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THE DIFFERENT LEVELS OF MENTAL TELEPATHY
The term “mental telepathy” is misleadingly broad. It essentially
means the direct communication of thoughts between people without
using the basic five senses. There is a huge difference, however,
between having a creepy feeling that someone is watching you and
being able to pick the plans for a nuclear reactor out of an
unsuspecting scientist’s mind. Mental telepathy covers a huge range
of abilities from very basic to fairly complex. This article will
attempt to explain the different levels of mental telepathy.
NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION
Kinesics, or non-verbal communication, occurs whenever two people
communicate without speaking, using their eyes, body language, and
facial expressions instead. This can range from simple messages like
“go away” to entire conversations. Any parent who has tried to
communicate something to their spouse that they don’t want their
children to hear has experienced this. Non-verbal communication is
achieved easiest and most accurately between people who know each
other well—siblings, parents and children, husbands and wives, and
close friends.
Some can argue (with good reason) that this doesn’t count as mental
telepathy, as the two people are using their senses to communicate
(just not with sounds). Technically, this is correct. This doesn’t
mean, however, that mental telepathy does not play a role. The fact
that non-verbal communication occurs most successfully between
people who are related (like family), or who have lived together for
extended periods of time (like spouses) implies that their minds
might be more attuned to each other than to strangers. On the other
hand, one could argue that this merely means the two people know
each other well enough to understand each others more subtle body
language, or have created agreed-upon nonverbal signals to
communicate.
EMPATHY
Empathy is the ability to recognize, perceive, or directly
experience the emotions of others. Some people are vary poor at
this, and others are very good at this, being able to mentally “put
themselves in another’s shoes” and understand how they must be
feeling. Empathy can be increased with training and practice.
Actors, for example, are able to imitate the emotions of others,
even to the point of being able to make themselves spontaneously
laugh or cry.
Most people have experienced “sympathetic pain”—feeling another
person’s pain as if it were your own. For example, after witnessing
someone close to you break their arm, you may experience an
uncomfortable feeling or even an ache in your arm, even though you
know it’s fine. Similarly, when someone close to you is experiencing
an overwhelming emotion, such as joy, grief, or depression, you may
feel an echo of the same emotion inside you. Finally, there is the
phenomena of long distance empathy. In this case, a person suddenly
knows—they FEEL it—that someone close to them is in danger, has been
hurt, or is in pain, even though they are not near the person at the
time.
Psychologists write off such empathetic phenomena as a simple trick
of an overactive imagination. At the very least, they do have a
point that other senses are being used. Would we be able to feel the
sympathetic pain of a broken arm, for example, if we could not
actually see the injury? This does not explain, however, the
phenomena of long-distance empathy.
CONCRETE CONCEPTS
This is the thought transference of concrete symbols and objects
between two minds. Mental telepathy at this level must by necessity
move beyond the regular five senses, and often requires a designated
sender and receiver, intense concentration, training, and practice.
The simpler the concept, the easier it is to communicate through
thought alone. For example, a color or shape may be easier to convey
than an animal.
Experiments in telepathy are often conducted on this level. The
Zener cards used in tests of mental telepathy are simple, concrete
black-and-white symbols (a circle, square, star, plus sign, and
three wavy lines). On one hand, skeptics and critics of the Zener
cards have pointed out that with only five cards to choose from,
even a random guess has a 20% chance of being right. On the other
hand, one could argue that a shared, known, limited set of concrete
symbols increases the ability of the sender and receiver to
coordinate their thoughts. Furthermore, although anyone can get a
20% success rate with enough guesses, a success rate of 50% or
higher (which have happened) can not be explained away by simple
statistics.
ABSTRACT CONCEPTS
Mental telepathy at this level goes beyond simple colors and shapes
to more abstract concepts like ideas, actions, or values. It is rare
and difficult for telepaths to achieve this level, and experiments
have shown that they have a lower success rate.
Some animals appear to communicate, and science is not able to
explain how. Telepathy shouldn’t be ruled out. At this level, such
animals would be using abstract concepts, albeit very basic
concepts. Due to the nature of animal brains lacking prefrontal
lobes, such ideas would probably not go beyond simplistic impulses
like “hungry”, “thirsty”, “horny”, or “danger!”
There is a theory that humans were once capable of telepathy, but
lost it as the species evolved and developed language. If this is
true, then humans may be capable of communicating abstract concepts
from mind to mind. On the down side, however, this means mental
telepathy may not be able to go beyond basic, animalistic concepts.
A human may be able to communicate a source of danger and how to
avoid it directly from mind to mind, but a receiver could not, for
example, speak to words to a poem the sender is reciting in their
mind.
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