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Sunday 1 June 2014

Telepathy, Anyone?

     What's the difference between mind reading and thought transference? Essentially, the same as between listening and speaking. Mind reading means eavesdropping on somebody else's thoughts: the power all police detectives and suspicious spouses wish they had, while thought transference is the deliberative sending of a message by means of thought. Where the analogy breaks down, of course, is that listening and speaking use two separate organs, whereas mind reading and thought transference both use the brain, so it is possible that the two are connected.
     That's assuming, of course, that they actually exist. Proving their existence in the laboratory would be, to say the least, rather difficult. In the film, What Women Want Mel Gibson convinced his female doctor that he could read women's minds by asking her to think of a number, and then telling her what it was. However, while that experiment might have convinced her, there was no objective evidence which a third party could grasp. After all, we can't read her mind to determine whether he was correct. With this in mind, what I am about to tell you are anecdotes, rather than scientific experiments. But I think they are good anecdotes.