Not A Blog™

The subject of telepathic communication came up, recently, and it ended up being a much larger discussion than I anticipated. I never really gave it much thought, but it turns out that I do have quite a bit to say about the subject. Because this stems from a personal discussion, and because I didn’t give my friend fair warning that I’d be publishing this in my Not A Blog™—and because I pretty much shoot down everything they were thinking about telepathy—I’ll keep their name confidential.

The first thing I have to clarify is the idea of brain waves. A great many people seem to be confused about this. The brain does not make or have waves. There is no such thing as a brain wave emanating from your head—not even a little bit. A brain wave is nothing more than the recorded output of an electroencephalograph (or EEG for short).

An EEG measures differences in voltage across the brain as a whole. As such, it could never be used to read minds as this would, presumably, require a much finer scanning resolution, possibly down to the electrical potential between individual synapses. This may eventually be possible—but regardless, the tool to do this would not be an EEG since it would not be measuring the brain holistically. Theoretically, such computations could be made from the aggregate data, but then again you wouldn’t be using that data to read the mind, either.

This bugs me because many people use the concept of “brain waves” as something that can be transmitted, or scanned. You’ll occasionally find this in science fiction. The person I was discussing this with was annoyed by the fact that telepathy exists in sci fi, but never explained. The lack of explanation doesn’t bother me too much; I can suspend disbelief. In fact, the reverse happens with me: if some author tries to explain something too much, that’s when I get annoyed because it often reveals a basic misunderstanding about the way the universe operates, and I can’t get past this. Suddenly, the only thing I can think of is that wouldn’t work! and the story is ruined.

So when a sci fi author talks about aliens reading brain waves—well that’s absurd. This is like saying, “Maybe one day we’ll control the weather by manipulating the isobars on the weather map.” Perhaps this would be an effective interface for weather control, but you would never actually be able to control the weather just because you were moving the isobars themselves. The bars are a measurement of the current state of affairs, not an influencer of them.

Along the same lines, brain waves are measurements of the current state of affairs in the brain and, like isobars, represent an average over many localized areas. In the same way that you can’t predict an individual’s localized weather conditions based on isobaric averages, neither can you read thoughts by looking at an EEG. If I said some planet (perhaps the one these aliens live on?) manipulates its weather by amplifying the isobars, this is meaningless. Likewise, “aliens reading brainwaves” is meaningless.

At this point, we have to get into the definition of what telepathy really is. The definition you’ll find in most dictionaries is something along the lines of “communication without using the five senses”—but we do this all the time. We just translate the communication from something we can’t sense (say, radio waves), into something we can (sound) before we sense it. If you want to get technical, the translation from “human-detectable” to “non-human-detectable” means it’s not really telepathy because the signal is still human-detectable at the point of interface, where the humans receive the information.

Machines could be built with current technology that mimic this sort of telepathic communication. However, they involve the person on the sending end thinking the words they want to send into the computer, via a brain-computer interface device. The words can be sent over the cell network, and could be received by a person with a hearing implant that translates the text message to speech and plays it in their ear. Now on both ends we’re translating it at the point of interface, so it’s not true brain-to-brain communication. It’s not “true” telepathy.

With this in mind, I think we can define true telepathy as a literal knowing what someone is thinking based only on one’s thought patterns. For this discussion, when I say “thought pattern”, I mean the state of every neuron and synapse in the brain. Yes, I know it is not possible with today’s technology to obtain this information, but it doesn’t matter. Even if it were, telepathy would still be impossible.

Before we talk about the impossibility of telepathy in our brains, it’s useful to consider it in a simpler system. This is what my friend did. They asked, what if we have something akin to a biological robot? That is to say, it is “born” fully mature and its thought patterns are predictable all through its life. Naturally such creatures would not learn—and we’ll ignore the inherent evolutionary disadvantages which would quite obviously wipe them out as soon as the first novel situation came along—and we’ll just focus on the telepathy part.

These creatures (robots, really) could be telepathic because their brains are so easy to model. But there-in lies the problem. If the behavior is so predictable that we can tell what they would do in every situation, we wouldn’t have telepathy—or maybe it would be more accurate to say that we wouldn’t need it. Simply having a model of the brain and the situation, we could just predict behavior with 100% accuracy, which amounts to the same thing. We could tell what they’re “thinking”, because their thoughts would just be a glorified version of the state of Babbage’s difference engine at any given point in its calculation. It’s just not useful to telepathically communicate with such simplistic creatures.

Now here’s the interesting thing. As soon as you add in the ability to make creative decisions when confronted with novel situations, the system becomes recursive. I don’t have any proof for this, so it could be wrong. But I’m going to stick to this answer for now because it seems to me that in order to demonstrate truly creative thinking behavior, the organism would have to have, at some basic level, a sense of self. Once you have a sense of self, the system is recursive, because now, within the model of “you”, you’ve got another “you”, which the real you can model yourself.

In less esoteric terms: you can imagine how you would react if, say, a nuclear bomb went off in New York City. You could be wrong about how you would react, but that’s beside the point. The point is that you can imagine it. You have a recursive sense of self. To a lesser extent, animals have this as well. It doesn’t necessarily follow that having a recursive model of oneself immediately leads to abstract recursive concepts such as “infinity”, but I think it’s a prerequisite. A complete (that is to say, non-recursive) system does not have the power to describe such concepts as infinity.

But I’m getting away from my main point which was: the ability to creatively think requires a recursive model. But the behavior of a recursive model cannot be predicted with certainty when introduced to chaotic systems. A chaotic system, by definition, has pseudorandom behavior, and how a recursive model, i.e. your brain, will react when confronted with this is not inherently predictable. That’s why telepathy won’t work.

Aside from that, there’s also the issue that everyone’s brain is a little bit different. Certainly large structures correspond to certain functions, but how individual synapses work together to form a coherence of thought—this is different for each person. I touched on this briefly before, but it comes down to a question of: what you think of as “blue” might not be what anyone else sees as blue. Everyone sees the same wavelengths of light, of course (assuming one is not colorblind), but after it gets into your brain and starts to scramble around, who’s to say that anyone else perceives blue quite like you? It will be an interesting experiment when we’re able to take one person’s thought patterns and impress them on another individual’s brain (as closely as possible) and see what results. Will the recipient of this brain remapping even be able to make sense of the data? Maybe it would send them into a kind of shock, a benign signal from the donor’s brain activating a seizure or initiating a body shut-down in some destructive way in the receiver. Given the additional complexity of chaotic systems—subject as they are to the butterfly effect—there’s really no way to know.

Because of this, telepathy won’t work, again, because there’s no particular synapse—or even a regular bundle of synapeses—which correspond to “blue”. I might be able to look at a brain scan and tell whether you’re retelling an event that happened, or making up a story with your imagination, but I can’t look at a brain scan and tell you what you’re thinking about. If the system were trained, possibly. I’m sure we’ll get to a point in the future where you can think of an object, and the computer will be able to read the entire brain with such fidelity that every time you think of the object after that, the computer knows. But if you don’t tell anyone that this thought means that, no one will ever know. You’ll be safe from telepathic snoops.

The very last thing I want to touch on is the biology behind the whole thing. Obviously any sort of brain scanning that happens with us would necessarily have to be in close proximity to one’s head. Maybe we’ll develop instruments sensitive enough to read the brain from a few feet away, but it seems that the electrical energy of the brain is too low, and that it would be difficult to overcome the interference of the surrounding environment. (Watch—this prediction will be wrong at some point in the future. We’ll have machines that can read anyone’s brain you can point it at, regardless of distance, and future generations will laugh at my prediction of brain scanners being limited to mere “feet”.) Be that as it may, we are contending with physics here, so we either have to come up with new physics (not entirely out of the question), or get more sensitive instruments (also not out of the question, but again we hit physical limitations).

Our brain may be too weak to read from a distance, but what about those sci fi creatures again? Let’s ignore all that stuff I just talked about and say that somehow the aliens would know what the others are thinking and could read minds. It would require an enormous amount of energy to broadcast ones thought patterns far enough that they could actually be picked up and read by someone else.

The only organism that can generate a substantial amount of electrical energy is an electric eel—and even then the infrastructure to accomplish this takes up around 80% of its body. Furthermore, it’s not the brain that does this, but specialized organs. Now, electric eels do communicate using discharged electricity, but this is hardly the same as telepathy, because they’re using another organ, not the brain itself, to communicate to other eels. In effect, within the eel’s abilities, it’s just another sense, like sound would be to us.

The amount of energy required for long-term broadcasting of thought patterns in the brain is grossly problematic. Unless we’re talking about fish-people, you’re broadcasting through air, which has a higher electrical resistence. But even if you are talking about fish-people in water, there’s such an enormous expenditure of energy required that the aliens would be completely exhausted in about thirty seconds. But basically it comes down to there being no reason to put this much energy into broadcasting thought patterns just so someone else can read them for their own amusement. Mainly, this violates the laws of physics because of the amount of energy required, compared to known biological mechanisms for acquiring and utilizing that energy. How much less energy is expended to communicate via some other method? It just doesn’t make sense.

There we have three reasons why telepathy won’t work: 1. the behavior of recursive models confronted with chaotic systems is unpredictable, 2. No two people have precisely the same brain structure, and 3. it violates the laws of physics.

Let me address one other line of thought that occasionally crops up: the idea that telepathy could operate on a quantum level. I hate when people invoke “quantum” anything because they invariably get it wrong. Our brains don’t operate on a quantum level; they operate on a molecular level. Molecules are so many orders of magnitude larger than quarks that there’s no interaction there at all. It’s like saying that you, standing on the Earth somewhere, influence the orbit of Proxima Centauri around the galactic center. You don’t.

Besides, quantum states are so delicate that they can be disturbed at the slightest perturbation. With current technology, it takes entire buildings full of super-specialized equipment just to generate and contain a dozen entangled particles. It’s highly unlikely that your messy, pulpy brain full of junk like the nicotine from that cigarette you smoked a couple minutes ago is going to be able to store entangled quantum particles, or any sort of sub-sub-atomic matter that could somehow be influenced by the sub-sub-atomic matter in some other person’s brain. It just doesn’t happen.

I’m not saying that there isn’t some other way that telepathy could happen using some type of physics that we haven’t yet discovered. There could be. For instance, in the same way that computers used to take up entire buildings but now fit in your pocket, so too may quantum computers—which haven’t actually been built yet, but when they do, will take up entire buildings—eventually fit in your pocket. At that point, maybe we’ll discover some biological mechanism which turns out to be inordinately good at preserving quantum particles—and that the brain makes use of this, and so operates at least partially at a quantum level. It’s possible. But knowing what we do now, it doesn’t happen.

What this all comes down to is that I hate telepathy in science fiction. Like I said, if it’s unexplained, I can deal. I can accept the idea that two beings communicate—even across interstellar distances, even instantaneously, no matter that this also violates the laws of physics as we currently understand them. You’ll be getting an eye-roll, I can assure you, but it’s not a show-stopper.

However. As soon as you start trying to tell me how it all works on the back end, forget it. Your explanation is untenable. If you invoke some new branch of physics that hasn’t been “discovered” yet—maybe. It depends how convincing you are; you could potentially pull it off and revert yourself to eye-roll status. Generally speaking, the less said, the better. But don’t try and explain it with known physics. Please!

Ideally, you shouldn’t really bring telepathy up at all in stories. Why is it used? There are a few reasons: to make some race of aliens seem super-intelligent or advanced. Alright, I get it. Not necessary except for the wow factor, but I understand the intrigue. It’s used as a plot device, because if people on spaceships had to communicate with Earth the regular ol’ boring way, the story would never get anywhere because it would take decades just to say “hello”. Alright, plot device, I can handle; I understand the necessity. It’s used as a deus ex machina to get the characters out of some terrible situation. You’re skirting the edge of what I’ll put up with, but I’ll survive. I understand the allure of the easy way out.

But if you’re not doing any of this stuff, you’ve got fantasy again. It’s completely meaningless otherwise. Even if you are just doing the super-smart aliens, why involve telepathy at all? Why do science—science—fiction authors DO this? It’s not science! It doesn’t work! It’s nonsensical to even consider! Even if the aliens had some sort of super-technology that, as Clarke would say, was indistinguishable from magic, IT’S STILL SUBJECT TO THE LAWS OF PHYSICS.

I already talked about fantasy. Telepathy comes under the heading of fantasy when it’s this thing, the extent of which is undefined and the nature of which is largely arbitrary. How can this tell us anything about people? No one has ever confronted or had to deal with anything like this. Comics do this a lot. It’s why I can’t stand X-Men, not even one tiny wincey bit. I watched two of the movies because they’re visually interesting, but the story line makes me want to tear my eyeballs out and shove them in my ears. The science is terrible, of course, but in particular, the main leader guy is telepathic and I just don’t buy it.

Telepathy does not happen, and probably won’t happen in the future. We may eventually have some communications technology that would make us appear telepathic to people a hundred years ago—but it still won’t be the real deal. That’s just a fantasy.

-Ted

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