From: mcgrath@cs.uiuc.edu (Robert McGrath)
Subject: Re: Telepathy and the Mind
Reply-To: mcgrath@cs.uiuc.edu
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept of Computer Science
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 17:26:02 GMT

Just a few comments:
In article <Bw1DJw.Hwu@mach1.wlu.ca>, kfisher3@mach1.wlu.ca (kevin fisher U) writes:
|> In article <1992Oct12.014238.14967@m.cs.uiuc.edu> mcgrath@cs.uiuc.edu writes:
|> >In article <BvwwyL.447@mach1.wlu.ca>, kfisher3@mach1.wlu.ca (kevin fisher U) writes:
|> >|> Greetings:
|> >|> 
|> >|> 	I'm doing a little private research (between my regular workload)
|> >|> into the phenomenon of telepathy.  It is my belief that this phenomenon can
|> >|> be explained by electromagnetic activity within the brain, but I need more
|> >|> info.  Can anyone out there provide me with the 'method' that they (or
|> >|> someone they know) use to achive telepathic communication with another?
|> >|> 	Any help would be much appreciated.
|> >
|> >Would you like to expand a bit on your experiment hypothesis.  
|> >
|> >  What do you mena by "telepathy"?
|> Well, the sending and receiving of mental messages, mainly.
"without using ordinary senses or soruces of knowledge."

One must take great care in designing tests of telepathy, as
there are lots of ways for information to leak.

|> >  What do you mean by "electromagnetic activity within the brain"?  Clearly
|> >  not EEG activity, but just what sort are you thinking of?
|> I was thinking of EM activity.
The brain is AWASH with EM activity.  That is what the EEG measures.
You are going to have to carefully measure the background activity
in order to detect any particular patterns.  This is a non-trivial
problem.  (I should also point out that EEG's have never been shown
to correlate to 'telepathy'.)

What are you thinking of using to measure EM activity?

|> >  And most important, what relationship do you think might be there?
|> >  (That is what sort of "explanation" are you examining?)  Some sort
|> >  of EM signal that gets transmitted and received?  Telpathic events
|> >  trigger characteristic EM activity or are triggered by them?
|> Your former question sums it up.  I hope to look into whether telepathic
|> events are triggered by EM activity in the brain.
This will require careful control conditions to detect a particular
pattern against the constant activity of the brain.  I see two
key problems:
   1) detecting exactly when the 'telepathic event' occurs,
   2) correlating that with specific EM traces (if any)
This is very difficult.  It takes a lot of work to solidly establish
correlations between EEGs and behavior, and your study will be
just as difficult.

|> >  Does your theory indicate that telepathy might be linked to other,
|> > "normal" brain activity?  If so, what is it realted to and how?
|> Well, it's not a formal 'theory,' just a curiosity...I don't know how it may
|> be related, I wasn't focusing directly on that part.
What I'm thinking here is that there are lots of interesting questions
here.  For instance, if the telepathic message is verbal, then
the brain activity should be similar to that of 'speaking to yourself'.
One might look to compare internal verbalization to telepathic
verbalization, seeking differences in EM traces that might indicate
that telepathy is taking place.

|> >I'm not criticizing you, I'm interested in the details of your approach.
|> >
|> THat's fine, I'm just hammering them out myself.

-- 
  Robert E. McGrath
  Urbana Illinois
  mcgrath@cs.uiuc.edu
From: Ken.Cusick@f29.n112.z1.fidonet.org (Ken Cusick)
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