What are some of the possible scientific explanations for psychic powers?

In My Humble Opinion
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Sorry moderators, I am not sure if this goes to the Cafe Society, or the Great Debates, so I just put it here.

Preface: Right now, there are no empirical evidence for psychic power, such as Telekinesis, ESP, mind-reading and the like. But suppose that one day it is established psychic powers are possible, what could be the likely scientific explanation? Or are there already something in the work?

For example, according to this article (warning: Christian content, but it is defending psionic powers in games and not the usual fundamentalist ranting), the author points out that as we becomes better educated, our mind is capable of performing feats that are impossible centuries ago. The example in the article is that of a particular person who is able to read without speaking aloud - and it is considered as a ‘feat’ back then.

Some of my ideas are as follow: have those been explored?

Savant theory: There are stories of idiot savants who are able to calculate prime numbers beyond what technology could and many other feats. Is it possible that by changing how one perceive information, we could achieve interpret existing information differently and obtain some sort of psychic powers?

Improved perception: For stuff like dowsing, psychometric and the such, is it possible that humans (through one way or others - maybe mutations or some chemical in the brain) be able to perceive the world like animals does? For example, there are dogs which could detect cancer because of their incredible sense of smell. Is it too far a stretch to say that perhaps a human being could develop ways have such a sense of smell or being able to see different spectrum of light and hence obtain some form of ‘psychic powers?’

Pheromones: There is this theory in Warhammer 40K that the Ethereal caste of the alien Tau race uses pheromones to manipulate others - is there any room in scientific thought for this? Could one be able to perceive pheromones and hence achieve some form of limited mind reading or empathy read?

Frankly, I can’t think of anything that could explain telekenesis or remote sensing. Perhaps quantum mechanics have some answer?

PS. This purely an intellectual exercise. Something like “are psychic-like powers be achievable through science and technology?”

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Cite?

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Edit: In response to DanBlather

I believe I read this in the book “The Man Who Thinks He is a Hat”, where there are a pair of twins who would play a number game by exchanging numbers with each other. A professor was studying the numbers and realised that those are prime numbers, and in very large order.

Of course, the book is kind of old (about 30 years old?) so perhaps my take that idiot savants can come up with prime numbers larger than with current technology is probably inaccurate, apologies for that (Probably for technology at that time when the twins were being studied). But in the account, the two kids basically just think out the prime numbers without any apparent pencil/paper calculation, churning it in their mind, within minutes.

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Correction: The book in question about the idiot savant cite is “The Man who Thinks his Wife is a Hat”

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You’re remembering it slightly wrong. What happens is the doc goes to sit next to them and they’re saying numbers to each other. The doc realises they’re prime numbers and goes get a book of prime numbers and checks the book against their primes. After a while one of them says an eight figure number then the other one thinks for a bit and then says a nine figure number.

The doc checks his book and reads out a ten figure prime. The twins both suddenly look at him in surprise and then concentrate fiercely. After a while one of them says an eleven figure prime number and gives the doc a triumphant smile.

They weren’t figuring out primes that are beyond human technology - is that even possible? The doc had a book with him, that’s how he knew they were primes.

But, yeah, your essential point still stands. Stories of autistic feats of maths are legion and apparently true. So theoretically if they can do it, could we all learn it?

And what’s going on with autistics feats anyway? How do they do that stuff? That’s a GQ itself I think.

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This seems more like an IMHO question unless you’re trying to make some sort of argument that stage magicians are actually performing magic because most people can’t perform the same feats, or that your average person is reading another person’s mind when they notice that she is smiling and thus can tell that she is happy.

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Ignore my previous post, I thought this was in GD. :smack:

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A great deal of brain power is devoted to socialization – indeed, it’s been theorized that the human brain evolved so quickly not due to dealing with the environment, but dealing with other humans. Since autistics are by nature non-social, they can devote that extra brain power to savant-like feats. (Same applies to stereotypical “nerds” who lack social skills, but excel in math & engineering.)

No cite, just my own pet theory.

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Anecdotal, so grain of salt and all that, but I do have a friend I’ve known since middle school that fits the nerd pattern. When I met him, he had very few friends and even among them he acted somewhat the oddball. In retrospect it seems kind of apparent that he just didn’t know how to respond to, say, a joke at the teller’s expense.

On the other hand, when we were sitting in math in 6th grade, the teacher eventually just handed us some high school geometry books to keep us occupied. He continued to be the resident ‘math nerd’ all the way through high school, until heading to Rose-Hulman, where he just finished his masters in math, with plans for a PhD.

The more interesting part, however, is his performance as an undergrad. When he was suddenly immersed in the social atmosphere of the dorms, it seemed as if he lost his touch. It took him a year until he seemed back to the level of aptitude I remembered. It was only when he rented a house with a few friends that he got back on track.

To tie this back to the OP, I seriously doubt that telekinesis, ESP, precognition, etc. are possible. There seems to be no plausible mechanism and it strikes me as a good old ‘spooky force over a distance’ thing. Enhanced, savant-like abilities, though seem quite likely to have reasonable, explainable, and most importantly testable source. Can the average person be trained to do what a savant can? Maybe, but there’s too much we don’t know about how a savant’s mind works to know whether a ‘normal’ brain can be made to do the same things.

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Just to correct CrazyChops’ own correction, the book he is referring to is The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks.

When he says that savants have been able to calculate primes ‘beyond what technology could’ he is perhaps slightly exaggerating the case. However, it is true that savants and gifted ‘human caculators’ have been able to perform calculations in their heads that are far beyond normal human capability even with study and practice, and far more quickly than a skilled mathematician armed with a desktop calculator. A good modern example, whose feats have been well documented and subjected to controlled testing, would be Daniel Tammet.

I don’t think there is any meaningful answer to the question in the OP. ‘Paranormal’ abilities are given this label precisely because if they exist, they both lie outside our current best scientific understanding of how the world works and are also inconsistent with it. For example, those who claim that ESP is real generally make claims that intervening distance makes no difference to the functional transfer of information. This is at odds with the fact that every other form we know of transmission of information is subject to attenuation (in simple terms: signals get weaker the further away you go).

Hence if we ever reach a time when we have replicable and independently verifiable proof of something ‘paranormal’, then we will either have to say ‘This is real, but it lies outside our scientific model of how the world works and we don’t yet know how to reconcile them’, or ‘We need to substantially revise our scientific model, including revision of some fairly fundamental principles’.

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I would emphasise that the reason they are called ‘paranormal’ is both that there is no scientific way to explain them and that they have never been observed.

I asked a dowser how his ‘powers’ worked. He said they were sent by God.
I asked if he could demonstrate them and he replied that any such testing was offensive to God and so it always failed.
He added that the powers were not to be used for financial gain. Then he offered to train me - for money.

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deleted

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I know this is not good logic, but perhaps what I am trying to ask is “suppose psychic powers are scientific - what probable theories within science could explain them” (I am also not very sure how to phrase the questions either).

Disclaimer: Nor am I claiming that psychic powers have to be scientific or that I am arguing that there are psychic powers, just wondering if any existing scientific models would explain some so-called psychic powers.

Thanks for the correction on the book’s title; I probably mis-remembered the story as it has been some time since I have read it and I have no idea where I have stowed it. Perhaps I call for a dowser…

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Let me take a WAG at telekinesis and see if this is the kind of explanation you had in mind.

Electricity is a major part of the brain’s function. Electricity can move some things around (static electricity). With proper training/equipment, our subject can can harness and focus the electric charges in their brain and project it across the room, enough to move small objects around. The only problem I can see is that the amount of juice you’d need to even move a piece of paper from across the room is certain to fry your brain in the process. Nobody ever said science was easy. :smiley:

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Since the OP really isn’t an answerable question, and will probably contain many side issues, I think we’ll move it to IMHO. It really doesn’t rise to the level of Great Debates, at least not yet. :slight_smile:

samclem Moderator, General Questions.

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I don’t believe this story, as described. There are (I figure in my head) roughly 400,000,000 primes of ten or fewer digits (10^10/ln(10^10)) and if you had a book that listed them all, how many could be printed on a page? A thousand, two thousand in tiny type? Even so, such a book would have 200,000 pages. Even up to eight digits would need well over 2000 pages. I have seen books of 6 digit primes and that seems likelier. To find out if a six digit number is prime, it is sufficient to try to divide it by all primes of three or fewer digits. It is not impossible to memorize a table of three digit primes, although obviously hard. You could also just try all numbers not obviously divisible by 2, 3, 5, or 11, which reduces the memorization. It is still a remarkable feat to do it all in your head.

I once saw a demo by a lightning calculator. She was good. She could do in 30 seconds, in her head, things that would take me 30 minutes with a pencil and paper. It was clear, both from what she could do and from what she declined to do, that she was honest. But let’s not get carried away with fantasy stories.

Incidentally, if you gave me a 10 digit number I could tell with a couple hours computation with near, but not absolute certainty, if it was prime. The main problem is to avoid arithmetic errors. But I don’t expect lightning calculators to understand the trick I would use.

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In my defence, I was just recalling the book from memory same as the op - long time since I read it. But I’m sure the numbers given in the book are as I said (I’ve got a pretty good memory - almost savant sometimes :))

This is from the relevant wiki page:

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I would be willing to bet that theory is incorrect. Autistics are non-social able to perform savant-like feats because their brain develops differently (in ways that are not completely understood).

“Nerdism” OTOH, is not a medical phenomenon. It is a cultural one. It can be applied to a wide range of individuals from your basic socially retarded adult Comic Book Guy to anyone who isn’t a good looking athletic half-wit to any member of a profession like IT or accounting. It can refer to someone with real social problems but more often, it is used by people who aren’t particularly smart or hard working to derisively belittle people who are.

CrazyChop, let’s look at your “psychic powers” for a second:

No. Assuming there are savants who can “calculate prime numbers” beyond what technology can, there is nothing paranormal about that. Computers have physical limitations based on their circuitry. So do humans, I suppose, but our brains are clearly able to process more than any computer. Just differently.

No. Our bodies are bound by physical laws of nature. You can’t smell as good as a dog can because your nose isn’t designed like a dogs. It’s like asking if I can make a car fly like an airplane. Yes you can. Just design it so that it is indistinguishable from an airplane.

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Pheremones are a real phenomenon. But as they are merely chemicals, I don’t see how they can convey any more information than “I smell fear” or “I smell sexy time”.

The problem is that there is no scientific explanation for “psychic powers” because there is not such thing as psychic powers. What passes for psychic powers is usually either bullshit, flimflamery, intuition or random chance.

Take a crash survivor who says “I had a bad feeling”. Do you “have a bad feeling” every time you fly because you are scared of flying and now feel vindicated by the statistical improbability of being right this one time? Did you have a bad feeling once you felt the uncharacteristic vibration of the engine? Clearly your “feeling” wasn’t strong enough to tell you to not get the fuck on that plane.

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I think the things often described as psychic powers do not exist, and are show tricks or self delusion or misunderstanding or some other disappointment.

But the OP question and the rephrasing here seem logical enough, at least logical enough to be a worthwhile question.

You can divide observed, suspected, or hypothetical phenomena up as natural or supernatural. By definition supernatural phenomena are above nature and would not lend themselves to any kind of natural or scientific analysis. I take the OP question not to struggle with this point, but rather to wonder whether some of the things we think are supernatural might be found to be natural instead. This is certainly possible (though I’m not aware of it having happened).

People worked with elephants for centuries, but it was only a few years ago that we discovered elephants vocalize at frequencies much too low for us to hear. This should remind us that things can be slightly outside of our awareness for a long time and still be very real. And the horse Clever Hans could add, or count (I forget which), according to his owner, who seemed to honestly believe it, though others think they figured out that what Hans could actually do was stamp his hoof repeatedly until his owner got a certain happy look on his face. This should remind us that things can be inside our awareness but quite incorrectly so.

Charles Fort used to push the idea that scientists were not doing their job well if they were too quick to dismiss ideas on the fringe, and I have to agree. There is, though, a practical matter - scientists want to turn stuff up, they want discoveries and understanding, and of course they need to feed their families. So they have to place their bets to some degree on lines of inquiry they think will be fruitful. Most probably feel pretty comfortable betting that there won’t be any mindreading discoveries they’re missing out on.

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How about, we turn the discussion into the following: You are a writer of a SF story that features characters capable of what to c.2009AD society looks like what is commonly called “psychic powers”. You do NOT want to attribute these to mystical cosmic powers. Or made-of-whole-cloth oh-please handwaves like midichlorians, for that matter.

What known or plausibly hypothesized physical-universe phenomena would you apply literary spin to, in order to justify said “powers”?
E.g., your novel has a character that glimpses moments in the future, too often and accurately to be just random déja vu. Some quirk of his attention-span makes it so that he becomes ever more conscious of this information-from-nowhere; early chapters are spent with him seeking medical evaluation and, to his relief, ruling out schizophrenia. What is an internally-consistent explanation that can sound plausibly scientific? CAN there such? Is it possible he is somehow consciously registering information glimpsed through passing transient wormholes, that most everyone else just get subliminally and ignore? Does THAT hold up to critique?