Have you ever been with a friend or family member,
know exactly what they were thinking, and wondered
to yourself is telepathy real?
Let's find out on today's episode of Colossal Questions.
Telepathy is a fancy name for the ability
to communicate with another person using just your mind.
It sounds like something straight out of a comic book,
yet for centuries, there have been those
who claim to have the gift.
The word telepathy was first coined in 1882
by a British scholar named Frederick W.H. Myers.
He was the founder of the Society for Psychical Research,
a group dedicated to understanding
strange psychic or paranormal events.
They were trained to use cutting edge science of the day
to get answers.
And telepathy was one of the main paranormal phenomena
they wanted to solve.
But even at the time, they weren't without strong critics.
[laughs]
Many experts criticized the Society for Psychical Research
for trying to find proof of telepathy
rather than trying to determine if it was actually real or not.
Even still, lots of different people
took this new idea of telepathy and ran with it.
All sorts of different experiments
popped up to try and test for telepathic powers.
Take for example Zener cards.
They were designed by a psychologist named
Karl Zener in the early 1900s.
The cards have five simple, distinct designs
on them, a yellow circle, a red plus sign, three blue wavy
lines, a black square, and a green star.
The test itself is pretty basic.
The person conducting the experiments
shuffles a deck of 25 cards and picks one
up looking at the symbol.
Then, the potentially telepathic patient
tries to guess which of the five designs is on the card.
Easy enough.
The problem is this experiment is
an easy target for cheating in the form of sensory leakage--
that's all the different ways a patient might
be able to tell what's on the card
without using telepathic superpowers.
They might be able to read the symbols
from the back of the cards or notice small hints in the voice
or body language of the person doing the experiment that
could tip them off.
In other words, this simple experiment
doesn't seem to have much scientific backing at all.
Other telepathic tests have been tried over the years, too.
But experts have found major flaws
with each and every one of them.
For years, it seemed as though telepathy
was nothing more than a pseudoscientific myth, that
is until around 2014.
That year, a team of researchers used technology
to conduct an experiment to try and see
if brain to brain communication is possible once and for all.
It sounds like sci-fi, but it worked.
How?
Well, they used special electrodes
that detect electrical activity in the brain called an EEG.
People in India wearing the headset
would transmit messages from their brain, over the internet,
to people in France, wearing a wacky device
on their head called a TMS.
Those signals were then emailed from India to France
where the TMS headsets would stimulate the person's brain.
The messages were sent in binary code.
So every letter was broken down into ones and zeros.
In other words, it was a bit like slow, clumsy Morse code
sent from one person's brain to another across the globe.
Pretty cool, but also pretty inconvenient.
Not exactly AN omega level mutant power.
But still, why does it matter?
Because there might not be people among us
with mystical mental abilities.
But one day, maybe even soon, science
might actually catch up with the fiction.