October 2024
Evidence that brain activity has nonlocal effects has been supported by the reanalysis of a study about twins published almost 60 years ago.
When one twin blinked an eye, an alpha wave was detected in the other twin’s brain even though they were in separate rooms. Surprisingly, an alpha wave was recorded in an unrelated person’s brain simultaneously, according to Tolga Esat Özkurt‘s analysis that was recently published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
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Özkurt made the discovery while evaluating a 1965 study that used hyperscanning, a technique in neuroscience to simultaneously record brain activity from individuals.
“This was indeed a controversial and unusual result according to the cognitive psychological scientific paradigm of both then and now”, Özkurt wrote in the paper. He is based at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.
Modern analysis of old results yields evidence
The original 1965 study recorded brain activity in 15 pairs of identical twins seated in separate lighted rooms located six meters apart. EEG data of some unrelated persons were recorded simultaneously to serve as control cases. Neither the participants nor the technicians knew the purpose of the experiment. One of the twins in each pair was instructed to remain relaxed with their eyes open unless commanded to close them for a period of five to 30 seconds.
The original findings suggested that eye closure in one twin elicited alpha band wave activity in the other, despite physical separation. For two of the pairs in the experiment the effect was consistent.
What Özkurt and associates discovered when reanalyzing the data with today’s improved signal processing was that eye closure in one twin also elicited alpha activity change in the brain of an unrelated control case.
This was not obvious through the initial inspection in 1965, but it became apparent with the refined signal analysis, where background noise had been subtracted.
Evidence for consciousness beyond the brain
The possibility of nonlocal interaction between minds is a core feature of parapsychology.
The reinterpretation of the pioneering study is yet “another challenge to the idea that all signal communication must occur locally” and provides “more support for the idea that the human brain is a quantum computer”, neuroscientist and psychologist Julia Mossbridge says.
Anders Bolling
