Super Human Future Senses.

I am looking at my curtains.  Now what colour are they really?  I would say that they were brown but brown is a name that we have just paired with that particular reaction in my eye. The good thing is that if I asked somebody else they will say that that curtain is brown as well, so I feel happy and can go on eating my dinner in peace.  But I can’t a war is brewing in my upside down brain.  The person said it was brown as well but how do I know that they are not lying or simply see another colour but say that it is brown when really it is red?

Well, that paranoia doesn’t really matter in the real world, every day we point out colours and use the name of the colour to associate with that colour, so as everybody understands that what we are pointing at is that colour it doesn’t really matter. That’s all we really want to know from day to day so if you are getting confused, angry, frustrated, paranoid, crazy, schizophrenic, loopy, frothing at the mouth or anything similar then stop reading.

I feel like stopping reading now as I am giving myself a headache or perhaps I’m one of the above, but what the hell…

Electromagnetic spectrum

Looking at the curtains is just one of those things that you can think of like that. The world is only there because you have senses.  These senses tell you that the world is there, but is it really?  Does it really matter?  Too many questions.  To some people it doesn’t really matter and I expect some people are reading this thinking what’s the point?  Well those people shouldn’t be reading this.  If our senses are telling us everything about the world that is there then what are we not seeing?  There could be some grisly 10 eyed monster standing right next to us and because we don’t have the right senses we can’t see it. On the other hand there could be some gorgeous person of the opposite sex that we can’t get our hands on. The things we can’t see don’t really affect our lives, that is if they are really there, but if we could see absolutely everything in the universe it could be quite useful. It would certainly make our lives more colourful.

It wouldn’t be so nice if we could feel things around us but not see them, or taste or hear. The electromagnetic spectrum, which contains visible light would be useful to see and on the left shows how small the band is that we can see. From the top, Gamma rays and x-rays would show us the dangerous places to be.  People would be able to see how far to stand away from x-ray machines  before they got zapped. It is possible to see gamma rays through a telescope but as the gamma rays do not penetrate the atmosphere the telescope has to be above the atmosphere.

Senses chart

Really only visible light and radio waves can be seen from the Earth, radio waves, obviously with the right equipment. To get a better and more detailed view of what type of telescope is needed for what radiation then go to this lovely NASA page. It may be that seeing the whole electromagnetic spectrum, would be quite complicated and confusing, but wouldn’t it be nice to chuck in some infrared capability of our eyes so we could see more at night?

The mind is a funny old chunk of meat and some people refer to a mind’s  eye. This is when you can picture things in your mind. If you close your eyes and picture something, that is what we are talking about. It’s amazing what you can do with your eyes closed, and I suppose this would be called imagination.

We are taught at school that there are five senses, but really, there are 21. Some are just the major ones broken down into smaller bits i.e. taste can be broken down into hot and cold. If you think about it we can sense temperature, pressure, touch, joint position (proprioception), body movement (kinaesthesis), balance and feelings associated with a full bladder, an empty stomach or thirst. But there are other monitoring systems in the body that we can never be even dimly “aware of” – sensing the pH of the cerebrospinal fluid would be an example.

In the future it may be possible to use telepathy. I am not talking about tomorrow, but in a couple of thousand years time. There are some wackos about now that say they can talk to their animals  but there is no scientific proof that says  telepathy is possible. The thing is though, it cannot be disproved, either. There are two ideas about telepathy.

The first is the Radio Wave Theory. According to this idea, telepathy works like radio waves. People often speak of “vibes” as though there were telepathic “brain-waves” going from one person to another. The problem with this theory is that if there were some kind of wave, we ought to be able to detect it coming from people’s brains. But we cannot. The brain’s electrical activity can be detected at best only a few centimeters away from the skull. There would also need to be a “vibes” transmitter in one brain and a “vibes” receiver in the other brain. No sign of either has ever been detected in any human brain. Also, the strength of the “signal” ought to decay with distance. But it seems it does not.

Will aliens give us telepathy?

The second is the Timeless/Spaceless Psychic Field theory. According to this idea, there is some unknown “psychic field” in which the impressions of every thought are stored for all time. Telepathy involves somehow picking-up these vibes from this psychic field.

However, no evidence for any such psychic field has ever been discovered. Furthermore, if it did, we would be inundated with the trillions of thoughts left behind by every human who ever existed – everyone from Alexander the Great to Hitler’s tailor.

If we could talk to each other without opening our mouths in some ways it would be a frightening thought. We could get an instant work request from our boss not to mention your partner, who would know everything that you know unless you could control it.

On the other hand, it can be quite useful in deciding who committed a murder or on the psychological side of things why people did things. Perhaps, if telepathy had no real distance restrictions, we could talk to similar people far away in the universe, and that might be quite a laugh. Perhaps at the moment there is a telepathic Internet. All you have to do is tap in and you could get the latest score for Alpha centuri against Beetlejuice in the Milky Way division. Perhaps the universe is waiting for us to join the telepathic Internet. But then again, perhaps we are just insignificant blobs of organics. It may not be up to us at all.. Perhaps some alien will knock on our  door and give us a crystal that would join us up with the universal telepathic Internet (I bet they have long domain names!) If they do do something as stupid as that, then I hope they tell us how to wire it up.

It only takes that one small discovery and bang the universe could open up.

If you want to join, or should I say try and join, the wackos then try here.

Telepathy for skeptics

Talk to the Alien-