Telepathy has a new name

It takes me till Wednesday every week to finish reading the Sunday papers. I always keep my favourite sections till last, and in one of them (Sunday Times News Review if you must know), there was an article about Dr Christopher James, a biomedical engineer at Southampton University who is researching into brain to brain communication which, as journalist Matt Rudd who wrote the article points out, is a scientific way of saying 'telepathy'.

With electrodes attached, Rudd and James's daughter thought hard about 'left' or 'right' and tried to communicate the thought to the other one. "Seemples," as Aleksandr the Meerkat would say. Our family practised much more complex communication than that.

As I mentioned in an early entry in this blog, my mother was a great believer in the powers of the mind. When we were quite small, she used to think of an object, usually an animal, and project it into our minds. All three of us (me, Mum, my sister) would take turns to be a 'sender' or a 'receiver' and with practise we got quite good - 8 out of 10 correct. My own experiments with 'sending' taught me that the animal (let's stick with animals) had to be reduced to a simple shape such as found in a baby's book about animals. Just an outline, coloured in with the correct stripes, spots or shade. A parrot would be green with a curved beak and a long tail - no wings, they were too complicated. A cat would be a black silhouette with ears, whiskers and tail. The sender would focus very powerfully on this image and project it clearly, allowing no other thoughts to enter the brain. When I was sending, I used to mentally repeat the name, too.

I wonder if this is why, in later life, I had many psychic and ESP-type experiences. Perhaps it was because that part of my brain involved in sending and receiving 'messages through the ether' had been finely tuned when I was young and, like learning to swim or ride a bicycle, it's a skill you never forget.