psychic. (If someone could read minds they could make a fortune playing cards).
I've attached an encrypted PDF with the image of playing cards, if you can name all of them correctly then that would be evidence supporting your alleged telepathy, or proof that you can crack PDF encryption, either way I'll be very impressed.
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That's a fine distinction - whats the difference between knowing someones thoughts and reading their minds? I don't think there is one. There is a way of influencing what people do and say to a certain degree (a la Derren Brown) but usually when someone does it they are aware of it and could describe how they did it to others.
In all honesty hun, if you were a friend of mine and you couldn't pass a test as per the post above I would be taking you to see a doctor. I know its very frustrating to have no-one believe you and I don't mean to be unkind but what you say you can do has never been proved possible. Please consider talking to your GP.
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I think it may be hard to find people on here who believe you. This is a scientific forum and people will not take your word for it you need to prove it. Otherwise if its accepted on your say so you have to accept my statement that I am able to hover two feet above the ground at will. I'm not showing you though.
So what is the distinction between knowing someones thoughts and reading their minds?
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I've attached an encrypted PDF with the image of playing cards, if you can name all of them correctly then that would be evidence supporting your alleged telepathy, or proof that you can crack PDF encryption, either way I'll be very impressed.
Cracking the 25 character PDF password would have been more impressive than guessing the cards ...
[ Invalid Attachment ] https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm
A déjà vu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_vu) type experience could give someone the false impression they have seen or heard something previously, but in reality it's a glitch in their brain getting information out of sequence, not telepathy or predicting the future.
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Any real form of ESP would be such an evolutionary advantage that those of us without it would be extinct or (at best) second class citizens.
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Well maybe since further mental abilities haven't shown up just yet, those without it aren't extinct yet.
I'm sure the people who knew Galileo in his time thought he was crazy for his theory, but he knew it was real. That can be said many times over about major scientific breakthroughs. Why is this any different? Time is a straight line after all, we just haven't reached this point yet.
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I'm sure the people who knew Galileo in his time thought he was crazy for his theory, but he knew it was real. That can be said many times over about major scientific breakthroughs. Why is this any different?
Empirical proof is the difference.
Galileo didn't know his theories were 'real' - What he did was to prove that their predictions fitted the observed data to a very high tolerance (<of the time). Later on, discrepancies were detected between theory and observation, that ultimately led to new, better models. ... The key aim of science should not, fundamentally, be about 'Truth' but instead about finding a model that best fits observation.
No empirical studies have been made of ESP, that stand up to scrutiny; thus it is not recognised as having any more value than any other unsubstantiated evidence.
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I managed to read the Op posts before he deleted them, from what he was explaining it seems to fit your last post. He said it wasn't the textbook known definition of ESP, and that it was at a very different stage when it first started happening to him. To me it seems like he theorized what was going on at first, and with evidence supporting him he kept remaking the model until it best fit.
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There are many reasons for people hearing or seeing things. If you want to see a ghost just stare into a mirror in a low light condition and one will appear behind or at the side of you eventually. When people with schizophrenia hear and see things, their brains are activated just the same as if someone is talking to them or showing them something.
The poster here said he doesn't read peoples minds but he knows their thoughts but couldn't articulate the distinction (or didn't want to)-that's indicative of internal workings of the nervous system. As an example, you generally cant articulate what it feels like to see the colour red and there are people who can train themselves to navigate by the earths magnetism but they cant articulate how they do it, they just get a sense of the right direction.
The closest people can get to esp for the moment is intuition (which is just unconscious expert recognition) - but who knows there are technologies now that can switch neurons on and off with light. However I reckon even if it were possible to augment humans with tech to enable them to read peoples minds would we want to? Should we? (As my dad says.....just because you can doesn't mean you should). Just one day of telling people exactly what you are thinking instead of censoring yourself before answering should be enough to sample the sort of chaos that would cause. Part of our very existence as social animals is reliant on the fact that you DONT tell people your every last thought about them. There aren't enough guns in the world to service the arguments that would ensue.
Although its a nice idea, I'm grateful we cant do it.
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Try reading Rupert Sheldrake (bona fide scientist, Ph D etc. in neuroscience) and his latest book Science Set Free. Also on You tube. he has done some interesting experiments, including crowd sources.
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" there are people who can train themselves to navigate by the earths magnetism but they cant articulate how they do it, they just get a sense of the right direction."
Any evidence for that?
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Try reading Rupert Sheldrake (bona fide scientist, Ph D etc. in neuroscience)
A biochemist whose inspiration is via the psychotropic drug LSD ...
There are some cases of LSD inducing a psychosis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosis) in people who appeared to be healthy before taking LSD. In most cases, the psychosis-like reaction is of short duration, but in other cases it may be chronic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide#Psychosis
Neuroscientists are not impressed ...
Neurophysiologist and consciousness researcher Christof Koch, for example, has stated that discussing Sheldrake's ideas is a "waste of time," given the absence of hard, physical evidence and Sheldrake's lack of understanding of modern neurobiology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake#Reception
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" there are people who can train themselves to navigate by the earths magnetism but they cant articulate how they do it, they just get a sense of the right direction."
Any evidence for that?
Yes-I'll dig out the link for you. It was a German University that taught some people to navigate via the earths magnetic fields with a belt they had invented. Give me 5 mins and I'll dig out the links.
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I saw a demonstration of this in a BBC2 documentary but I cant remember which one.
It wouldn't allow me to download the pdf its too large
doi:10.1088/1741-2560/2/4/R02
Beyond sensory substitution—learning the sixth sense
Saskia K Nagel, Christine Carl, Tobias Kringe, Robert M¨artin and Peter K¨onig
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Even if , (like other animals), some humans are capable of magnetoception (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoception) it wouldn't qualify as Extra Sensory Perception (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasensory_perception) as they must have a sensory organ for it somewhere ... http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v2/n6/full/ncomms1364.html
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I saw a demonstration of this in a BBC2 documentary but I cant remember which one.
It wouldn't allow me to download the pdf its too large
doi:10.1088/1741-2560/2/4/R02
Beyond sensory substitution—learning the sixth sense
Saskia K Nagel, Christine Carl, Tobias Kringe, Robert M¨artin and Peter K¨onig
Giving someone a compass (even if it vibrates their belly via a belt) is not what most people would consider ESP.
It's like giving them a sat nav.
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I wasn't suggesting magnetoreception was ESP-I was illustrating the fact that when you cant articulate something it is because the sensation is a product of the nervous system and not because of ESP.
Here is my original post so you can see the context:
There are many reasons for people hearing or seeing things. If you want to see a ghost just stare into a mirror in a low light condition and one will appear behind or at the side of you eventually. When people with schizophrenia hear and see things, their brains are activated just the same as if someone is talking to them or showing them something.
The poster here said he doesn't read peoples minds but he knows their thoughts but couldn't articulate the distinction (or didn't want to)-that's indicative of internal workings of the nervous system. As an example, you generally cant articulate what it feels like to see the colour red and there are people who can train themselves to navigate by the earths magnetism but they cant articulate how they do it, they just get a sense of the right direction.
The closest people can get to esp for the moment is intuition (which is just unconscious expert recognition) - but who knows there are technologies now that can switch neurons on and off with light. However I reckon even if it were possible to augment humans with tech to enable them to read peoples minds would we want to? Should we? (As my dad says.....just because you can doesn't mean you should). Just one day of telling people exactly what you are thinking instead of censoring yourself before answering should be enough to sample the sort of chaos that would cause. Part of our very existence as social animals is reliant on the fact that you DONT tell people your every last thought about them. There aren't enough guns in the world to service the arguments that would ensue.
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@ Minerva
Actually, he did state this method that allows him to know other's thoughts. He said he manipulates their thoughts and makes them think these things in the first place, so that's how he knows they are thinking it.
And he also said he had a lot of intuition as a kid, and over time he got a better grip on what was going on. Not saying that I believe him or anything, i'm just stating what he said. :)
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Certain types of hallucinations can cause people to hear voices, and misinterpret reality. It is my belief that the original poster had truly believed that he was hearing other's thoughts. However, his reality may not have been in sync with every else's reality.
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Déjà entendu, (literally "already heard") is the experience of feeling sure that one has already heard something, even though the exact details are uncertain and/or were perhaps imagined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_vu#D.C3.A9j.C3.A0_entendu
Déjà entendu could be misinterpreted as "I read your mind and knew you were going to say that before you said it" or "I thought of the phrase first, telepathically put the phrase in your mind, then you said it".
The Déjà experiences are brain glitches, not supernatural. Your brain momentarily files information out of chronological order so you feel you've already experienced the thing you've seen / heard when you haven't.
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From Wikipedia:Some quantum physicists have supported Sheldrake's hypothesis.[8] The late David Bohm suggested that Sheldrake's hypothesis was in keeping with his own ideas on what he terms "implicate" and "explicate" order.[8] Hans-Peter Dürr has called for further discussion of Sheldrake's hypothesis, describing it as one of the first to reconcile 20th-century breakthroughs in physics, which emphasize fields and the indivisible nature of matter, with biology, which he says for the most part remains rooted in 19th-century Newtonian concepts of particles and separateness.[8][54] Others, like biologist Michael Klymkowsky, disagree, contending that "[w]e live in a macroscopic world. Quantum effects are essentially irrelevant".[8] For more details on this topic, see quantum biology.
The concept has attracted speculation from neurolinguistic programming, as an explanation for action at a distance.[55] Sheldrake's book The Presence of the Past: A Field Theory of Life was positively reviewed by the physicist Amit Goswami.[56]
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Sheldrake's ideas are essentially philosophy. The scientific reception part of the wikipedia article makes it clear he doesn't have much scientific support. Bohm was a great physicist, but he also dabbled in a lot of very far-out philosophical ideas based loosely on physics, which is why he probably supported it. Amit Goswami is well-known for promoting extremely far-out theories of quantum mysticism, which also have very little science in them.
It's great to keep an open mind, and to explore philosophical ideas based on modern physics, but it's also important to be clear about the distinction between rigorous science and philosophy.
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I ordered a course on the Brain and Sensory Perception (Peter Vishton, College of William and Mary) It covers the five senses, and talks about sensory perception below the level of conscious awareness or control, for instance, the way baseball players respond as quickly as they do to a fast ball, or outfielders predict the trajectory of a fly ball with out really knowing themselves how they do it. And of course this professor feels that many phenomena attributed to esp are the result of ones brain picking up on cues subconsciously. But he did cite one researcher that he said had done experiments he could not explain or refute, a guy by the name of Daryl Bem of Cornell University.
Basically Bem's experiment went like this: Two people are in separate and isolated rooms. After watching one of four randomly selected videos, person A is asked to meditate on the video he watched and "send his thoughts" to person B. Person B sees four videos and is asked which one is it was. Person B was correct more often than predicted by chance, and even correct more often if person A and B had a close relationship.
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I ordered a course on the Brain and Sensory Perception (Peter Vishton, College of William and Mary) It covers the five senses ...
Only five ?, the course must come in instalments ... http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=46506.msg402277#msg402277
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I ordered a course on the Brain and Sensory Perception (Peter Vishton, College of William and Mary) It covers the five senses ...
Only five ?, the course must come in instalments ... http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=46506.msg402277#msg402277
Well, no, he did two lectures on proprioception, the sense organs in joints and muscles that tell you where your body parts are, which was very interesting. Including this fun demonstration:
Hold your right hand up as if you were swearing an oath, just out of peripheral vision, but not so high up that you can't touch it easily with your other hand. With your left index finger, touch your nose then touch your right thumb.(Don't look) Touch your nose and then touch the next finger, your nose again and the next finger and so on.
Most people are surprised to find they have a hard time doing this.
Now repeat the experiment, only this time wiggle the fingers of your right hand, and keep wiggling them continuously as you touch your nose and each finger.