Telepathy = Thought Transmission?


	TELEPATHY = THOUGHT TRANSMISSION? Mario Varvoglis, Ph.D.

	Let's start by defining what telepathy is. Telepathy is an exchange of information between two people without any known sensory or energetic interaction. My own case with the earthquake seems to have been telepathic in nature, momentarily linking my psyche with my mother's experience. The literature on spontaneous psychic experiences indeed reveals that a very large proportion of reported telepathic cases involve two major elements, both of which were present here: an exchange between close relatives, particularly a mother and her children, and a life-threatening situation to one of the two persons involved. As my mother later told me, during the first seconds of panic, she had an intense moment when she thought she might die without ever seeing me again. In everyday language, we often refer to telepathy as "thought transmission," one person being the "sender", the other the "receiver." But this is where words can get us into trouble. For one thing, it's far from certain that we're really talking about a 'transmission' of anything across space in the traditional sense; that's just one possibility, and not the most plausible one at that. Also, thoughts are not the only things picked up by receivers; some of the most interesting telepathic cases involve exchanges on a deeper level than conscious thoughts. In fact, some of the most fascinating recent psi experiments bypass the conscious mind completely, and use the body as a psi-detector. For example, in THE LAB section of the Psi Explorer CD-ROM, a video shows how a receiver's physiology reacts at the very moment a distant sender is concentrating on her. Essentially, in these 'Body-Psi' experiments, the receiver is hooked up to a physiological monitoring device (in this example, the Galvanic Skin Response or GSR, a sensitive detector of psychological stress). The sender, in a distant room, is instructed to either concentrate on the receiver, or else to just relax. A growing number of studies now show that, although receivers cannot consciously distinguish between 'sending' vs. 'relax' periods, their body somehow does know: GSR levels are consistently higher during the sender's concentration periods than during the relaxation periods, which strongly suggests that the receiver is indeed detecting the efforts of the sender.


	[This article used with permission of the Psi Explorer CD-ROM]