April 2024
A new study seems to confirm a phenomenon often talked about: People who share a close emotional relationship can communicate in a telepathic way. Such anomalous “shared experiences” are particularly often reported by identical twins.
“Within the neuroscience community, this area is the subject of heated controversy”, says neuroscientist Richard Silberstein, one of the researchers, in an interview.
In the well-controlled study, five pairs of twins participated in two 90-minute sessions two months apart. One twin functioned as a “sender”, who was successively shown a large number of both general images and personally relevant images at random time intervals. The other twin, sitting in another room eight meters away, functioned as a “receiver”, viewing a static image. Brain activity was measured.
In 14 cases, the researchers recorded characteristic changes in the brain activity of the receiver when the sender was seeing a picture. The statistical chance of that many clear results in the study being random was calculated to be 1 in 20 million.
Silberstein and his co-author Felicity Bigelow draw the conclusion that “results from this study support the presence of anomalous interactions between sensorily isolated MZ [identical] twins”.
Silberstein is open to the possibility that these results are the tip of the iceberg: “This phenomenon may be much more common than we imagine: mother and child, lovers, close friends”, he says.
The receivers didn’t report “seeing” any actual pictures. The evidence of a connection is the measured brain activity. Perhaps the “filter theory”, put forward by William James over a hundred years ago, is true, Silberstein suggests:
“If the brain didn’t filter out all the signals you potentially could pick up telepathically, you wouldn’t be able to function in this world.”
The authors encourage additional research: “Given the nature of the findings, it is important that this study be independently replicated.”
Anders Bolling
