Will humans evolve telepathic powers ?
It sounds like the stuff of comic books, but some very smart people have suggested homo sapiens would evolve telepathic powers. Now Silicon Valley technologists like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are betting billions on it.
In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 classic, Childhood’s End, a new type of human is born, with telepathic powers. They’re only a few of these super-kids at first, but soon a whole new species emerges, all in one generation. They are no longer individual selves, but fuse into a group-mind far more powerful than the human species. Their parents are horrified. Indeed, the entire human race die of despair. They have been superseded.
One finds a similar scenario in many other science fiction and comic book stories. In John Wyndham’s 1957 novel, The Midwich Cuckoos, a group of children are born in an English suburb after a mysterious UFO sighting. They all have blond hair, and telepathic powers. They are not separate selves, but one collective being. A resident of the town realizes the threat they pose to homo sapiens, and blows them up.
In Stan Lee’s X-Men comics, which first appeared in 1963, evolutionary ‘mutants’ start to appear with supernormal powers like telepathy, telekinesis and healing. Again, the mutants potentially pose a mortal threat to homo sapiens, but this time they manage to live in harmony with their inferior predecessors, more or less.
Jean Grey, who struggles to control her paranormal powers in the X-Men comics
What may surprise you is that many leading minds over the last 100 years have seriously believed humans will evolve supernormal powers like telepathy.
The idea goes back to the late 19th century, and a figure called Frederic Myers. He was the youngest classics fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, but left academia to pursue his own studies. In 1882, Myers teamed up with some of his Cambridge friends to found the Society for Psychical Research, a group dedicated to investigating spiritual and paranormal occurrences with scientific methods. They were the ghostbusters of the Edwardian era.
Frederic Myers, founder of the Society for Psychical Research, who coined the word ‘telepathy’ in 1882
Myers himself attended over 1000 seances, and was dismayed by the amount of fraud and charlatanry he encountered. But he also came across many genuine cases of events that didn’t seem to fit neatly into the materialist paradigm. In one survey, Phantasms of the Living, his team gathered scores of examples where people had sudden premonitions or visions of loved ones at moments of crisis.
Perhaps, Myers speculated, some humans possessed the ability to send or receive thoughts and feelings at a distance. He coined a new word for it — telepathy, which literally means ‘feeling at a distance’.
The new word caught the mood of the times — the telephone had been invented in 1875, and the radio in 1896. People were suddenly communicating their thoughts and feelings across thousands of miles. Perhaps humans could do it naturally?
Some suggested that telepathy was a basic animal skill which civilized humans lost as they evolved out of tribes. After all, there is some evidence that dogs and parrots can read their owners’ minds, as Rupert Sheldrake has explored — below is one example of a dog who knows when their owner is coming home:
And here’s a clip of N’kisi, a parrot with a vocabulary of around 950 words, who also apparently has the ability to read its owner’s mind:
Myers, by contrast, thought telepathy and other ‘supernormal’ powers were the first buds of a new evolutionary development. The seeds of telepathy existed in our minds as a latent potentiality, and gradually, Myers believed, this and other superhuman powers would appear more and more, until homo sapiens evolved into homo superior.
Myers was no crank. The Society for Psychical Research included many leading politicians and intellectuals, including two prime ministers (Arthur Balfour and William Gladstone), the scientists Marie Curie (a Nobel prize winner for her research into radioactivity), Charles Richet (a Nobel prize winner for his discovery of anaphylaxis) and Alexis Carrel (a Nobel prize winner for his work on organ transplants).
Many researchers into telepathy were also pioneers of globalist politics. For example, the International Union of Intellectual Cooperation (the 1920s predecessor to UNESCO) included on its committee Marie Curie, Charles Richet, and fellow SPR members Henri Bergson (the philosopher) and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (philosopher and president of India). The first president of UNESCO, Julian Huxley, was also a member of the SPR and a firm believer in telepathy.
Their faith in telepathy fed their faith in international cooperation. They believed humans were evolving into a collective planetary consciousness. The paleontologist and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin called it the ‘noosphere’ — a ‘super-mind’ or ‘brain of brains’ that was emerging partly through new technology, and partly through the evolution of telepathic powers.
In the 1950s, the focus of early psychedelic research was not just on psychedelic therapy, like today, but also on using psychedelics to develop and test superpowers like telepathy. Humphrey Osmond, the British psychiatrist who coined the word ‘psychedelic’, believed the new mind-expanders would help humans evolve into telepathic super-humans. He and friends like Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard tried out LSD and mescalin in small groups in an attempt to achieve ‘group mind’.
From left, Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley and Captain Al Hubbard after one of their experiments in ‘group mescalanization’.
A similar hope inspired the founding of Esalen, the retreat centre in Big Sur that was the centre of the human potential movement in the 1960s and 70s. Its founder, Michael Murphy, also believed humans were evolving into superhumans, and in the future supernormal powers like telepathy would be the norm.
He thought superpowers were already appearing among us, and were most obvious in sport. It’s interesting to note how often sports stars talk about a telepathic link between some players. This week, several competitors and observers in the Olympics dressage competition suggested the sport works via a telepathic link between horse and rider.
The idea humans will evolve telepathic powers has long had credibility in military intelligence. In 1967, renowned futurist and military strategist Herman Kahn of the Rand Corporation published The Year 2000. Among his long-term predictions were that humans would evolve telepathic powers. Both the Pentagon and the Soviet military invested in psychic research to try and create telepathic soldiers and spies.
Today, the dream of telepathic superhumans is alive, well and living in California. But this time, the dream is telepathy through technology.
Everyone from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg to DARPA are investing in research to enable direct brain-to-brain communication, using EEG machines, trans-cranial magnetic stimulation and neural implants.
There are early signs of success — an experiment in 2019 enabled a group to send instructions on a Tetris game to a person in another room, via EEG helmets. The receiver was right 81% of the time.
In 2019, the Royal Society published a report predicting that machine-brain interfaces would make possible non-verbal communication at a distance. It said:
People could become telepathic to some degree, able to converse not only without speaking but without words — through access to each other’s thoughts at a conceptual level. This could enable unprecedented collaboration with colleagues and deeper conversations with friends. Not only thoughts, but sensory experiences, could be communicated from brain to brain. Someone on holiday could beam a ‘neural postcard’ of what they are seeing, hearing or tasting into the mind of a friend back home.
That would be fun, wouldn’t it? We could all just plug into Keith Richards and enjoy his lifestyle without damaging our bodies, via Keef-Link.
In fact, during an ayahuasca retreat in 2017, I was sure the psychedelic potion had switched on latent psychic powers within me, and found the prospect terrifying. How would I turn off others’ thoughts? After the retreat, two friends of mine got in touch to say they’d abruptly sensed that I was in some sort of psychic trouble after the experience (which I was). Thankfully, I haven’t shown any obvious psychic ability since then.
Meanwhile Elon Musk has invested in start-up Neural-Link, which enabled a monkey to play a computer game using its thoughts.
Musk says he is not trying to engineer a new breed of telepathic superhuman, but rather to enable humans to keep pace with AI. He’s worried super-intelligent AI will surpass and eliminate homo sapiens, and thinks our best hope to avoid this fate is to develop brain-computer ‘wizard hats’ so we evolve symbiotically with AI.
It’s an intriguing prospect. But humans have already evolved the ability to communicate at long distances without words. It’s called emojis.
I still have faith in the unplugged version of telepathy. In fact, the inventor of the EEG machine, Hans Berger, was inspired to start researching in the field when he almost died in a military accident, and his sister, many miles away, instantly knew he was in danger and insisted their father telegram Hans to check he was OK.
Berger recalled: ‘It was a case of spontaneous telepathy in which at a time of mortal danger, and as I contemplated certain death, I transmitted my thoughts, while my sister, who was particularly close to me, acted as the receiver.’
How does love enables us to ‘feel at a distance’? How does tenderness enable us to send tendrils of attention tending towards each other across time and space? That is the really juicy question.