July 13, 2009
‘Mental telepathy‘ can be a broad term that encompasses numerous things. It typically means reading the thoughts between people without using normal senses. The difference is a huge between having an intuitive gut feeling and knowing information that could only be gathered by reading somebody’s mind. Very basic skills can be construed as mental telepathy but so can very complex. Different levels of mental telepathy can be summarized in this article.
NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION
Whenever two people communicate without speaking, using body language or facial expressions instead, it is considered non-verbal communication or kinesics. Some people are able to communicate simple messages while others are able to communicate entire conversations using kinesics. You may have experienced this when giving looks to a cohort in a secret plan of action. Achieved easiest and most accurately between people who know each other well, kinesics involves knowing what the other person is thinking by non-verbal gestures or kinesics.
This may not count as mental telepathy, as the two people are using their senses to communicate, just not verbally and this is correct. However, mental telepathy plays a role, because their minds are more attuned to each other because of extended exposure to the way the others mind may think and some predictability comes into play, so there is a sort of mental connection. Two people that know each other well enough to understand more subtle body language, or have created nonverbal signals to communicate, might be argued that it is not be classified as mental telepathy.
EMPATHY
Empathy is the ability to recognize, perceive, or directly experience the emotions of others. Some people are very poor at this, and others are very good at this, being able to mentally ‘put themselves in another’s shoes’ and understand how they must be feeling. Empathy can be increased with training and practice. Actors, for example, are able to imitate the emotions of others, even to the point of being able to make themselves spontaneously laugh or cry.
‘Sympathetic pain’—feeling another person’s pain as if it were your own is something expectant fathers mention, some claiming they can feel the mother’s labor pains at the same time she is experiencing them. If someone close to you is experiencing an overwhelming emotion, you may feel an echo of the same emotion inside you, and mothers often describe this uneasy feeling when their child has been injured. The phenomena of long distance empathy, where a person suddenly feels that someone close to them is in danger, even though they are not near the person at the time is common in other relationships, as well.
Psychologists write off such empathetic phenomena as a simple trick of an overactive imagination. At the very least, they do have a point that other senses are being used. Would we be able to feel the sympathetic pain of a broken arm, for example, if we could not actually see the injury? This does not explain, however, the phenomena of long-distance empathy.
CONCRETE CONCEPTS:
Thought transference of symbols, numbers, or names of objects between two minds is beyond the regular five senses in communication. A designated sender and receiver, intense concentration, training, and practice are often involved in this type of Mental telepathy, such as a mind reader or physic with a television audience, who is able to guess the names of loved ones or what card a person is holding in their hand.
The simpler the concept, the easier it is to communicate through thought alone. For example, a color or shape may be easier to convey than an animal.
Zener cards often used in mental telepathy test are an example of this principle. Simple, concrete black-and-white symbols (a circle, square, star, plus sign, and three wavy lines), gives even a random guess a 20% chance of being right. On the other hand, a shared, known, limited set of concrete symbols may increase the coordination of the thoughts between sender and receiver. A success rate of 50% or higher (which have happened) can not be explained away by simple statistics, but may indicate a level of mental telepathy, instead.
ABSTRACT CONCEPTS:
This level of mental telepathy involves more advanced abstract concepts than shapes and colors. Here people communicate ideas, values and actions, which is quite tough the success rate is quite low. Telepaths seldom achieve this level and the ones who do are pretty rare.
Telepathy shouldn’t be ruled out when it comes to animals that seem to communicate ideas to each other through non-verbal actions. Because animal brains lack prefrontal lobes, telepathy would probably not go beyond simplistic ideas such as hunger or danger signals, but many have seen two dogs look at each other and go running for an almost pre-decided location.
Some people feel that initially in the olden days man had the power of telepathy, which declined as language and man, evolved. Assuming this is true, and then right research can show us the right way to rediscover this lost skill.
If enough people can develop these powers, theoretically all humans in the future could use mental telepathy to communicate, according to some scientific beliefs.



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