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Evolving Telepathy

SixSixSix

Critical Thinker
S
Joined
Feb 2, 2005
Messages
456
OK, here's an interesting thought experiment.

We all know that telepathy is as bogus as other so-called psychic phenomena. My point in this post is to discuss whether or not it is even physically possible.

We discard all the usual nonsense with regard to a phenomena that doesn't degrade with distance, and so forth. (Actually, I suppose it is theoretically possible that some as yet unknown wave will have those properties, but I'm not concerned with that here). As far as I am aware, brain activity involves electricity, which cannot help but produce electromagnetic waves (I assume this is how encephalography works).

Now, there are very real questions about how thinking actually happens. For example, it appears to me that my thoughts take on an ordered sequence as I'm typing this paragraph, but it is certainly possible that this is an after-the-fact rationalisation. Possibly I think of the last word in the sentence first, and then reorder them unconsciously prior to typing. It is also not at all certain that it is even theoretically possible to link specific wavelengths of brain electromagnetic radiation to the thoughts I perceive while producing that radiation. For the sake of argument, however, we will assume that the latter is indeed possible, and that the former does not occur.

The next question is: do we have a biological mechanism for detecting this electromagnetic radiation and classifying it in such a way that a mind could be "read"?

It seems to me that we can detect electromagnetic radiation already with our eyes. Granted our eyes can only perceive the visible spectrum, but this is quite possibly not an inherent limitation on DNA. One can imagine mutants that could "see" infrared or ultraviolet radiation, and that perhaps some biological advantage would be conferred that would cause natural selection to favour this. It is possible (but by no means necessary) that several iterations of such mutations would enable our eyes (or another adaptive patch of skin - new sensory organs, in effect) to "see" electromagnetic radiation of the proper wavelengths to detect "thought".

However, that is obviously the easy part. It is probable that the wavelengths we are talking about are quite common, and so to tune in on the wavelengths of a particular brain would be difficult because of the low signal-to-noise ratio. This would at the very least probably impose a severe range limitation on any such sense.

Is such a problem insurmountable? Not necessarily. If our brains became good enough at filtering out the noise, it is possible that we could detect the brain waves of a particular brain at some (probably short) distance. That just leaves the ability to interpret what we find; this last step could theoretically be done without any further genetic variation (it could be entirely learned behaviour, in other words).

This would seem to indicate that the ability to read brain waves is not beyond the abilities of a biological entity, even though it is certainly beyond our current abilities. Have I missed anything here?
 
OK, but I acknowledge it may be a very short distance ability. It may actually require touch (I assume no shorter than that, otherwise you'd need to drill holes in the skull to get an encephalograph to work). That doesn't make it useless, just obviously not Lensman grade. :)
 
The question that must be answered is does the electrical activity contain information?

I don't think it does.

Oversimplified description for the sake of discussion: When nerves are stimulated in our bodies, sight, smell, touch, etc., the impulses first go to a the brain to be temporarily stored. Interpretation is almost instantaneous. Interpretation interferes with the actual nerve impulse and organizes it in a way the brain can make sense of it. Long term memory of the information involves structural changes in the brain.

The nerve impulses work very much like computers do. They either fire or they don't. They may fire at different rates. But it it still a matter of following the particular path that contains the information. If an impulse comes from the optic nerve or a skin receptor, the electrical impulse and the neurotransmitters that continue the impulse from cell to cell do not differ in the variety that the anatomical structure differs. In other words, it is the path the impulse takes, not the electrical or chemical nature itself that carries the information.

If you want to show that information can be transferred from one person to another, you'll have to find the mechanism the information is stored and transmitted by. EE activity (as measured by EEGs) is measurable but only as electrical activity. It is not measurable as any sort of coding that contains information that can be transmitted and received and interpreted.

I suggest those that know how radio and light waves transmit information chime in here. One can transmit sound waves. A sound wave is interpreted by our hearing sense system because different wavelengths and amplitudes translate into different pitches and loudness respectively. The same is true for light waves that are then interpreted as different colors by our sight sense system.

But thoughts are not a matter of wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Thoughts are a matter of the neuro-electrical transmissions through fixed, (fixed but constantly being restructured), cortical structures. The brain structure contains the information, not the all or none impulses.
 
I pretty much agree in part. I think the electrical activity of the brain is at best a first step towards "reading minds", and at worst a blind alley that will yield nothing of consequence.

However, the principle is one of "side channels". Consider a smart chip that is designed to securely encrypt information without the owner of the chip ever seeing the plaintext (unencrypted information). A good encryption algorithm makes it infeasible to determine from the output what the input was.

But what you can do instead is monitor temperature, electrical activity, and precise timings. Maybe you find out that the chip takes 1 ps longer to execute an add instruction than a multiply instruction, and maybe you know that an extra ns is needed if there's a carry. You also determine that the chip heats up slightly depending on the number of "1s" as opposed to "0s" in the plaintext. And so on.

This is not science fiction; smart chips have been "broken" in this fashion, which is why further countermeasures have been added (such as light sensitive components that disable the chip, preventing you from opening it up, and also time scrambling algorithms designed to make it infeasible to gain any useful information from timing operations).

Similar side channels may well exist for the human brain. The act of thinking of (say) Tim Tams may trigger slightly different skin temperature and/or eye flickering; the heart rate may flutter ever so slightly differently, and so forth - there are a whole range of autonomic responses that one could (theoretically) measure, and most if not all of these are potentially observable with purely biological means (requiring extensive mutations and probably millions of years in extremely favourable conditions, but maybe still barely feasible). I am not arguing that reading the mind would be as simple as waving a multimeter over someone's head and graphing the data - it might be, but it probably isn't - but even horrifically complex interactions are not necessarily impossible to interpret. We already have biological examples of actions that are difficult to build machines for - catching cricket balls (or baseballs if you insist) requires plotting a parabolic trajectory in real time and positioning our hands to intersect the path - quite difficult to build a robot to do, but most human children can manage it (and so can dogs).

After all, with genetic engineering as an available tool on the horizon, why limit ourselves to simply human traits? :)
 
[lecture mode=on]

OK, let's look at this with an open mind. Currently, the human brain and other sensory apparatous is extremely insensitive to electromagnetic (EM) signals. Otherwise our modern environment would be unbearable to us. It is also a fact that people can be exposed to EM radiation even at fatal levels without being aware of it (except sometimes by feeling hot). This has, sadly, been found out empirically during a number of accidents involving various types of powerful transmitters.

As EM waves are a very recent addition to our environment, this cannot be an evolutionary trait. Instead, we must assume that it is an intrinsic characteristic of our sensory system.

But that should not stop us; it might be possible to evolve or manipulate our system to have a higher sensitivety to EM. Certain species of fish are quite sensitive to electromagnetic signals (but that is a lot easier living in a conductive medium).

However, let's look at brainwaves. To say that our brain works with electric signals is an oversimplification; actually it works with electrochemical signals, but that is not a problem, telepathy-wise, since according to our present knowledge, there is always an electrical component in the signal, so if we can detect that, we can detect the signal.

We now have to look at the "wiring" of the brain. Unlike computers, where signalling is mainly serial, that is, information is echanged as a sequence of states, the brain is mainly parallel, which means that a given piece of complex information is presented in one state (many "wires"). Thus, wheras timing is meaningful in a computer, identification of the single "wire" is meaningful in the brain. If we were to detect the signals emanating from a computer as noise, we would basically only need to identify 16 data wires, then the rest of the information content would be in the timing. If we were to eavesdrop on a brain, OTOH, we would need to identify thousands (or millions) of "wires", and the only way we could identify them would be by their position inside the skull. Since brainwaves have a relatively low frequency (<1000Hz), their EM wavelengths are long, hundreds of kilometers long. This not only means that they are very difficult to detect, but to determine their position within a fraction of a millimetre is impossible. To confound the problem, the detail wiring varies from brain to brain. So even if we could read the signals, we would still have to crack the code for each individual brain.

In conclusion, the best we could hope for, even if the seemingly impossible obstackles of sensitivity and signal range were overcome, would be some crude perception of the state of the brain we were reading, that is, we might detect sleep, anger, shock, and such. All things that are of some value to know, but which can normally easily be gleaned at short range using more mundane methods of observation. [lecture mode=off]

Hans
 
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