The widespread dissemination of interests in the area of the unknown in our time cannot but ignore such a phenomenon as mind reading. Surely there is hardly anyone among people who does not periodically want to become the owner of this ability. In fact, a person who reads people’s thoughts is always protected from deceivers at home and at work, from various types of scammers, and is always able to give the correct answers to questions, win the lottery, and so on. But, unfortunately, most people are deprived of this ability. At the same time, there are those who claim that such a useful skill as mind reading can be developed with the help of various kinds of exercises and techniques. So how can you learn to read people's minds?
Terminology
Thought transmission is not just an oriental tale, it is a phenomenon studied by scientific and parascientific organizations, parapsychologists, physiologists, physicists and other enthusiasts. There were experiments and research initiated even by government authorities and carried out in the most modern laboratories. Accordingly, there is a special, specially developed terminology for this phenomenon. The very phenomenon of transmitting thought images, according to her, is called telepathy, and a person who reads thoughts is called a telepath. This is a narrow concept. In a broader sense, a telepath is someone who can not only read someone's thoughts from a distance, but also put their own into someone else's head. Therefore, it is necessary to learn two more terms - inductor and percipient. An inductor is a person who is the source of thought. He can actively instill it in others or simply scroll it through his head - it doesn’t matter. The main thing is that the inductor is the one whose mental images are perceived. A person who reads people's thoughts is called, accordingly, a percipient - a perceiver.
For this article, these three terms will be sufficient.
How does this happen
It is believed that every person has telepathic abilities. But in most people they are very poorly developed - and therefore they generally sleep, or they appear, but spontaneously and rarely. For example, you suddenly, out of the blue, remember a person you haven’t seen for a long time. And at that moment he calls you on the phone. It turns out that before your friend started dialing your number, his intention was mentally conveyed to you.
The phenomenon of telepathy is explained by the fact that during the thought process, the human brain emits specific electrical impulses into space that can be perceived by the consciousness of another person. In this case, the distance separating two people exchanging thoughts does not play any role. By analogy, this process can be compared with mobile telephony.
The existence of telepathy
Many people doubt the existence of such a phenomenon as telepathy and similar phenomena. Moreover, they deny the opportunity to learn to read other people's thoughts. A person has the right to choose what to believe. This article does not aim to convince a skeptic of the reality of the phenomenon, and therefore various arguments regarding the question of whether it is possible to read people's thoughts will not be presented here. Let us assume a priori that it is possible, and devote further research to finding an answer to the question of how. This is the most productive approach to solving a problem: try and find out.
Telepathy: term and modern meaning
Reading people's thoughts is called telepathy. This term is of Greek origin and means “to feel at a distance.” The modern meaning of the concept reflects ancient ideas about the methods and levels of information exchange between people.
So, telepathy is the ability to transmit and perceive the thoughts and feelings of people without their direct (material) manifestation. The ability for it was attributed to the Egyptian priests, sages of the East and other special segments of the population of ancient civilizations. People belonging to many sacred cults often chose this path of understanding the people by learning to read the thoughts of others.
A feature of telepathy is considered to be that for two mind readers to understand each other, different languages of communication and the distance between the participants will not be an obstacle.
The nature of telepathy
To understand how to learn to read people's minds, you first need to understand the theory. Unfortunately, the cold attitude towards telepathy of official science, inconsistent, uncoordinated research by enthusiasts, as well as the parasitism of charlatans on the problem of studying this phenomenon have led to the fact that even now theoretical knowledge about telepathy is quite scarce. People generally know little about the brain and deep mental processes. Perhaps this is why awareness and understanding of such things as mind reading have not yet come to our society. However, there is still something. Namely, we have at our disposal the practical developments of researchers who, through personal and other people’s experience, have established and comprehended telepathic connections.
First, we must deeply understand the simple truth that thoughts are material. Today this has been practically proven by quantum physics experiments. Therefore, we will not be far from the truth if we imagine a mental image as a series of waves emanating from a person’s head, like from a radio transmitter. Of course, the statement that thoughts literally float in space is technically somewhat simplified, but, in essence, it is quite true.
Secondly, if not from natural gullibility, then at least for the benefit of the matter, the existence of a common information field should be stated. Some scientists, for example Nikola Tesla, assigned this role to the ether, which supposedly fills the entire universe invisibly to humans. Others proposed even more fantastic hypotheses. The majority preferred to remain silent, smiling sarcastically. One way or another, the general information field stores and displays, as in a mirror, the entire amount of information that is present in the world. Among other things, the thoughts of every person fall into this great universal archive. Interesting, isn't it? Go ahead.
From here theories are born about how you can read people’s thoughts - either by connecting to this universal information field, or by learning to directly record and process the flow of mental images emanating from the inductor’s head, or in some other way. There are arguments and supporting facts for each of these versions. But let psychics, parapsychologists, esotericists and others argue about this. Most likely, the truth is closest to the statement that in parallel there are several ways to make telepathic contact, as is the case with any other type of communication.
AlterEgo: a device that can read (some) thoughts
In early April, twenty-four-year-old MIT researcher Arnav Kapoor posted a short video on YouTube. The video shows him walking around the campus, moving from one location to another; He has a white plastic device attached to the right side of his face.
First, he walks past a row of bicycles parked near melting snowdrifts, his lips pursed and unvoiced thoughts flashing on the screen. The inscription appears: “Time?”, and a male voice answers: “Ten hours thirty-five minutes.” In the next scene, Kapoor is seen shopping at a local store. The price of each item he throws into the cart (toilet paper, Italian sandwich, canned peaches) is displayed on the screen. “The total amount is $10.07,” says a male voice. In the last scene, Kapoor moves a cursor across the screen, apparently with the power of his mind.
Kapoor came from New Delhi to join MIT's Media Lab to create wearable devices that would seamlessly integrate technology into our daily lives. So that you no longer reach for your phone, don’t stand staring at the screen, don’t walk with your eyes downcast and don’t fall out of reality in order to get involved in the process.
It may sound far-fetched, but AlterEgo—a silent, voice-controlled, headphone-free device that Kapoor has been developing for the past two years—is now so good at reading his thoughts that he can order a taxi from Uber without uttering a single word. The current version of the device (Kapoor created it in collaboration with his brother Shreya, a student at the same institute, several colleagues from the Fluid Interfaces department and his mentor, Professor Patty Maes) is a 3D printed device equipped with electromagnetic sensors. It fits snugly against the jaw on one side of the face and uses Bluetooth to connect to what Maes calls our computer brain—that colossal network of information we access up to 80 times a day via smartphones.
This invention can be considered revolutionary for the reason that it does not require deep implantation (ie implants) and is capable of processing non-verbal signals of human communication with an extremely high degree of accuracy. Kapoor promises that in the future it will also become virtually invisible to others.
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A few months after the video was published, Kapoor gave an interview to the Medium team in the small office where he works with other researchers on the fifth floor of the Media Lab building. He is clean-shaven, neatly dressed and thin as a student; the gaze seems either sleepy or scorchingly intent - it makes an impression. Among the rubble of books and parts in the office, one can see a pink ukulele, which he claims is not his.
Kapoor is naturally a long-winded man, but since his invention began to attract press attention, he has clearly begun to hone his storytelling. “Artificial intelligence is my passion,” he says. “I believe that the future of humanity lies in cooperation with computers.”
Since smartphones hit the market, two and a half billion people have already turned to the computer brain when they need to go somewhere, cook something, contact someone, or remember the capital of Missouri. Cognitive reinforcement in the form of technology has become an integral part of our lives. There is an organic brain, and there is a computer brain. According to Kapoor, they already work together, just not as effectively as they could.
However, modern devices are designed to distract us rather than help us. To find the information we need in the limitless world that is always at hand, we have to give the process our full attention. Screens require eye contact; when working with a phone, you have to wear headphones. Devices pull us from physical reality into our own.
Kapoor wants to perfect a device that allows people to interact with artificial intelligence as intuitively as the right hemisphere interacts with the left, so that we can integrate the capabilities that the Internet provides into our thought process on different levels. “This is what our lives will look like in the future,” he says.
Early design
When developing the design concept for AlterEgo, Kapoor was guided by several principles. The device should not require the introduction of any elements into the body: according to the researcher, this is inconvenient and not applicable on a wide scale. Interaction with it should feel natural and occur unnoticed by others - accordingly, the device should be able to read non-verbal signals. Clearly aware of how easy it was for the technology to be misused, he also wanted the user's ability to control the process to be built into the design itself, so that only intentional signals were picked up, not unconscious ones. In other words, the device should only read your thoughts when you want to share them.
Other pioneers in the field had already developed interfaces for human-computer communication, but there were always some limitations. To communicate with Siri or Alexa, you need to speak out loud to the car, which seems unnatural and does not allow you to maintain privacy. The spread of this technology is hampered by the nagging fear that with such devices you can never be sure who will overhear us and what exactly they will hear.
Kapoor needed to come up with a way out of this situation. What if a computer could read our thoughts?
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As a researcher who “tried himself in different disciplines” (he once tried to write briefly about himself for the site, but failed - he did not want to confine himself to one specialty), Kapoor began to perceive the human body not as a set of limitations , but as a conductor. He saw it this way: the brain is the power source for the complex electrical neural network that controls our thoughts and movements. For example, when the brain needs us to move a finger, it sends an electrical impulse along the arm to the desired point, and the muscles react accordingly. Sensors are ways to capture these electrical signals - all that remains is to determine where and how to connect to the process.
Kapoor knew that when we read silently, our internal articulatory muscles are in motion, unconsciously producing the words we see. “When you speak out loud, the brain sends instructions to more than a hundred muscles of the speech apparatus,” he explains. Internal vocalization - that is, what we do when reading to ourselves - is the same process, only much less pronounced: neuronal signals arrive only to the internal muscles of the speech apparatus. This habit develops in people when they are just learning to read, pronouncing letters out loud, and then words. This can be a hindrance in the future—speed reading courses often focus on stopping people from pronouncing words in their heads as they skim through text.
These neural signals, first recorded in the mid-19th century, are the only physical expression of intellectual activity that we know today.
Kapoor wondered whether the detectors could detect the physical manifestations of internal monologue—microscopic electrical discharges emanating from the brain—through the skin of the face, even though the muscles involved are located much deeper, in the mouth and throat. And despite the fact that they do not work fully.
Identifying Contact Points
In its prototypical form, AlterEgo was a frame that attached 30 sensors to a subject's face and jaw so they could sense neuromuscular movements. The object, meanwhile, spoke the necessary messages to himself. The team developed special programs to analyze the signals and translate them into specific words.
There was only one problem: at first, AlterEgo’s sensors didn’t pick up anything at all.
Having written the software and assembled the device, Kapoor hoped for the best, but the myoelectric signals generated by internal speech turned out to be extremely weak. It would have been very easy to give up on the idea at that point. “But we wanted to capture the interaction as close to the pure thought stage as possible,” explains Kapoor. He moved the sensors to different parts of the face, made them more sensitive, reconfigured the programs - everything was useless.
One evening the brothers were testing the device in their apartment in Cambridge. Kapoor put it on himself, and Shreya watched the situation on the computer screen. They set up the device to transmit signals in real time, so Shreya could pinpoint exactly when something would count, if at all.
It was getting close to night. Kapoor had been having a silent conversation with the device for about two hours. So far, it has been programmed to interpret two words, “yes” and “no,” and this has not brought any significant results. But then Shreya thought he saw something. Something flashed on the screen.
“We couldn’t believe our eyes,” says Kapoor. He turned his back to his brother and repeated the procedure. “The jump in the signal was repeated over and over again, but we thought it was just a fault in the wires. We were sure that everything was due to interference in the system.” Did they really see something worthwhile? After an hour of endless testing, Kapoor was convinced that contact had been made.
“We almost went crazy,” he says. The next day the event was celebrated with pizza.
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It took Kapoor and his colleagues two years to create the hardware and software for AlterEgo. The device was designed to be comfortable to wear, and the team refined the sensors and redesigned the contact points to make the shell compact and not too eye-catching. Kapoor abandoned headphones, which, in his opinion, disrupt the normal course of human life; instead, he developed an acoustic system based on bone conduction. The device whispers answers to queries, like some super-gifted guardian angel.
Once the device began to recognize myoelectric impulses, Kapoor focused on collecting a volume of data on the basis of which AlterEgo could be trained to match characteristic signals with specific words. It was a labor-intensive process: I had to sit for a long time in the laboratory with the device on my face, repeating the necessary words to myself until the computer mastered them. At the moment, AlterEgo has a vocabulary of 100 words, including the names of numbers from 1 to 9 and commands: “add”, “subtract”, “answer”, “call”.
From the video on YouTube, it seemed as if the device was reading Kapoor’s thoughts, so there was some demonstrative panic. “It's actually quite scary that someone else can now have access to what we think,” one concerned commenter wrote about an article about the technology. “With technology like this, the Thought Police can become a reality.”
Kapoor and Maes, an AI expert, are sensitive to such ethical issues. Kapoor believes that he, as the creator of the technology, has the opportunity to prevent its use for immoral purposes by building safeguards directly into the concept. Kapoor emphasizes that AlterEgo cannot literally read minds and will never gain such an ability. He quite consciously created a system that responds only to signals given intentionally - that is, to voluntary communication. To interact with a computer brain, you yourself must want to convey this or that information to it. This is the difference between AlterEgo and, say, Google Glass. It also doesn't have a camera, because Kapoor wants his wearables to only have the data you actively share with them.
“AI itself does not harm anyone, but we should not gloss over the fact that this technology can be turned into evil,” says Kapoor. “So we try to ensure that our devices comply with the principles that we adhere to. That's why we developed AlterEgo from scratch in-house - we had a specific vision of what it should be, and we wanted people to use it the way it was intended."
Kapoor, who has worked on a number of projects with Harvard Medical School, is primarily committed to making life easier for those with health problems. For example, people suffering from Alzheimer's disease could wear this device to compensate for memory impairment. At the same time, thanks to its ability to read neural microsignals, it could help those who suffer from physical disabilities - deaf and mute, stroke survivors, Charcot's disease or autism - to interact with the outside world.
To bring AlterEgo into a truly working state, Kapoor will have to train it for a long time, expanding its vocabulary well beyond a hundred words. In addition, he will need to collect enough data to make sure that the device will work on any head and with any internal monologue. At the same time, he is convinced that the technology is so good that sooner or later it will learn to synthesize information and extrapolate the meaning of new words from the context.
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In the sparkling modern offices of the Media Lab, it is very easy to allow ourselves to be carried away by the picture of a shining, cloudless future, when we will be able to use two brains at once without a hitch - the one with which we were born, and the computer to which we voluntarily tied ourselves.
Maes provides a whole host of hypothetical examples of how a perfectly integrated AI system could change our lives if the programs were designed to empower us rather than just entertain us. She says that such technologies can make many of our dreams come true. (She is rightfully considered an IT mentor with a utopian bent—an attitude that, along with other considerations, attracts ambitious students like Kapoor to MIT). AlterEgo could teach us foreign languages, describing the surrounding reality through their means and in real time, or smooth out rough edges in communication, suggesting names and basic information about the people we greet.
Maes then, as if on cue, makes a sharp departure from Kapoor's concept of a pure mind meld. If we provide channels for collecting physiological information (pulse, sweating, body temperature), the device could predict our behavior and quietly guide us to actions that will allow us to achieve our goals. He might sense that we're starting to doze off while we work and start emitting the invigorating scent of mint. He could correct our behavior if he greeted an attempt to take the third cupcake with the smell of rotten eggs. He could sense that we were nervous and speak to us with words of encouragement that were inaudible to others. This path of development is significantly different from what the student Maes offers - it is more aimed at developing the desired model of behavior and offers more opportunities for monetization. Maes seems to be suggesting that if we incorporate AI and all the information that the World Wide Web has into our conscious thinking, then we could finally lose those extra five kilos.
It's not hard to imagine how, in a few years, Kapoor's invention could turn into an idea that will generate billions, and the implications this will have for the defense industry and tech giants like Facebook and Amazon. Less obvious is another: whose intellectual property is AlterEgo? Kapoor himself answers this question evasively. According to him, if he decided to leave the institute, he could take all his work with him, but at the moment he is not planning anything like that. He intends to remain in science and refine the invention, which, in his opinion, can benefit humanity, instead of simply selling it at a higher price to someone else. This is his baby, and he wants to take it all the way to the end.
But what if someone plagiarizes his technical solutions, assembles their own version of the device and creates another unicorn startup without his participation? “I don’t know how to answer that,” Kapoor says with a straight face, shrugging his shoulders.
Unintentional telepathy
Most of us have unintentionally made telepathic contact more than once. Most likely, we simply did not notice most of these types of episodes in our lives, because we did not have the opportunity to recognize the phenomenon. Think of times when you and your friend or spouse, or perhaps someone else with whom you are in a good close relationship, suddenly uttered the same words and even entire phrases at the same time. Or how exactly the same answers came to your mind when asked a question. Or suddenly a thought appeared in your head out of nowhere, and a moment later it was voiced by the person next to you. All this applies to cases of unintentional telepathy, when the consciousnesses of two people connect, vibrations and subtle mental rhythms are tuned to each other and a process of partial synchronization of two people, two minds occurs.
Attentive attention to such manifestations of the psyche and a detailed, scrupulous study of them is the key to success if you have a desire to learn how to learn to read people's thoughts consciously, intentionally and at the right time.
Is it possible to penetrate the thoughts of others?
In addition to learning to read minds, it is worth determining our position. In other words, decide for yourself whether this phenomenon really exists.
It is difficult to believe in the reality of telepathic capabilities. Manifestations of the ability to read thoughts are everywhere around us. Everyone at least once in their life has encountered a mysterious situation when the state of another person becomes clear to us without words or actions.
The simplest examples of insight into thoughts are relationships between close people. The mother intuitively knows what her child needs and what he is doing now. Lovers guess each other's wishes in order to make a pleasant surprise. Official science has recognized that married couples who have been married for a long time most effectively use the acquired skills to understand each other's thoughts. At the same time, there is no reliable real data on how to quickly learn to read minds. For now, such knowledge is part of mystical doctrines.
Preparing for telepathy
It’s worth saying right away that there is no magic wand or pill that would allow you to overnight transform from an ordinary person into a telepath. Anyone who wants to acquire mind reading skills will have to seriously work on themselves - on their body, on their mind, on their speech. At this stage, it is important to understand the fact that all mental processes in a person (like all life processes in general) are provided by subtle energy, called, in accordance with Eastern terminology, prana, and among domestic psychics called bioenergy. A person who reads people's thoughts is no exception. And the more prana accumulates in the body, the easier and faster the process of mastering paranormal abilities, such as telepathy, will be. And on the contrary, the less prana, the slower this process will go, if it even gets off the ground. Therefore, the first thing to do is to learn to spend as little prana as possible and collect as much of it as possible in the surrounding space.
Instructions for reading other people's thoughts
It is worth understanding that you will not be able to read other people's thoughts like an open book. Rather, it is more like a vision or a feeling. You have images, pictures, scraps of thoughts from which you can formulate a whole picture. You will be able to read your mood or like/dislike. But it’s difficult to count specific phrases – this is at the level of professionals.
And it all starts with your own thoughts. You need to abstract yourself from your thoughts, look at them as if from the outside. Don't evaluate, don't direct, don't analyze. Just watch.
You need to observe the flow of thoughts until you get a clear picture of where they are flowing.
Once you learn to follow your own thought patterns, you can practice with others.
Rules for accumulating vital energy
What does it mean to accumulate prana? It's simple. This means doing less of what consumes it, and more of what contributes to its accumulation. To be more specific, this means that you need to lead a healthy lifestyle, avoid unnecessary sexual impressions and contacts, eat right (preferably on a vegetarian menu, since meat poisons and burdens a person, taking away a colossal amount of vitality), spend more time in nature, do not give in to negative emotions, breathe deeply, talk less, refrain from emotional outbursts, engage in physical exercise, etc., observing the principle of moderation in everything.
Uri Geller
Uri Geller is an Israeli mentalist and magician who became famous for bending metal spoons. After serving in the army and being wounded during the war, Uri Geller retrained as a space envoy. He said that his mission was to save all humanity from terrible disasters.
The cosmic envoy's arsenal included the ability to bend metal spoons, tell the contents of a hidden drawing, and the ability to change the course of a clock. He said that this was possible thanks to his willpower and intelligence.
No disasters occurred either in Uri’s homeland, Tel Aviv, or throughout the world. He didn’t catch asteroids or extinguish volcanoes. And critics of his “talent” repeated similar tricks without using superpowers. And Uri Geller, at the age of 35, decided that his character had changed and stopped calling himself an envoy. He stated that his task is to make an interesting show.
Image by ElisaRiva from Pixabay
Affirmations and self-belief
Believing in yourself and in your own strengths is a necessary condition that helps you achieve success. If you do not sincerely convince yourself that you are a person reading thoughts at a distance, then your brain simply will not be able to remove the block and allow itself to consciously perceive information from someone else’s head. Therefore, every day, as often as possible, imagine that you have already achieved success, that you already know how to perceive and inspire mental images. Imagine this figuratively, as clearly as possible, and be sure to say some formula, like this: “I am a telepath. I read people's thoughts." You can choose the words yourself. The main thing is that the phrase should be spoken in the first person, in the present tense and without negative prefixes, that is, without any “not”, since the subconscious does not catch them.
Psychology to help
In addition to understanding a person’s train of thought in a supernatural way, you can also learn about him by external manifestations. Over the course of its existence, psychology has accumulated an impressive stock of knowledge for the interpretation of facial expressions, gestures, and behavior of people. The results are sometimes simply surprising.
Physiognomy deals with the interpretation of a person’s emotions and thoughts by facial expression. It will help you both learn to read thoughts and hide your own, which is an invaluable skill. The position of the eyebrows, the curve of the lips, the expression of the eyes and many other features and movements of parts of the face express certain emotions. They can be bright and subtle. In the totality of all movements, facial expressions present a more or less complete picture.
Next to physiognomy there is always expressive body language. The movements of the hands, the position of the legs, the turn of the head - all these are signals sent by a person and indicate what he is thinking about at the moment.
Now we have a choice of how we can learn to read minds: by developing paranormal abilities or by studying psychology. Each method is effective and deserves attention. Telepathy, as is commonly believed, requires a special gift.
Exercise to develop telepathy
Here's an exercise to help you understand how to read other people's minds. Choose a partner who will take the matter seriously. Choose a room where no one and nothing will disturb you. It is better if it is dark there (so that attention does not wander). Next, take a comfortable position with your back straight and relax. Inhale and exhale deeply several times. Your partner must also do all this. Then clear your mind of thoughts, stop the internal dialogue. Focus only on your partner, give your brain the setting to perceive his thoughts. And let the assistant, in turn, think intensely about something. And then just wait. Over time, with regular persistent training, you will learn to exchange biofields with your partner and perceive his thoughts. There is no need to guess them - a clear vision will come on its own when you are ready for it.
