Your author’s first introduction into mental telepathy experiments was back in the 1970’s when videos of Soviet experiments were stolen and leaked to the world. The grainy black and white KGB file footage showed various experiments involving human beings attempting to send different kinds of messages to each other using nothing but their brains. Rumors of the secret experiments told that the Soviets found that mental telepathy was in fact real. But their lack of understanding and control of the phenomenon led the KGB to cancel the program.

Mental telepathy

Today, militaries and universities are still trying to harness the power of mental telepathy – defined as communication using nothing but one’s thoughts. And scientists from Harvard claim they’ve successfully proven the power exists once and for all. Similar visionaries have already proven certain levels of mental telepathy, but in communicating with computers. Successful experiments have repeatedly shown that a computer can detect varying electric pulses emanating from the brain and use it to assist crippled or disabled individuals in carrying out certain simple motor functions. But the credit has always been given to the receiving capabilities of the computer, not the sending capability of the human brain.

All that changed in September when scientists published a report documenting their successful attempt to prove the power of mental telepathy in humans. They stationed three people in Thiruvananthapuram, India and one in Strasbourg, France. The experiment was monitored by the University of Barcelona. In the lead-up to their endeavor, the researchers explained that they wanted to not only prove the power of ESP in the brain, but also the convenience and ease of using the internet in transmitting the mental communications.

Ones and zeros

After reading the experiment’s Abstract in the journal Neuroelectrics, twice, it’s clear that the human sender and receiver didn’t actually send words to one another. Instead, the sender was wirelessly connected to a computer in India and the receiver similarly connected to a computer in France. With no invasive techniques, electrodes were place on the subjects’ skulls and the receiver was deprived of other senses with blindfolds and earplugs.

In one of the various experiments, the sender looked at a computer monitor. The monitor displayed a large dot that was stationed either at the bottom of the screen or the top of the screen. The computer assigned a 0 to the bottom-stationed dot and a 1 when the dot was at the top. When the sender peered at the dot on the screen, the computer sent the 1 or 0 to the experiment’s other computer thousands of miles away.

The receiving computer was simultaneously connected to both the sending computer and the receiver’s skull via electrodes. When the transmission was received by the computer, it used an electromagnetic pulse to stimulate the receiver’s brain. Proving the theory of mental telepathy between humans, the receiver was able to distinguish whether the dot on the screen thousands of miles away was position at the top or the bottom. In their first series of experiments, their error rate was 6%, 5% and 11% respectively. In their second series of similar experiments, their error rate was reduced to 2%, 1% and 4% respectively.

Hello and goodbye

Attempting to show they could use mental telepathy to transmit words, the scientists replaced the dots with two words – hola and ciao – hello and goodbye in Spanish and Italian. The participants were again able to decipher between the two messages from 5,000 miles away from each other with similar success. Granted, researchers merely assigned a 1 or a 0 to the two words. But the first computers only used a very small set of ones and zeros and look how far that method of communication has come, with billions of ones and zeros packed into split-second transmissions now.

The scientists insist the true historic breakthrough is proving the fact that two humans can communicate with each other, “without using sight, touch, sound, taste or smell.” One of the participating scientists also remarked, “This is of course early days. But the discovery could eventually have a profound impact on civilization.”

As a lifelong believer in ESP, this author noticed there was one major ingredient missing from the successful experiment. The senders needed to be connected to a computer via electrodes attached to the skull. The receivers were similarly connected. And a computer was required to detect the brain activity of one and stimulate brain activity in the other. The piece of the puzzle still missing is the human brain’s ability to stimulate another brain without the help of electrodes and computers. When the world’s scientists figure out how to do that, mental telepathy will truly be a reality.