The supposed communication of thoughts or ideas by means other than the known senses.
Scientific consensus does not view telepathy as a real phenomenon. Many studies seeking to detect, understand, and utilize telepathy have been done, but according to the prevailing view among scientists, telepathy lacks replicable results from well-controlled experiments
Origins of the concept
According to Roger Luckhurst,[8] the origin of the concept of telepathy (not telepathy itself) in the Western civilization can be tracked to the late 19th century. In his view, science did not frequently concern itself with "the mind" prior to this. As the physical sciences made significant advances, scientific concepts were applied to mental phenomena (e.g., animal magnetism), with the hope that this would help understand paranormal phenomena. The modern concept of telepathy emerged in this context.
Psychological symbiosis, on the other hand, is a less well established concept. It is an idea found in the writings of early psychoanalysts, such as Melanie Klein. It entails the belief that in the early psychological experience of the child (during earliest infancy), the child is unable to tell the difference between his or her own mind, on one hand, and his or her experience of the mother/parent, on the other hand. This state of mind is called psychological symbiosis; with development, it ends, but, purportedly, aspects of it can still be detected in the psychological functioning of the adult. Putatively, the experience of either thought insertion/removal or unconscious memories of psychological symbiosis may have led to the invention of "telepathy" as a notion and the belief that telepathy exists. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists believe and empirical findings support the idea that people with schizotypal personality disorder are particularly likely to believe in telepathy.
Case studies
A famous experiment in telepathy was recorded by the American author Upton Sinclair in his book Mental
Another example is the experiments carried out by the author Harold Sherman with the explorer Hubert Wilkins who carried out their own experiments in telepathy for five and a half months starting in October 1937. This took place when Sherman was in New York and Wilkins was in the Arctic. The experiment consisted of Sherman and Wilkins at the end of each day to relax and visualise a mental image or "thought impression" of the events or thoughts they had experienced in the day and then to record those images and thoughts on paper in a diary. The results at the end when comparing Sherman's diary to Wilkins was that "Seventy-five per cent were found to be correct". A typical example was on 21 February 1938. On that day, both Sherman and Wilkins had recorded that cold weather had delayed their jobs, they both had witnessed that someone's skin had peeled off their finger, they both recorded that they had drunk alcohol with friends and witnessed boxes of cigars being brought and both recorded that they had experienced a toothache.[11][12]
To rule out any kind of fraud, each night Sherman had sent his impressions to Gardner Murphy, a psychologist at Columbia University. Murphy had studied the Wilkins-Sherman results and claimed that some could be explained by coincidence but that some exceptions were unexplainable. One such example took place on Armistice Day, 1937. Wilkins had attended a formal ball for the Army with the locals in Canada as his plane was forced to land due to bad weather, Wilkins recorded that he was worried about a dress-suit that he had to wear as the waistcoat was short in size.[13] On the same night, Sherman recorded in his diary "You in company with men in military attire-some women-evening dress-important people present-much conversation-you appear to be in evening dress yourself."[13] Wilkins was very impressed by the results and wrote that:
"When we finally were able to compare notes, what did we find? An amazing number of impressions recorded by Sherman of expedition happenings, and personal experiences, reactions and thoughts of mine. Too many of them were approximately correct and synchronized with the very day of the occurences to have been 'guesswork'."
In popular culture
Telepathy is commonly used in fiction, with a number of superheroes and supervillains, as well as figures in many science fiction novels, etc., use telepathy. The mechanics of telepathy in fiction vary widely. Some fictional telepaths are limited to receiving only thoughts that are deliberately sent by other telepaths, or even to receiving thoughts from a specific other person. For example, inRobert A. Heinlein's 1956 novel Time for the Stars, certain pairs of twins are able to send telepathic messages to each other. In A. E. van Vogt's science fiction novel Slan, the mutant hero Jommy Cross can read the minds of ordinary humans.
