Genes 2 Brains 2 Mind 2 Me

Image via Wikipedia Mind reading, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition ? Not possible you say ? Or perhaps misunderstood ? You may once have had a premonition or a feeling and later been surprised to find that it coincided with an actual event. Once, for example, when I was 15, my pal and I absconded with his mother’s car for a late night joyride – mortifyingly resulting in a dented front fender and busted radiator. Upon return, we were greeted in the driveway by his disconcerted mom who had apparently woken from a nightmare involving her son in a car crash. Boy, did HE ever get it !! and by ‘it’, I don’t mean a lecture on parapsychology. While many scientists may dismiss parapsychology research as quackery akin to Bill Murray in Ghost Busters, Samuel T. Moulton and Stephen M. Kosslyn of Harvard University provide an interesting update on current research in this field (you can get a copy of the paper by email) entitled, “Using Neuroimaging to Resolve the Psi Debate” (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2008) 20:182-192). Because accounts of paranormal events often involve closely related or emotionally close individuals, Moulton and Kosslyn invited identical twins and family members to participate. So-called ‘senders’ were instructed to ‘transmit’ information regarding a specific visual stimulus while ‘receivers’ were instructed to chose between a matching and non-matiching stimulus while laying in an MRI scanner. Not surprisingly, receivers were no more accurate than if they were choosing at random (out of 3,687 responses, the correct matching response was chosen 1842 times (49.99% accuracy) and no significant differences were observed in brain activation in receivers when senders were sending matching visual images. Professor Kosslyn is highly regarded as an expert in visual imagery and so this particular team is well suited to interpret the findings. As the paper inevitably shows however, no evidence of brain activity was found to support telepathy, clairvoyance or precognition. My own extra sensory perception tells me that this is not likely to be the last word in this area of research.