What is your explanation that from time to time people experience telepathic communication?

That’s a good one. :)

Also, I think if there were really telepathy, we’d have thoughts like this a LOT more – like all the time. Instead, people take random incidents, ignore the 99% of times when there aren’t any synchronous thoughts, and call it “telepathy”. Classic case of seeing what people want to see.

I’m a scientist, but I do believe in “paranormal” stuff. I feel like we’re conditioned to dismiss this sort of thing, but there are loads of things in this world we aren’t even close to understanding. Your explanation is very rational and is quite plausible. But what if the couple hadn’t had the pizza/brick building experience 6 weeks prior?

My theory is that a lot of “paranormal” things can be explained by energy. How, exactly, well.. that’s the part we haven’t figured out yet. We’re electrical powerhouses, but we also conduct electricity, as well. A thought is energy, in that when we think, our brains are generating a current. That energy may stay in our heads, but it may also be picked up by other people sometimes. Seeing how affected people are by electro-magnetic fields, I would say that we’re sensitive to energy and magnetic fields.

Good question. Those who believe in ESP, mediums and such (John Edward comes to mind) would easily explain it. Just as they explain other otherwordly or extra sensory things.

Me? I dunno. Gonna follow the answers here. Hope it’s a long thread.

Like @Zen, I don’t have a theory on this one. I have experienced things in my life that seem beyond coincidence, but haven’t had any truly convincing supernatural events happen to me.

@AlenaD – You mean the magnetic fields as a result of firing axons when thinking pizza can be measured by a second brain 2 feet away?

I find any believeable explanation for paranormal events as quite far-reaching. Random chance and unusual circumstances are more likely a product of brain glitches than actual paranormal activity. There just is no evidence that is believable.

No one has ever explained beyond a reasonable doubt as to why we aren’t up to our necks in ghosts, given the number of deaths of humans since the first proto-humans dropped out of the trees. Even if we only count the people who died through violence and/or as victims of terrible events, where are the six million ghosts of the Nazi victims, all of whom died very horrifying and tragic deaths? What about the millions of soldiers who have been killed in wars since the beginning of time?

When military veterans tell me stories of young men and women being blown to bits right before their eyes, I would assume that dead person would be a ghost, since they died at a very young age, say 19, and by literally being torn apart by explosive forces. sometimes I wish those vets didn’t share such knowledge with me, as the resulting nightmares and mental imagery are horrific. But if it helps them to recover by sharing, then I guess it is necessary.

There are many things about paranormal activity that just don’t add up. I’m more likely to assume it is a product of our organic brains than an actual natural phenomenon.

—The Native Americans didn’t believe in ghosts as Europeans did, they believed in spirits of the land, and not something that would jump out from behind a tree and go “Boo!” . Ghosts in America came over with the European settlers.

I would assume that telepathic ‘evidence’ is just as likely justified through anecdotal evidence and false assumptions as are stories of ghosts.

I think a large part of it can be explained by how well people know each other. My mother and I have these kinds of moments all the time, but I’ve lived with the woman my whole life. However, she did tell me once of a time when I was 2 or 3 years old and I was in my high chair having lunch while she was reading a book about French guys. She kept thinking this one guy’s name was Jacques but then I said, “Not Jacques, Mommy, Georges!” She had never spoken of the book to me and, obviously, I hadn’t read it. I can’t explain that.

I agree with at @KatawaGrey. My wife and I joke that when we are old women we will be able to communicate without talking. Currently, my wife and I can communicate a lot our needs and wants without language. Sometimes I just have to give her a certain look or say one word and she knows what I was about to say. I think this comes from knowing someone really well, picking up on non-verbal clues, and sharing and environment.

I remember watching a much larger scale version of this, I think it was on Derren Brown. He drove people through a planned route and had dozens of subtle things to sway them later.

I think it’s a subject I don’t understand so I won’t try to make guesses.

And in relation to what @tinyfaery and @KatawaGrey are saying, my wife and I can communicate with just a look, or a body movement, or even an eye roll. We have many private or inside jokes between us that much of what we say to each other comes out as “Hey, I was just thinking the same exact thing.” It’s familiarity and such, as stated by the above answers.

Of course, you will always have those unexplainable things, like thinking about your friend John and then he calls two minutes later. This doesn’t mean a thing, because you could think about John a hundred times and have him NOT call. It’s like psychic readings, people remember the the “hits” and ignore the “misses”.

Some people want to describe every mysterious thing with a paranormal explanation. Is the unusual noise in the basement the ghost of Aunt Marge or a previous tennant, or is it simply the water pipes expanding or contracting, or the house settling?

I’ll go with the more mundane explanation, because if you start seeing things that aren’t there, they’ll lock you up. or elect you to Congress.

I explain it by saying it’s anecdotal. People have been trying for years to demonstrate telepathy empirically (think of those cards with the funny symbols).

So far, no one has made a replicable demonstration that telepathic communication exists at all. Believe me, the military and the CIA devoutly wish me to be wrong.

@mattbrowne – I’m merely open to possibilities and not making any real claims here. That would be impossible, since nothing has been proven. However, when people are close in relationship, you will find occasions where it really does seem that one may pick up on the other’s brain wave. I have had this happen countless times with girlfriends, and there are no looks given, merely one of us thinking of something one moment and the next moment, the other mentions it out of the blue. Of course, you could chalk it up to coincidence, but, as I said, I’m definitely open to the possibility of something else.

As a teen, I dated twins and they had some kind of mind thing going which rubbed off on me when we were together and it was trippy to feel connected that way. As an adult, again I dated a twin where we were living with his identical and an older brother in the same house, all four of us ended up kind of in sync. I have no explanation except that it exists, whatever “it” is.

I think it has to do with some scientific principles we have not discovered as of yet. Perhaps it has something to do with the holographic nature of the universe.

@AlenaD Yes, there are occasions in relationships where one picks up on the other’s brain wave. I know this from experience. But I think the scientific reason is psychology and the way our brains work and not electromagnetism or some undiscovered force or new form of energy.

I think the famous dead psychoanalyst Karl Jung was spot-on, in his theory of the collective unconsciousness, and I think this explains coincidences in people’s thoughts and ideas, in any given timeframe.

If a phenomenon exists it should be measurable, replicable, one should be able to draw statistical inferences from its occurrence, and to make predictions about it from past performance. Show me how the “Collective Unconscious” is an empirical phenomenon, please. (“Because you say so” is not a sufficient answer.)

If everything could be explained by everyone all of the time, then we wouldn’t have that little thing called science.

Just sayin’.

There is no room in science for the supernatural. That should have been the first thing you learned in your scientific education.

@pdworkin: You’re assuming that everything that is called supernatural is completely outside of science but the fact of the matter is that no one knows. Just because science now says a whole bunch of stuff exists does not mean there’s no room for anything else.

I don’t have the time or the energy to educate you.

@pdworkin: And that, my friend, is why you only have a blind faith in science as opposed to an open mind.

@pdworkin I’ve experienced lots of what seems to be telepathy. Everyone experiences such stuff a few times a year, simply due to the fact that the odds are bound to cause such experiences to occur sometimes. Seemingly orderly patterns can be cherrypicked out of chaos to create fake patterns, I understand that.

But why is it that when people are on LSD or magic mushrooms, they experience the seeming-telepathy or the seeming-coincidences, at a rapid fire pace? Can these entheogenic drugs cause a human to perceive a usually-hidden or latent collective unconsciousness? I think so, but that’s only because I’ve used them and that’s my observation. That’s not science of course. It’s not any sort of proof. Just a personal observation. And then when I lay the theories of Karl Jung on top of this personal experience, it fits quite well. Perfectly in fact. So that’s why I’d choose Jung over Freud or other competing theories. It wasn’t a random choice at all. It’s what I feel to know for myself. I don’t really care to a huge degree what others think, except for the fact I’m interested in it. If I’m wrong, I’ll eventually change my mind.
And if I’m right, scientists will one day explain and prove it with science. Right now that stuff still rests mostly in the realm of the unknown, science-wise.

@Kraigmo: I wish I could lurve you a thousand times over for that response.

@Kraigo, I devoutly wish your view were the true view. I have made my own experiments with LSD, having taken it when it was still legal, and manufactured by Sandoz. I have also steeped myself in the work of Jung, Adler, and, yes, Freud.

But what I have seen for the past thirty years or so is a group of people trying very hard to replicate ESP results, and being disappointingly unable to do so. They have been much more likely to have uncovered fraud than to have proven empirically that there is even a smidgen of evidence that results of telepathy tests are even a smidgen over 50%.

This is disappointing, but we must accept it and move on. The explanations for the catalog of anecdotal evidence for these phenomena are rather convincing. Allow me to mention one example, which you have almost certainly heard before, but it makes a descriptive point:

People whose airline flights have trouble will often say, after the danger is past, or after they have tragically lost a loved one, that they had a “feeling” that Mary shouldn’t have gone to Hawaii that day; or that they “knew” something bad was about to happen.

Clearly, thousands and thousands of people are afraid of flying, and thousands and thousands of times a day, they have “bad feelings” about an impending flight, but the majority of those flights go well, and the people forget that they “predicted” disaster.

So in the rare event when a disaster does occur, it is not surprising that someone predicted it that time too. Of course only when a disaster occurs do they remember their prediction. They were not wrong, but neither were they prescient.

Occams Razor is known in science as the rule of parsimony. It is not a law, but in general, it is true that the simpler explanation is the better explanation. My girlfriend is blind, but can avoid objects. This phenomenon has been called facial vision, and is thought to be something on the edge of ESP. However, the parsimonious explanation is that she is using echolocation and other means we sighted do not utilize only because we don’t need to.

I’m sorry, but it is not unknown that these phenomena don’t occur. Unfortunately we have plenty of evidence that when carefully examined they never exceed the boundaries of inferential, probabilistic statistics.

@pdworkin The fact that we rely on our senses to perceive, record and evaluate scientific phenomena would in fact preclude the ability to record and evaluate scientific anything that is called or considered extra-sensory. ESP, and related phenomena, can not be proven or debunked by mainstream science, because of the fact that is extra-sensory by description.

From Wikipedia: In casual usage, “miracle” may refer to any statistically unlikely but beneficial event, (such as the survival of a natural disaster) or even which regarded as “wonderful” regardless of its likelihood, such as birth. Other miracles might be survival of a terminal illness, escaping a life threatening situation or ‘beating the odds.’

Therefore to me when we are usually talking about “miracles” we can rule out the supernatural and use scientific explanations or we should continue to search for scientific explanations.