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In: History
We Can Communicate Telepathically?
Neuroscientists broke the brain-to-brain barrier years ago and nobody noticed. Why?
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In 2014, in the open-access PLoS One journal, a small international team of researchers published the results of an experiment they had conducted, detailing the first scientifically unimpeachable case of telepathic communication.
For the most part, the public has not noticed. You can tell by looking at their Google searches from that time frame; the following graph shows the number of searches for “telepathy” from 2004 to the present. I’ve circled the part corresponding to the publication of their results:
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It’s interesting to me that, as a culuture, we have fantasized about telepathy for over a hundred years, and yet in the months following the first demonstration of real telepathy the world mostly ignored it. Why the silence?
As best as I can tell the reason is that in that strange liminal space between the dream of telepathy and the reality of it, something was lost. Telepathy exists at an odd cultural nexus; for many people, it still holds connotations of…