# Telepathy and Others - True or False? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 17, 2012, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796 "2012-01-17T15:00:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![brocks](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7feea3/32.png) [@brocks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brocks)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 7:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/81 "2012-01-25T07:03:03Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > I’m not that familiar with the inner workings of radios, Therefore you are not qualified to dismiss the possibility that it is the radio which is psychic, and can play whatever song David is thinking of. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 7:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/82 "2012-01-25T07:17:53Z")
There’ve been at least 40 or 50 times in my life (maybe even 100!) where I’ve looked at the clock, and it read 12:34. 1234. What are the chances?! I’ll bet had I played those numbers in the daily lotto, I would’ve hit the jackpot. OR Out of the million+ times I’ve looked at a clock in my life, 12:34 always stuck out In my mind because it was a pattern I recognized. So the odds of 12:34 reading on my clock are 1 in 720. How many times do I glance at the clock each day and night? For the last 38 years? Yeh, pretty underwhelming. Confirmation bias + coincidence + pattern recognition + the human desire to find _meaning._ ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 7:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/83 "2012-01-25T07:24:42Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > Confirmation bias + coincidence + pattern recognition + the human desire to find _meaning._ Not just a desire, either: it’s something our brains are hardwired to do in case the pattern helps us survive. There’s no unconscious filter for meaningless coincidences. ---
**Author:** ![AboutAsWeirdAsYouCanGet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/22d042/32.png) [@AboutAsWeirdAsYouCanGet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AboutAsWeirdAsYouCanGet)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 7:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/84 "2012-01-25T07:32:08Z")
> [@](#): > > And if you think telepathy is just “talking” how would my brain interpret sound without an eardrum?? Just doesn’t make sense… I can interpret sound without an eardrum. ---
**Author:** ![Sister\_Vigilante](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de0a6/32.png) [@Sister\_Vigilante](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sister_Vigilante)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/85 "2012-01-25T15:36:38Z")
I see 1138 a lot in things. Because I’m a Star Wars fan. Doesn’t mean I’m psychic. I’ve also been humming a tune certain mornings when I get up, get in the car for work and that song will be playing. It’s usually because they play that frikkin’ song every 10 minutes, just like on all radio stations these days. Not because I psychically knew what was playing, or going to play. ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2012, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/86 "2012-01-26T13:22:24Z")
> [@Princhester](#): > > Psychics like to claim police use them but it is basically lies. What does happen is that the police receive an alleged “psychic” tipoff. They don’t believe it is a psychic tipoff. However, the police do know that a real witness who doesn’t want to be associated with a crime might phone in a tipoff and pretend they only know the information psychically when actually they know it through being involved or a witness. . Many years ago in France, in a child murder case, all that correctly guessing where the body was got a psychic was to be detained. The first tought of the police had not been : “how, we’ve a real psychic” but “how, we have somebody who was involved in the murder” (place were the body was found was non-obvious). The psychic was cleared later, though. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2012, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/87 "2012-01-26T13:27:06Z")
> [@clairobscur](#): > > Many years ago in France, in a child murder case, all that correctly guessing where the body was got a psychic was to be detained. The first tought of the police had not been : “how, we’ve a real psychic” but “how, we have somebody who was involved in the murder” (place were the body was found was non-obvious). The psychic was cleared later, though. Cite, please? ---
**Author:** ![Doubticus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e56c9b/32.png) [@Doubticus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doubticus)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2012, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/88 "2012-01-26T21:38:37Z")
Well I’ve definitely had some strange experiences. The one that sticks with me the most happened when I was 16. I was dreaming, in my dream my mother was calling me. “Come down we bought donuts,” she said. “Okay, just give me a second,” I replied. Then her voice was emphatic, “You better hurry up or there won’t be any left!” So in my dream I get up, grab a robe, rush down the stairs and turn to see my mother with donuts. The image of her vanishes and I am awake staring into my empty room. I turn my head to see my real mother standing in the doorway. “What were you dreaming?” she asked. I told her about my dream and she laughed. She then told me the story about how when I was an infant, if either of my parents thought about me while I was sleeping, it would wake me. So when she passed by my bedroom, she thought she would see if that would still happen. Was this a psychic coinsurance or just some bizarre great cool incidence? I have no idea. I did see some scientist on the “Beyond the Wormhole” show that was testing to see if thoughts between people could be carried electromagnetically given that the brain waves are influenced by electromagnetism and he showed some success. My WAG is that if psychic phenomenon is real, then it isn’t supernatural, it’s rooted in the physical. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2012, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/89 "2012-01-26T21:47:35Z")
> [@Doubticus](#): > > Well I’ve definitely had some strange experiences. The one that sticks with me the most happened when I was 16. I was dreaming, in my dream my mother was calling me. “Come down we bought donuts,” she said. “Okay, just give me a second,” I replied. Then her voice was emphatic, “You better hurry up or there won’t be any left!” So in my dream I get up, grab a robe, rush down the stairs and turn to see my mother with donuts. The image of her vanishes and I am awake staring into my empty room. I turn my head to see my real mother standing in the doorway. “What were you dreaming?” she asked. I told her about my dream and she laughed. She then told me the story about how when I was an infant, if either of my parents thought about me while I was sleeping, it would wake me. So when she passed by my bedroom, she thought she would see if that would still happen. > > Was this a psychic coinsurance or just some bizarre great cool incidence? I have no idea. I did see some scientist on the “Beyond the Wormhole” show that was testing to see if thoughts between people could be carried electromagnetically given that the brain waves are influenced by electromagnetism and he showed some success. My WAG is that if psychic phenomenon is real, then it isn’t supernatural, it’s rooted in the physical. Infants wake up constantly, and parents think about their infants just as constantly(if not more so). Not that great a coincidence, I would say. ---
**Author:** ![Doubticus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e56c9b/32.png) [@Doubticus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doubticus)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2012, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/90 "2012-01-26T22:07:45Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Infants wake up constantly, and parents think about their infants just as constantly(if not more so). Not that great a coincidence, I would say. Oh I agree that infants waking isn’t a great coincidence. Waking from a dream where someone is calling for you, only to see that same person who proceeds to tell you they were calling for you in there mind is a greater coincidence, I would say. That’s not empirical evidence, but it is cause to raise an eyebrow. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2012, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/91 "2012-01-26T22:12:54Z")
> [@Doubticus](#): > > Oh I agree that infants waking isn’t a great coincidence. Waking from a dream where someone is calling for you, only to see that same person who proceeds to tell you they were calling for you in there mind is a greater coincidence, I would say. That’s not empirical evidence, but it is cause to raise an eyebrow. That would depend on the number of people that are usually in the house, the number of those in the house that would probably wake you, and the likelihood of you dreaming about the people you know doing the things that they usually do. Still not that great a coincidence. ---
**Author:** ![WotNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e19b73/32.png) [@WotNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WotNot)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2012, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/92 "2012-01-26T23:48:12Z")
> [@Doubticus](#): > > Oh I agree that infants waking isn’t a great coincidence. Waking from a dream where someone is calling for you, only to see that same person who proceeds to tell you they were calling for you in there mind is a greater coincidence, I would say. That’s not empirical evidence, but it is cause to raise an eyebrow. I don’t think it is, really. Think of it this way: if you had been lying on your bed with your eyes shut, but fully awake, would you have been aware of your mother walking up and standing in your bedroom door, looking at you? I’m fairly confident you would, as would most people (and 16-year-olds, in my experience, are more than usually attuned to their parents unexpected presence in their bedrooms). Now consider that being asleep or awake isn’t a simple either/or state. Even in deep sleep, we can be aware of our surroundings to some extent. You don’t give a time of day for this, but unless your mother was prone to wandering about on a whim in the dead of night, I’m going to assume that you’d either just gone to sleep or it was around the time you’d be waking up normally – i.e. you weren’t fully asleep, and therefore more likely to pick up cues from your environment and incorporate them into whatever dream you might be having. So, it’s a fun anecdote, but not really an eyebrow hoister. Unless she was actually thinking about donuts, of course… ---
**Author:** ![Doubticus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e56c9b/32.png) [@Doubticus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doubticus)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2012, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/93 "2012-01-27T22:26:30Z")
Have you ever had a dream where the urgency of the situation wakes you as in a nightmare? This dream was like that, I awoke facing away from my mother and I was generally startled by her presence. She hadn’t made a habit of standing in my doorway. LOL. But anyway, I’m not saying this is proof, but because of this experience plus a few others, I’m open to the possibility that there is something to it. I found this documentary pretty interesting. [http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/through-the-wormhole-is-there-a-sixth-sense/](http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/through-the-wormhole-is-there-a-sixth-sense/) ---
**Author:** ![naita](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naita/32/5862_2.png) [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2012, 12:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/94 "2012-02-03T12:43:26Z")
> [@David42](#): > > Note: Dismissiveness without any inkling of taking it seriously. > > Nothing I said was about _predicting_ anything. it’s about “I can tell you NOW what is on the radio while there is no radio playing.” > > Now someone who would take the possibility seriously might ask, “Wow, that sounds incredible. You have any ideas what might be going on?” And someone knowledgable about radio, the human brain and the psychology of human misperception may say: “Wow, that sounds incredible. Have you done any systematic checks of this to make sure you’re not fooling yourself in one of the many ways science have shown people fool themselves?” It’s incredibly simple. Grab a pad and a pen, jot down your perfect knowledge of the song currently playing, check the result, repeat. Describe everything about the procedure. Do you check more than one channel for instance. Then, when you have a sufficiently large sample, look at the songs and how often they were played in the period of experiment and whether or not your hits are statistically significant. > [@](#): > > To which I might say: “I dunno, but I wonder; I wonder if maybe, since I am always near a radio that’s turned off when it happens, it might be some kind of interaction between the unampliflied signal in the coil and certain brain cells I might have, maybe some of my cells have become hypersensitive to this energy?” > > And someone who was seriously interested in science (rather than proving their pseudointellectual superiority over whackos) might say, “hey, we might make a hypotheses and test it.” No, this is so unlikely, knowing the physiology of the brain and the nature of radio signals, that someone seriously interested in science would first ask you to accept the possibility that you might be wrong and do a proper critical examination. Impressing yourself and your friends is known to be possible with chance phenomena due to various biases, while hearing radio signals in your head is known to be impossible within the current knowledge of brains and such signals. > [@](#): > > And I might say, “Well, I was thinking of what it would take to falsify this, and thinking there might be such and such that could be done, but the drawback is…” > > Whereupon someone really interested in science might have a contribution to my idea or an entirely different one, and I might say, “ok, so long as it doesn’t seem too scary with large amounts of electricity and my brain in the same sentence, I might consent to a test like that.” > > But nah, people who are more interested in seeming smarter than someone else simply dismiss it and laugh and make fun and trot out their speculation as fact. No, people who’re interested in fighting ignorance are asking you to accept the fact that your claim is not unique and that it’s been shown over and over again that such beliefs may arise due to nothing more than chance and human perception bias. They’re asking you to man up and examine your perceived ability with some very basic safeguards against perception biases, simply recording your peri-knowledge, rate of success and procedure. No large amounts of electricity, no scary PTB finding out your brain should be sliced and diced, just you, a radio, pad and pen, and if there’s an actual above chance in the raw hits, some statistical analysis of your choice of picks and their playing frequency. Until you do so, the only sensible conclusion from the available evidence is that you’re lying or delusional. ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2012, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/95 "2012-02-03T14:02:33Z")
> [@naita](#): > > Until you do so, the only sensible conclusion from the available evidence is that you’re lying or delusional. You don’t need words that strong to explain David42’s statement. “Exaggerating” and “mistaken” are all it takes to explain. ---
**Author:** ![naita](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naita/32/5862_2.png) [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2012, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796/96 "2012-02-03T20:51:40Z")
> [@CurtC](#): > > You don’t need words that strong to explain David42’s statement. “Exaggerating” and “mistaken” are all it takes to explain. All it takes to explain a single post of such claims, sure. Repetition and insistence turns exaggeration into lying (which it basically is in the first place) and being mistaken into being delusional. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/telepathy-and-others-true-or-false/609796.md?page=4)