Many years ago, I read something, about an Italian physicist (Giuseppe Cocconi?), who conducted research on ESP, telepathy. This was in Italy, before the Second World war.
Supposedly, Cocconi had found that the brain could receive information via radio waves.
I never read anything more about this (it sounds like quack-style stuff).
Is there any record of this guy’s work, and was he a real scientist?
Today, the state of the art for “receiving information” directly from the brain works 2 main ways.
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Electrodes implanted on the surface of the brain itself can deliver shocks. In the right areas of the brain, you can perceive these impulses as tiny flashes of light in your visual field, or other things. There’s an experimental implant that is commercially available that will give you limited vision using this method.
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Big honking magnets can actually induce electrical currents in your brain. This takes gigantic magnets, and the effects are subtle, and less about information and more about stimulating areas of the brain.
Radio waves are more likely to be like #2 than #1. There’s a simple reason for this - radio waves have a much longer wavelength than the size of individual synapses in the brain.
This is the only famous Giuseppe Cocconi:
He did write a paper about SETI, not telepathy:
http://www.bigear.org/vol1no1/interste.htm
Are you thnking about that?
That is backwards. Both of those are about sending information to the brain, not receiving information from it, and the latter, the magnets, are not really even that. Furthermore, the effects are not at all subtle. Very strong, focused magnetic fields can (presumably by inducing random currents) effectively but temporarilly (and, seemingly, fairly harmlessly) incapacitate parts of the brain. This is known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Thus, for instance, if you focus the magnetic field on the brain area responsible for speech (Brocca’s area), you can render someone temporarily unable to speak.
There are a number of technologies for receiving information from the brain, which is in general far more useful (mostly for medical and research purposes) than trying get information into it in a way that bypasses the normal sense organs and peripheral nervous system that evolution has provided for the purpose. These include relatively old techniques such as electroencephalography (arrays of electrodes on the scalp that pick up general, large scale patterns of electrical activity) and newer ones such as fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) which allows you to see (with rather poor spatial and temporal resolution) which areas of the brain are most active when a person does a certain cognitive task. You can also open up the skull and stick electrodes directly into the brain tissue, and thereby record the detailed activity of single neurons, but (except in certain very rare medical circumstances) it is not considered ethical to do this with human brains. It is often done, for research, with monkeys and other animals, however. It provides much better spatial and temporal resolution than fMRI and similar non-invasive imaging techniques.
None of these techniques bears much resemblance, even a distant one, to what people normally think of as telepathy or ESP.
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To return to the OP’s question, I have never heard of Cocconi. Also, I have here a copy of The Handbook of Parapsychology (edited by B.B. Wolman: New York, 1977), a thick tome that aspires to be comprehensive, and that deals with the history of the field, as well as other aspects of parapsychological research. No Cocconi is listed in the index.
However, in the 1970s, the British physicist (and, latterly neuroscientist and AI researcher) John Taylor did propose a theory somewhat resembling that adumbrated by the OP. He attempted to explain psychic powers such as telepathy and psychokinesis (most particularly the powers claimed by Uri Geller) in terms of low frequency radio wave generated by (and I think also picked up by) the peripheral nerves. By 1980, though, Taylor had seen through Geller, and repudiated all this.
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The most famous parapsychological researcher of the period before WWII was undoubtedly Prof. J.B. Rhine of Duke university in the USA. AFAIK, however, he did not attempt to explain the ESP effects he claimed to have discovered in terms of radio waves.
There was a fictional scientist named Cocini in books by Keith Laumer - the scientist invented a device to go from one universe to another…
A video on that. If it doesn’t link directly, it is video #2 (Cybersenses), and about 14:00 in. Alan Alda looked at it a few years ago, so presumably the resolution is better today.
Nah, they’re not that big, if you’re talking about TMS. Related is tDCS, which accomplishes mostly the same thing with electricity on the scalp (non-invasive). They are normally used in research to temporarily “knock out” part of the brain or temporarily improve function, or in therapy to treat depression and such through repeated administration (rTMS).
No kidding - I believe the synapse is 20-30 nm, so 25. And radio waves have a big range, but let’s say 1 km on average. That’s a size difference of 4x10[sup]10[/sup]! Neurons themselves are a little larger, but still a huge ratio.