"Telepathy, oh, telepathy, I have an antipathy for you!.." - sang the bards at the end of the last century, and the song was picked up by the broad masses. Needless to say, people were interested in such an exciting phenomenon as "reading thoughts at a distance." It seems that it was not so much believed in it, but what about Wolf Messing, circus performances, mnemonists?..
Scientists are interested
Interest in telepathy did not arise in people from scratch. All sorts of wonderful stories were passed from mouth to mouth, which supposedly happened with one or the other person. For example, the story of Major General of the British Colonial Forces B, Richardson, became widely known. On September 9, 1848, during the storming of the Indian city of Multana, Richardson was mortally wounded. Feeling that he was dying, the general asked the adjutant to remove the ring from his finger and send it to his wife, who was waiting for him in England. His wife later said that on that very day, being half asleep, she clearly saw her husband being carried away from the battlefield, and heard that he was asking someone to remove the ring from his finger and send it to her. She immediately informed her sister and father about this. Subsequently, when the death of the general was confirmed, the adjutant attested to the fact of the request for the transfer of the ring.
And this is far from the only incident of this kind that was published in the pages of the then press. In the 19th century, cases when people, like the wife of General Richardson, received mental messages about the death of their loved ones, numbered in the thousands (the famous French astronomer K. Flammarion alone collected more than two thousand of them using the questionnaire method). Then it turned out that this phenomenon was known to people at all times. Mentions of similar events are scattered in letters, articles, works of art, biographies, historical chronicles, and memoirs. chronicles of different centuries. Eyewitnesses perceived such stories as something mystical, associated with otherworldly forces.
Scientists became interested in all this only at the end of the 19th century. The year 1876 can be considered the starting point here. when the famous English physicist Sir William Barrett spoke at a meeting of the British Scientific Association with a report on the facts of "direct transmission of thoughts over a distance." Shortly thereafter, in 1882, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in London, with the mission of investigating all known cases of this kind. And in the same year, one of the founders of the OPI, Frederick Myers, first introduced the term "telepathy" in relation to the phenomenon (from the Greek words "tele" - distance and "pathos" - feeling). In general, he described the phenomenon in this way: if someone A dies at a given moment or some important, exciting event happens to him, then quite often another person (let's call him B),connected with A by ties of kinship or love and located far from it, at the same moment experiences a mental state, which in one way or another reflects an event associated with A.
At the same time, the first experiments began to confirm or deny the existence of telepathy.
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More than an accident
The techniques were very simple at first. For example, the French physiologist Charles Richet conducted numerous experiments on guessing the intended playing cards. As a result, he found that the number of correct answers always slightly exceeds the number of random coincidences allowed by the theory of numerical probabilities. For example, for 2997 tests it is possible 732 accidental "hitting the top ten", but in fact there were 789 of them. Moreover, for some subjects, the result was even higher.
Richet's experiments using the theory of numerical probabilities were further developed in the USA. where the psychologist Karl Zener proposed special cards with black figures on a white background for testing: a square, a circle, wavy lines, a star and a cross. The deck consisted of 25 such cards, that is, each figure in the deck was repeated five times.
In telepathic experiments, Zener cards are used as follows. Suggesting (or inductor, "transmitter") and perceiver (percipient, "receiver") sit at the table facing each other. They are separated by a cardboard or plywood screen. When the “receiver” signals that it is ready for the experiment, the “transmitter” takes the top card from the deck and looks at it. The “receiver” writes down its answer and again gives a signal. The “transmitter” takes the second card from the deck and looks at it until the next signal from the “receiver”. And so on, until the end of the deck. The "transmitter" then checks his completed registration sheet against the "receiver" sheet and records the number of guesses.
According to the theory of numerical probabilities, the average random guess for 25 cards is five cards (or 20%). In experiments with Zener cards, the success of the "receiver" is estimated by the number of successes exceeding this figure. In large series of experiments. conducted by American and English parapsychologists, the number of guesses exceeding random was obtained several times.
Black cockroach with horns
More complex experiments were also carried out. For example, the “receiver” was asked to draw or verbally describe those visual images. which will mentally inspire him with the "transmitter". From a huge number of such studies, the experiments of the American writer Elton Sinclair on the mental suggestion of drawings to his wife Mary Sinclair are widely known. E. Sinclair presented these experiments in the book "Mental Radio" (1930).
The suggestion was made from another room, and in some experiments, from another house 30 miles away. The experiments were especially successful when Mary was, in her words, "on the verge of sleep." The suggested drawings appeared in her sleeping consciousness in the form of visual images. It must be said that such experiments do not lend themselves to strict statistical processing and therefore are not so convincing for establishing the very fact of mental suggestion. But on the other hand, it helps to better understand the psychological characteristics of telepathic receptivity. In this respect, the mistakes of the "receiver" in the image or perception of perceived images are especially instructive. Here is an example from the book "Smart Radio". E. Sinclair draws a smoking volcano; Mary in another room depicts exactly the same thing, but calls her drawing "A big black cockroach with horns."Word is at odds with deed! There are many similar examples in the book. What are they talking about? Undoubtedly, that it is the visual image that is telepathically perceived, and not the concept, not the word, not the thought in the exact understanding of what is called thought.
All this means that the frequently used expressions "thought transmission", "mental suggestion" are inaccurate. Only visual images can be telepathically transmitted, less often auditory images. feelings, motives for action - what Academician I. P. Pavlov attributed to the first signaling system, and not thoughts associated with words, that is, relating to the second signaling system. Thus, it becomes clear why telepathic experiments are also successful in those cases when, for example, the "transmitter" is an Italian, and the "receiver" is a Turk, and the Italian does not know a word of Turkish, and the Turk does not know Italian.
So what is telepathy?
Founder of OPI F. Myers. Having devoted many years to the study of telepathy, in the end he came to the conclusion that it is nothing more than a manifestation of some higher powers, or a higher intelligence that exists separately from people, but is closely connected with them. “Telepathy as a property of an incorporeal mind must undoubtedly exist, if such a mind is present in the Universe at all,” he wrote in 1909, shortly before his death. “Therefore, the phenomenon that people are trying to reveal with the help of experiments on mental transmission of images is not telepathy, but something else, more mundane and explainable by the natural magnetic properties of the human body …”
Currently, some experts agree with this judgment and admit that all the "telepathic" experiments described above have nothing to do with the phenomenon of telepathy, and it is impossible to reveal its existence with their help.
In true telepathic communication, the transmitting party may not be aware of this. which acts as a "transmitter". and the receiving side does not consciously prepare itself to receive thought. Telepathy associated with the astral, spiritual essence of people cannot be an object of experiment, unlike the phenomenon of transmission of thoughts over a distance (including the ability to hypnotize). This latter is most likely a rudimentary property of the brain, which is due to the weak electromagnetic waves generated by it, which were recorded by the Italian neurologist Ferdinando Katamalli; telepathy is a mode of paranormal perception, set in motion by strong feelings and a person's stay in an altered state of consciousness, in which, according to parapsychologists, movements in the astral body and contacts with other astral bodies are possible,as well as entering the energy-informational continuum of the Earth and the Universe.
Igor Voloznev. Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" No. 32 2010