Telepathy and Others - True or False?

No…

let me elaborate…No, under controlled conditions it has never been detected.

Psychics also make press announcements and contact family members, inserting themselves into the event that way.

I finally get to use a Digger quote. From panel 2:

The comic starts with a talking wombat hallucinating because she hit a pocket of bad air and gets odder from there.

Said I wasn’t sure about it… just that it was an odd thing that happened. Said to make up my mind for me. So meh :stuck_out_tongue:

NOPE! Not uh, nadda, nothing. Except for those I said already, of course I can’t prove or disprove that so.

Just because you don’t remember it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But like I said, it’s also possible that you were feeling bad for no particular reason and you remember it because it turned out that something important was also happening. To offer a third possibility, other people knew what was going on and you picked up on their tension without knowing why they were tense.

“The laws of probability not only allow for coincidence; they demand it.” See “Confirmation Bias” (in Standingwave’s post above, quoted below).

I think you’ve nailed it. Here is why:

It’s my considered opinion that true human telepathy cannot reliably be said to exist. I base this answer on my telepathic experiences. :slight_smile:

Prior to 1990 I was highly emotionally repressed. While I did love my wife, it was more in the nature of a patriotic/religious commitment than anything the songs might celebrate. In spring 1990 I had a heart attack; the following year, we took in homeless teenagers, feeling like we were being called to help them. The rtesult was vastly destabilizing to my emotional battlements. At the same time, one runaway arrived and ended up in our household who thought he had lost all the things that had provided him emotional stability. We “clicked” – we were both desperate for emotional stability, and each discovered a hole in our life the size and shape of the other. We became each other’s best friend/{older/younger} brother/{father/son} figure, intellectually oriented, emotionally needy, and capable of “switching hats” on need at a moment’s notice. We sought and got a really deep understanding of the other’s personality, his reactions and ways of thinking, talking for hours, grasping each other’s reactions to songs, and so on.

And for a few months we could much of the time reliably predict the other’s reaction in real time to the point we were effectively reading each other’s mind.

Now in later analysis, I realize that though it occurred often enough to be so described, it was not constantly reliable. Hence, confirmation bias played a big role. And there is little doubt in my mind that we were unconsciously doing “cold readings” on each other. We wanted to think it was happening, so we did.

After a while, when we didn’t need it as much, it faded. Because were no longer in each other’s frontal lobes, because we didn’t need to be. So the ability to “read” each other faded back to normal coincidence level.

It was real. And it was about as supernatural as my ability to guess Sen. Santorum’s opinion of folk masses. Which is to say, not at all.

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I hate to make accusations, dear lady, but it seems to me that post was just deaf-elk-ating in the thread. :stuck_out_tongue:

You may well be right here. But it is in my mind a quite different question. If we posit for the sake of argument, for use in reductio ad absurdam proof, a God who insists that prospective believers put their trust in Him by faith and not because they have received monadnock-obvious objective proof, then the behavior described would be in accord with how He is reported as behaving, more or less. The problems of rewarded evil, incurable disease, man’s inhumanity to man, furnish much better evidence against Him than His willingness to grant only subjective (not objective) evidence of His being.

Just goes to show you’ve got to watch out for those talking wombats.

And that … rock … over there? That one does look like a bunny!

TV psychics are boring. I’m a Pandora psychic.

To the OP, I was hoping to read some examples from you that are at least interesting, but what you have related are nothing more than occurrences that appeared odd to you. The reality is that they’re just coincidences or confirmation bias at work. So the answer to your question is an emphatic FALSE! You don’t have any telepathy powers. Or shall I say you have as much special powers as Sylvia Browne, John Edward, and James Van Praagh, which is none.

I’ve had two interesting experiances. The first one, I was working on a work crew at a folk fest. Suddenly out of the clear blue sky, a high defintion image of my friend came on in my brain. It was like a TV turning on. It was not thinking of her…Anyway, I had the urge to go to the next concert. Asked my group leader…she said yeah I could go. I go to the next concert and sit down in front…Guess who jumps on me about a mintue later?
Then one time I was up in Boston hanging out…went to a bookstore…suddenly that high defintion TV turning on in my brain happened…Next day I go down to the post office. I looked up and KNEW my friend had sent me something…and she HAD!!!
It wasn’t confirmation bias…meaning I wasn’t thinking of her…it was more like a very high def image of her coming up in my brain…VERY weird, and has freaked me out.

They don’t actually: see here

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. So the police have to follow up the tipoff to see if it has some substance. Which it basically never does.

::sigh:: Holidays. Fire escapes. Diamonds. Wrist. Ergo, psychic.

DO I HAVE TO SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU?!?!

A chill just went down my spine. :eek:

I knew you were going to post that.

I once had a weird dream wherein Bob Hope died.

Twenty years later he did, in fact, die.

Freaked me out.

I had a dream someone would post after me in this thread…

With pleasure. :smiley:

But no one did. Eerie!

When you open your mind, all the evils of the world rush out ?

Lizzyerd, if you ask me, the readiness with which most Dopers dismiss “woo” does a disservice to science.

I recall the idea that “One man’s magic is another man’s science.” One day what is currently called “woo” will somewhat be called science.

I believe science simply has not asked the right questions and done the right kinds of experiments.

I find it arrogant to dismiss a phenomenon as non-existant because science does not yet know how to measure it or explain it. If we are at the ultimate of our knowledge, then why do we need further science? I predict that in a hundred years those so readily dismissing what is “woo” today will look foolish in light of the future’s discoveries.

I think “I do not know the answer” is a much better answer than, in a haughty pseudointellectual air, declare that all things not currently quantifiable or understood cannot exist, period, case closed.

For instance, the radio plays in my mind. I don’t hear it with my ears, I don’t think it’s tooth fillings (I had all my mercury replaced a few years ago) but darn if daily I don’t hear a song in my head and turn on the radio and that song is playing. It happens way too often for chance to be an adequate explanation. Of course I can’t give an adequate explanation, but I’m not accepting that its not happening.

Someday someone will be able to explain it in scientific terms.

Refusing to accept phenomenon because science currently does not understand it is NO REASON WHATSOEVER to dismiss what appears to our feeble minds as magic. I’m not going to call the millions who claim to have witnessed woo events liars on the grounds science cannot explain it or measure it. To do so would mean there is never any possibility of understanding it.

Of course I am not arguing that mere coincidence isn’t sometimes all that is going on, or that confirmation bias doesn’t happen either, and frankly, some of your examples are not very impressive to me.

But I do wish to encourage you to keep on asking the questions. That’s how we increase our understanding.

People made fun of a lot of the scientists we today respect, and some of their discoveries explained yesterday’s magic in a scientific way, so don’t let them discourage you from your interest in this subject.