Can people read other's minds?

Great Debates
1

In this GQ thread jally submitted as evidence that young children to not think the experience of a mind-reading psychometrist, who only heard “white noise” in the presence of children.

I posited that there were other explanations, to wit:

jally responded by referring to my post as “clutter”, and making another pitch for jallyware. Far be it for me to clutter these boards. Obviously you believe I am mistaken; let us debate our disagreeing points of view.

To start the debate, jally or whoever else believes in mind-reading:

  1. Does mindreading exist?
  2. If it does, why has it been unable to be scientifically proven? Even if only a tiny percentage of the population has this ability, that should still create a significant population to allow for double-blind tests and the like?
  3. How is mind-reading accomplished? Does the brain emit a radio wave that certain people are able to receive?
  4. What is the mechanism by which mind-readers receive the thoughts of others? Is the mechanism the result of a genetic mutation? What is the apparatus in the human body that is able to receive these waves? Is it the ears, the eyes, the brain? Is this genetic mutation recognizable on a macro scale, or is it recognizable after a DNA test?
  5. Are mind-readers able only to decipher the thoughts of people who speak the same language?

Thank you in advance,

Sua

2

Arghh,

this GQ thread

3

Well let’s look at it from a scientific point of view.

If people read minds it would have to:

  1. Convert “thoughts” into some sort of medium that would travel to another mind.

  2. That medium would have to be to stimulate identical or analogous brain processes in the receivers mind.

Oh wait - we do have something like that. It’s called LANGUAGE.

This my answer to the other thread, too. Language is not thought. It is the medium of human telepathy.

4

The pieces of fiction involving mindreaders that I’ve always found the most credible are those that treat those with it as either flat-out insane, or clinging to sanity by desperate threads. Have you ever just sat quietly and paid attention to your own brain? It’s a noisy place most of the time. Hustle and bustle, thoughts jostling around on extremely important errands, occasionally getting lost and mugging each other, more out of habit than for profit. Sort of like many big cities.

Now take even a couple dozen of that kind of babble, stack them all on top of each other, and put them inside your head at once. If a magical genie popped up and offered to give me telepathy, I’d run away as fast as I could. It’d be a “good” replacement for the death penalty, maybe.

5

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t doable. Language manages to distill all that incoherent babble into babble which is more or less coherent to the other side…(unless we’re talking about certain relatives of mine, whose babble is in fact cruel and unusual).

6

Look, we all know the pineal gland is where telepathy and other psychic phenomenon originate, including but not limited to telekinesis, telepathy, pyrokinesis, and even magical acts. However, I believe the appendix needs to have not been removed for the pineal gland to work, and the tonsils as well. Oh, and you need a prefrontal lobotomy. :eek: :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously, though, people surely don’t disbelieve because of a lack of testing. People don’t believe because the testing has given results equal or worse than chance in the case of telepathy. As well, other methods of testing have not held up to the scientific method itself. A third problem is that the testers themselves are somewhat dubious characters.

I think the matter could be settled if a team of reputable researchers simply perfermed a battery of tests on multiple people(say, 100) and published their findings but not their conclusions(no personal interpretation). Such a thing has not been done because of a DNFTT mentality in the science world.

Frankly, I find that attitude to be a bit lacking in rigor. There are not an insignificant number of persons who believe, or at least don’t find it implausible, in telepathy. Not that that is always a good reason to perform a battery of scientific experiments in itself, but for Eris’s sake it might finally get Cleo off the screen.

Myself, I don’t see it as impossible, but I’ve never seen anything which I would call evidence, no matter how specious. In 7th grade I did a project on it and tested over a third of my school. results: only slightly better than chance in a non-significant percentage of the sample. Needless to say, nothing to get excited about.

As far as telepathy backwards in time, well, try getting me in on telepathy first and then we’ll talk about divining the past from rocks :wally

7

Of course people can read other people’s minds – if we expand our definition of “people” to include Aquaman, and our definition of “other people” to include fish.

8

I have always been tempted to add to the “Other” part of my resume “I have the ability to communicate with sea mammals”. I mean, how they gonna prove I’m lying? Most offices don’t have otters lying around.

Sua

9

“What is the otter thinking?”

“The otter is thinking how pleasant it is to laze around and play in the water.”

“Hmm. What is that horse thinking?”

“The horse is thinking how nice it is to graze, and–with all due respect–that it would be nice if you would lose some weight. And those sheep over there…”

“Those sheep are liars!”

10

I knew you were going to be skeptical about mind-reading, Sua, I just knew it.
I do not take these powers lightly.

11

I don’t believe people can read minds. But I do think that people can read very subtle cues from other people. Especially, but not limited to, someone they spend a lot of time with.
And most especially twins.
But I do believe in ghosts.
Peace,
mangeorge

12

This is a fascinating subject, and one that I am mercifully free of any solid opinion. But as I noted in the thread Sua refers to, I find it interesting that really crazy people hear voices. I would be interested to know approximately how many schizophrenics have that particular symptom. As previously noted, telepathy would drive you crazy.

I doubt very much that any quantitative analysis will ever be fruitful. If you could test a thousand people thoroughly, but only one was likely to have any real measureable psychic ability, the test would be meaningless. We have no notion of what sample size would be valid. Would you screen out people who thought, for whatever reason, that they were psychic?

I’d love to test for PK by motivating the subject (fear, greed, I don’t care) to psychicly affect in the smallest possible, something like deflect a laser beam in a sealed environment one nanometer right or left. Wish I were rich so I could fund crackpot shit like that, totally ruin some poor grad students career.

Probably nothing. Would sure be cool to hang around the Physics Department the day the word gets out.

13

I seriously doubt that would settle the matter. The people who believe in mind reading are most likely reluctant to believe the results of a scientific test anyway.

Maybe it is most telling that those persons are unwilling to fund scientific study to discern telepathy and understand it. They’re perfectly willing to spend money on psychic “advice” though.

I’ll give them some “psychic” advice: Your life will be much better if you stop spending money on this crap. :wink:

14

This is interesting. I agree that people can read very subtle clues from people they know well, and that this can be catagorized under reading body language, picking up slight changes in tone of voice, and having some background knowledge of a particular situation. I would also agree that some people are better at this than others, so that someone who was especially good at it might “amaze” another person who wasn’t terribly good at it.

However, sometimes one sees accounts (often standing in supermarket check-out lines) of a twin who claims that he “knew” when his brother was in a car accident, a hundred miles away. I would chalk this up to the fact that many people think of their siblings often, and that we don’t have any reason to remember those times when it turns out that nothing dire happened to said sibling. Also, I imagine that the dread one would feel when hearing of a sibling’s accident might retroactively color the earlier memory, thus the statements “I just KNEW something bad happened to Bob, and sure enough, he was in a car accident.”

And Sua, nix the communication with sea animals on your resume. While most offices don’t have a resident otter, the interviewer is surely going to realize something is amiss when he doesn’t see the thought lines waving out of your forehead in the general direction of the nearest body of water.

15

Yes, delphica, this ‘twins’ thing is a whole 'nuther subject. Similarities in twins seperated at birth and so forth. Thinking about it too much gives me a headache. :wink:
There is something there, but nobody really seem’s to know what. I’m sure it’s been covered here on these boards (Cecil, maybe?), but I’m not about to go look. I’m out of aspirin.
Peace,
mangeorge

16

wevets said:

Indeed, they often come up with a whole host of excuses when such testing does fail to turn up anything. My favorite is the one that says skeptics in the area give off negative vibrations that cause the psychic powers to fail.

17

delphica wrote:

Not to mention the suspicions you will arouse without that little “beeping” noise that’s supposed to accompany those thought lines.

18

One thing about the SDMB, it is a place where people tend to be inordinately proud of thier worldly skepticism.

It is rightly noted that if a “rigorous” scientific experiment could be undertaken that would absitively, posolutely prove beyond doubt that there is no such thing as Psi, the “believers” would not accept it, weaklings that they are. As I have noted before, I very much doubt if any such experiment is possible. It is dimly possible that an experiment could be made that would prove some sort of Psi, but just dimly.

But if it did? The The Skeptical Inquirer would leap on board? “Son of a gun, we were wrong, here it is” I think not. If the preconception is that such is impossible, mere proof is powerless. The opposite number of the True Believer, the Hard-nosed Skeptic, would know that the experiment was flawed, because impossible results are just that: impossible.

It may very well be, and that is my personal favorite, the what is billed as “Psi” is nothing more than intuition writ large, and that by itself opens up fascinating lines of inquiry. But is experimentation and quantification of intuition any likelier to give “hard” results than, say, experiments on hypnosis? I think not.

19

elucidator wrote:

You’re just jealous.

… whereupon Descartes disappeared in a puff of logic.

20

I can read minds. And you all should be ashamed.