15. How Far Can You Think?

Frank and Percy are identical twins. During the Second World War, when Frank was in India and Percy in England, Percy suddenly felt that something awful had happened to his brother. Two days later, a telegram arrived informing the family that Frank had had a serious accident and was in hospital.

How many people have stories of this kind to tell? A large number. Yet, although they make good stories, most of us reject them as being too fanciful, and certainly not susceptible to proof. Nevertheless, people have always had an uneasy feeling that perhaps telepathy, thought transference and even other "supernatural" phenomena like witch-craft and necromancy really do have some basis in scientific fact.

On 19 April, 1966, two teams of Russian scientists, one in Moscow and one in Novosibirsk (3 000 kilometres away), witnessed telepathic contact between Karl Nicolaiev and his friend Yuri Kamensky. At a previously' agreed time, Yuri opened a sealed box which he had selected at random from a number of identical sealed boxes, opened it, took out the object inside and tried to "see it through his friend's eyes". In Novosibirsk, Karl wrote down on a piece of paper that the object was "round, metallic, gleaming, looks like a coil". In fact it was a metal spring. A little later, Yuri opened a second box; Karl wrote down that the object was "long and thin ... metal ... plastic ... black plastic". In fact it was a screwdriver with a black plastic handle.

A later experiment set out to find real physical evidence of the arrival of a telepathic message in the brain of Yuri, the receiver. He was placed in a room and connected to an electroencephalograph (EEG); he was then told to allow himself to enter the relaxed state of mind—the so-called state of "relaxed attentiveness"—which seems to be necessary for the effective reception of telepathic messages. He was not told when the message would come through. After a time, the EEG was registering a steady rhythm of "Alpha" waves from Yuri's brain, Karl was then instructed by telephone to begin sending the telepathic message. Four hundred miles away, in Leningrad, he began sending. Exactly three seconds later, there was a violent disturbance in the "Alpha" waves being recorded on the EEG. This was the first time that visible proof of thought transference had been recorded.

Only a very small number of people seem able to participate in telepathic communication. Indeed, it is so small at the present time that people who have this power are considered abnormal. It seems to be particularly connected either with great similarity between the communicators (identical twins, for instance), or with the ability to enter into a stale of mind rather like that of a Yogi, when the "Alpha" brain waves are predominant. But what can we deduce from the rareness of this ability? That only a few people are born with it? Or that everyone is born with it, and only a few people have developed it to a point where they can actually receive messages? Will there one day be a world where everyone is permanently "plugged in" to a system of thought transference, sending and receiving messages as and when they wish? The idea is a little frightening, and at the same time exciting. Some people, however, might argue that the human race is moving in the opposite direction; that as we become more and more "civilised", and further removed from our roots, we are actually losing a capacity that was perhaps more common in a simpler age.