The scientific explanation of telepathy. telepathy

Telepathy is a distant feeling, and it is the "sixth sense" besides the five conventional senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Telepathy mainly includes direct communication between people and hearts, knowing the past and future, and remote observation. The most mysterious statement is "Perception of omniscient information hidden in 1 1 dimensional space, which vibrates at the junction of 10 dimensional space and 12 dimensional space". In order to develop and utilize this special function, a large number of scholars devote themselves to the study of mind; Some countries have invested heavily in the hope of gaining military superiority through telepathy; There are also many folk "psychology lovers" who are keen to participate in various spiritual and physical and mental training and try to cultivate the "sixth sense".

However, after decades, telepathy has not been scientifically confirmed. On the contrary, there are a large number of Jianghu scams and academic fraud, and the "spiritual lessons" exposed by the media involve cult spread and collective fornication. Some scholars believe that people who believe in telepathy are deceiving themselves, only seeing the results they want to see and turning a blind eye to the evidence that does not support telepathy. There is often some tacit understanding between lovers, relatives and acquaintances, which is regarded as telepathy. For example, someone dreamed of his first girlfriend and then received her letter by phone. However, there are various channels of information communication between people who are closely related, and their living habits are similar, so it is not magical to produce individual and accidental tacit understanding. In order to prove the existence of telepathy, we need rigorous scientific evidence.

As early as the 65438+80s in 2009, Sir William Fletcher Barrett, professor of experimental physics at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Dublin, and a group of scholars formed a "Mind Research Society" to conduct scientific research on a priest's four daughters and 1 maid-they claimed that they could communicate telepathically. The research method is to guess cards with names or household items. If you are blind, the probability of guessing five cards in a row is 65.438+one in 42 million, and the probability of guessing eight cards in a row is astronomical. In the witness of the notary, all the girls guessed right. However, after six years of experiments, it is finally found that girls cheat in code words, and the methods are not clever.

Douglas Blackburn is a telepathic person. He performed telepathy with a juggler and was recognized by the Psychic Research Association. Blackburn became the general secretary of the association. However, Blackburn later couldn't help but publish a series of articles to expose how he deceived researchers.

People pretend to have telepathy for some reason, so they use nonverbal codes, such as looking up and down, looking left and right, representing different meanings, or coughing, sighing, yawning, making noises with shoes, etc. To reveal the contents of the experimental card, and even use coins to knock out the sound to send Morse code! In order to prevent fraud, researchers have to hire magicians, casino swindlers and other experts to detect fraud.

On the other hand, telepathic researchers often cheat. Laing, an American psychologist, found that his student and assistant Levi forged data in the experiment. Laing himself ignored the data that did not support telepathy and thought that the participants deliberately did not cooperate.

But the phenomenon of telepathy does not exist after the experimental fraud is ruled out. Some people sophistry that telepathy is "sincerity is spiritual", and strict anti-deception means destroy the trust between people, so telepathy is invalid.

1988, the National Academy of Sciences announced a conclusion: "After 130 years of research on psychological phenomena, there is no scientific evidence to confirm its existence." Being able to know the past and the future is a magical manifestation of telepathy. Among them, "knowing the past" means realizing the perception of what has happened simply by spiritual strength. For example, the following example—

An American audience watched a TV news: Susan Smith, a white mother in Southern California, claimed that a black man hijacked herself and her two sons into a car, drove her out of the car after driving to a lake area, and then drove away with her two sons. The audience immediately thought that the two children might have been killed in the lake. A week later, the police found out the truth of the case: it turned out that the mother cruelly locked her two sons in the back seat of the car, then started the car and rushed into the lake, and got off early to watch the children drown.

So the audience thought they had telepathic ability and could know the truth of the case. In fact, the crime of a mother killing a child occurs from time to time, and its probability is much higher than that of a black kidnapping a white child. So many viewers in front of the TV suspected that the mother was committing perjury-not because of their telepathic ability, but because of their understanding of human nature and human behavior. In fact, the most suspicious is the experienced police. As long as someone follows this line of thinking, the truth is not difficult to get out.

Robert Carroll, an American philosopher, once saw a woman claiming to have been raped on TV, but he thought the woman was lying, which was later proved to be true. Others feel the same way after reading it. Is this telepathy? Not exactly. People just judge things by feeling, sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Occasionally, once or twice, people will be surprised by their hunches and intuitive abilities and begin to believe in telepathy. Human beings often make predictions about the future, and when making predictions, they often use their own knowledge and experience and consider environmental factors, so predictions do not depend on mysterious supernatural forces. A premonition is mysterious, which means that a person feels that something unusual is going to happen, and there is no convincing explanation so far. Some people try to explain telepathy with the concept of "quantum entanglement" in quantum mechanics, but what is the relationship between the activity of a single microscopic particle and the neural activity of the brain? This is not clear. Psychologists admit that the biggest difficulty they face is that these mental phenomena are difficult to be compatible with physics and biology.

For this reason, some psychologists use functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) to measure brain activity, as well as the corresponding skin conductivity and heart rate, trying to prove that the human body has a hunch or "subconscious effect" before the real stimulus occurs. For example, the body has reacted before seeing a picture, which can explain the existence of telepathy. Sure enough, some experiments have found that people will have physiological activities such as adrenaline secretion before anxiety. However, this does not mean that people can foresee the future. After all, anxiety does not appear before things happen.

Carol pointed out that these psychological experiments are full of defects in design, such as the lack of a reasonable experimental control group, the researchers' interpretation of the data is far-fetched, and they often confuse people with statistical tricks. Repeatability is an important requirement for scientific experiments, but when other scholars repeatedly verify the so-called psychic premonition, they can't get the same result.

The phenomenon of paranormal premonition can be explained more simply and reasonably. For example, there is something wrong with experimental instruments-precision instruments are easily affected by temperature, humidity and electromagnetic fields; There are errors in the recording and calculation of experimental data; Some researchers want to prove the existence of mental phenomena too much, falsify them intentionally or unintentionally, and only see the data that is beneficial to mental phenomena. Carol said: "As long as you find someone who can predict the game champion, lottery winning number or terrorist attack every time, then the skeptics will be really convinced." Self-deception means that we mislead ourselves into believing something wrong. Psychologists believe that self-deception has various intentional or unintentional motives, such as egoism, or psychological factors such as prejudice, desire and insecurity.

For example, although the objective evidence clearly shows that the child is lying, his parents still firmly believe that the child is telling the truth, which is the result of the parents' desire to tell the truth. Carol believes that self-deception is a moral defect of dishonesty and a manifestation of lack of rationality. Sometimes self-deception is due to the lack of ability to judge evidence, which is a natural lack of ability. For example, parents think they are close to their children, and people who accuse their children of lying don't know their children themselves, so there is reason to trust them more. This is a simple cognitive disorder, which has nothing to do with motivation and morality.

Many people think that as long as they are not as wishful as their parents, they will not deceive themselves, but in fact, self-deception continues to happen. For example, many people spend money on all kinds of fakes, believing that there is a perpetual motion machine in the world, thinking that it is economical, environmentally friendly and can save the world. As a result, the money was cheated and the face was lost.

Although scientific research has repeatedly shown that telepathy, horoscope personality, crystal ball divination and touch therapy are deceptive, there are always people who think that on the one hand, it is driven by interests, such as fortune tellers and psychological counselors engaged in touch therapy, on the other hand, it is ignorance, laziness and low cognitive ability. For example, believers in telepathy often do not have scientific literacy. Remote observation refers to seeing places beyond the visual range through telepathy and perceiving who is there and what they are doing without the help of any other technical means.

Psychics with this telepathic ability claim to find oil fields, mountains on Jupiter, missing children, abducted hostages, buried bodies, secret meetings held by enemy defense departments and so on. They have successfully persuaded the US government to fund research, so there was the "Stargate Project" which cost millions of dollars by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). At most, 16 telepathic masters participated in this project. Some people have unusual experiences, such as David Mohouse being shot in the head, and often seeing "things" after taking out the bullet.

The Stargate project tried to find out Gaddafi's position in Libya by telepathy, so as to achieve "targeted removal". At that time, the media also reported on the stargate project, and did not express any doubts. However, after 24 years of tossing, the plan was finally stopped because the government thought that remote observation was too unreliable and had no military value, even if it was not completely false. According to the report of the Central Intelligence Agency, spiritual masters provided various, irrelevant, unrepeatable and full of mistakes and omissions.

In order to verify remote observation, one person must run to a remote location and another person must receive information from that location. Carol believes that the information obtained by remote observers may come from personal experience or just personal fiction. A survey in the United States found that only 65% of the results of remote observation were correct, while others were either ambiguous or based on books.

Outside the United States, telepathy research in two other big countries in the world is not far behind-the Bioinformatics Laboratory in the former Soviet Union and the research on human specific functions in China have both lost a lot of resources for the masters of specific functions, and ended in vain. In fact, scientists have been studying remote observation since the middle of last century, and have obtained a lot of research data so far, which shows that this telepathy does not exist. One of the most interesting findings is: "neither practice nor training can reliably improve the ability of remote observation."

Carol analyzed that people can visually imagine things beyond their own visual range, and subjectively feel that "seeing" does not mean telepathy. No one in history has ever been able to observe from a distance repeatedly and accurately, and even if there is, it is a mythical and exaggerated legend. Occasionally, the spiritual master said something far away, saying it was useful, but most of the time, when it was useless, he began to quibble and even insisted that it was a "symbol", leaving a huge space for subjective imagination. Confirmatory prejudice refers to a kind of selective thinking of human beings, which tends to pay attention to and find evidence to support their own views, while ignoring and underestimating evidence that does not conform to their own views. If you work in the emergency room of a hospital, you believe that there are more patients on the full moon night, so you will pay attention to the people who come to see the doctor on the full moon night and pay less attention to the patients on other nights. Over time, you become more and more convinced that the full moon will lead to an increase in accidents. When the confirmation deviation becomes more and more serious and you turn a blind eye to the negative and negative evidence, you will completely lose your rationality and completely block your mind.

Many studies show that people generally think that confirmed evidence is more valuable, that is, positive, positive and supportive data. Thomas Gilou Jilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University in the United States, suggested that this is probably because it is easier for the brain to cognize and process confirmatory information. Evidence supporting a certain point of view is easier to be accepted and remembered than evidence opposing it. Negative and negative evidence is not naturally accepted, so people will be biased if they don't pay attention.

In the experiment of telepathy, the evidence supporting the existence of telepathy is often ambiguous, and psychologists get a treasure; Evidence that does not support telepathy cannot be seen at once and needs some brain analysis, so it is often ignored. Psychologists also selectively set the beginning and end of the experiment, so as to get the results that are conducive to confirming the existence of telepathy. Dr James alcock, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, criticized them for "refusing to believe that telepathy does not exist". Although this sounds like a bridge in a science fiction movie, several researchers at the University of Washington in the United States did successfully exchange brain signals in the brains of two subjects through the Internet and non-invasive technology.

Lagache Rao, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, and Andrea Stako, an associate professor of psychology from the Institute of Brain Science, put on electrode caps that can read electroencephalograms (EEG) in the experiment, and bridged their brain signals through the Internet, successfully completing a "brain invasion experiment between people".

During the experiment, Rao and Stoke were placed in different positions in the university, and the so-called "EEG recording and a form of magnetic simulation" technology was used to transmit Rao's brain signals to Stoke through the Internet. At the moment the signal arrived, Stoke, wearing a magnetic field simulation coil, immediately unconsciously pressed the space bar on the keyboard with his right index finger.

"I think such an experiment may worry some people because they may overestimate the potential of this technology." Chantel Prat, an assistant professor of physiology at the University of Washington who participated in the project, went on to say: "But in fact, it is almost impossible for us to use this technology without people's awareness or reluctance. Moreover, this technology cannot accurately read the thoughts of a person's brain, and can only perceive some simple brain signals of the other party. "

Some researchers said that maybe one day when the pilot can't continue to fly the plane, we can use this technology to help the flight attendants land the plane more safely, or to help those with language barriers to express their ideas better.

In fact, this experiment is not a real telepathic experiment. We are easy to trust others, willing to believe mysterious things, but lacking the spirit of doubt, which is an important reason for the proliferation of psychics. In the "real case" told by many psychologists, there will be such a story: someone had a dream, and then something came true in reality, indicating that the paranormal phenomenon exists-have you seen the story he told with your own eyes? Can you believe it? Although what you see may not be true, what you see with your own eyes is a hundred times better than what others say, and many people believe it without even seeing it. In fact, for these supernatural things, as long as you investigate more and ask more questions, you can always find a place to wear it.

People with scientific literacy, such as real experts, scoff at psychology because they will consider it from the perspective of physics and statistics, and it is easy to see through fallacies. I graduated from Peking University, majoring in medicine and psychology, and I have all the basic scientific qualities. I may also be an amateur in a specific professional field. However, through investigation, interview and consulting materials, I exposed the false fallacies of Da Vinci's sleep method and alkaline ionized water for many years, and now I have discovered the truth behind psychology. Then, for most ordinary people who are neither engaged in scientific research nor have the energy to investigate, how can they see clearly the various "Machamp puzzles" such as psychology?

Borrow Occam's razor: Don't add entities unless necessary. The main idea of this philosophical tool is that we should accept a relatively simple and reasonable explanation instead of believing something mysterious. American mainstream astronomers believe that UFOs don't exist and can be shaved off with Occam's razor-I have personal experience about this: many years ago, I was walking on Dongxiao Road in Guangzhou at night and suddenly saw a dark red disc-shaped object flying slowly towards Haiyin Bridge-UFO? Flying saucer? If I can't wait to call Guangzhou Daily to report that I have "first contact" with aliens, maybe I will believe in strange things like UFOs in the future. But I just don't believe in evil. I quietly stay where I am and continue to observe. Sure enough, the "flying saucer" flew back slowly-this time I saw clearly that it turned out to be a lamp on the steel arm of a construction crane and its circular lampshade, which was particularly like a flying saucer in the night. For such strange things as psychics, we should think about "what ordinary things may actually be", and don't regard a little light in the sky as a UFO, and be fooled by a "master" for telepathy. 1 release the conclusion directly to the public without peer review.

We often talk about the integrity of science. How can we embody this spirit? If a newly discovered scientist is willing to hand over his findings and ideas to other scientists for review, this reflects scientific ethics. So the scientific community hopes that colleagues who have made new discoveries can show them to the insiders first. If they make new discoveries, but bypass peer review, they will directly give the results to the media, and the media will give them to the public. Then, most of the findings can't stand the scrutiny of peers.

1989, two chemists from the university of Utah, B. Stanley Pang Si and Martin fleischmann, announced their discovery of cold nuclear fusion at a press conference before peer review. Other scientists didn't know about it until they saw the report about the news conference.

Some scientists even bypass the reporter's evaluation by publishing their research results in paid advertisements. Once a health food company used a full-page advertisement in a newspaper to promote its own vitamin O, only to find out later that the so-called vitamin O was just ordinary salt water.

The discoverer claimed that a large company/institution tried to suppress its own research.

There is a saying that big companies will suppress new discoveries that may reverse the balance of wealth/power at all costs. These pseudo-science discoverers describe the mainstream scientific community as part of a larger cabal behind companies and governments. Some people say that cars made of water were invented, and oil companies suppressed themselves at all costs to protect their own interests. Needless to say, this is nonsense.

The scientific effects discovered are always subject to extremely high observation restrictions.

All the pictures about flying saucers are blurred, and the Loch Ness monster doesn't have any clear pictures. Although scientific measurement has to face some background noise or data fluctuation, if the signal-to-noise ratio is always unsatisfactory, even in principle, then this scientific effect is probably untrue and the research content is not science.

There have been thousands of studies on paranormal psychology before, and researchers claim to have confirmed the ability of telepathy, thought transfer or predicting the future. However, only after a difficult analysis of the data will this result appear, and relevant researchers cannot increase the proportion of "signals". If so, it means that this is not real science.

Rumors are not evidence.

So-and-so claims that modern science has discovered something in the last century. Don't believe the evidence if it's just hearsay. The rumor itself is largely moved by emotional factors. The most important discovery of modern medicine is neither a vaccine nor an antibiotic, but a randomized double-blind experiment. You can't take rumors as evidence just because they are numerous.

It's been tested for hundreds of years, and it doesn't mean anything.

Before people knew that blood flowed all over the body or that diseases were caused by bacterial infections, our ancestors treated patients with various medical methods that modern science could not understand. So-called "replacement therapy" can also fall into this category.

It is unrealistic to repackage the wisdom of the ancients or dig out new contents to compare with the achievements of modern scientific laboratories.

6 behind closed doors research

The lonely genius inventor studied hard in the attic laboratory and finally made a revolutionary breakthrough. This is a Hollywood science fiction movie, not real life. Now it is often the result of many people working together to make a breakthrough.

7 put forward new laws of nature

To explain some unusual phenomena, the newly proposed laws of nature cannot conflict with the known laws of nature. If the new natural law is based on changing the known natural law, nine times out of ten it is pseudoscience.