How Could Telepathy Work?

I’ve always been fascinated by biology and also by the idea of psychic powers. Even after spending a lot of time studying scientific theories, I never ruled out the possibility that there was more to the world than they described, because reaching out into the unknown is exactly what makes science such an exciting quest. So my mind was open to things like telepathy, but I was never too sure; after all, the world is full of charismatic charlatans and my own experiences were limited and could be interpreted in multiple ways, there was nothing I could call definitive.

All that changed when I listened to a podcast: The Telepathy Tapes, probably the most important piece of media I’ve run across in several years. If you haven’t heard about it yet, it’s about people with severe autism who are born without enough fine motor coordination to speak. For a long time, the official position has been that “there’s nobody in there,” but increasingly teachers and parents are teaching them how to communicate by spelling words, either pointing to letters on a board or typing on a tablet. And it turns out that not only do these people have rich inner lives, they can all read people’s minds.

Houston identifying Uno cards that he can’t see with his mother Katie and neuropsychiatrist Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell (source)

And I don’t mean in the kind of fuzzy experiment that’s easy to write off as bad statistics or bad methodology, I mean some of them can read a randomly generated number or picture or sentence from another room with 100% accuracy. The podcast is currently raising money for a documentary, in which they’re going to test this in a magnetically shielded Faraday cage, which would rule out electromagnetic communication of all kinds, and there’s reason to believe they’ll still be able to do it.

The show set my mind racing down two different tracks: first, how might telepathy work, and second, what are the implications for everyday life? In this post, I’m going to focus on the first question and leave the second for Part 2. And by the way, there’s a lot more than just telepathy in the podcast—I recommend sticking with it past the first few episodes, which are intended to convince skeptics—but I’m going to focus on telepathy here because it’s the strongest claim.

There’s a common kind of explanation for the incredible things revealed in the show, which is that there’s another layer of reality, whether it’s called the paranormal, the occult, the spiritual realm, or another dimension. This is a tempting way to go, but it’s not satisfying to me because it tends to position psychic phenomena as something special and non-ordinary, something that happens to special people or in special circumstances, or with great effort. It might add a certain sparkle of specialness, but it also puts distance between normal life and the mystical, whereas my quest is to make these one and the same.

A friend of mine says that all of us are doing energy work all the time, we’re just not all aware of it. I think this is true, and that far from robbing the magic from telepathy and other psychic skills, seeking out a physical explanation for them will deepen the magic for anyone in love with our reality. So in this post, I’m going to lay out one possible path I’ve found for understanding what’s going on here. It draws on technical ideas but I’ll try to explain it intuitively, with links if you want to follow up on source material, and more technical bits in footnotes so you can skip them easily. My goal is to build up a physical intuition about telepathy, energy work, etc that can guide my engagement with them and help me incorporate them into how I live my life.

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Space is weirder than we thought

Let’s assume that the big experiment in the documentary works. It might look something like this. Alice is the mother of autistic telepath Bob (these telepathic connections seem to be strongest between mother and child). Alice goes into a chamber surrounded by a Faraday cage, which is a structure that blocks all radio waves. The chamber is also lined with mu-metal to block magnetic fields. It’s also somehow isolated from outside light, sound, and air. The point is that we don’t know of any methods of communicating through the walls of this chamber. Inside the chamber, Alice uses a device to generate a random number and looks at it. Outside the chamber, Bob points at digits on a tablet and they are later confirmed to match the ones Alice was seeing. Here’s a diagram of this setup:

an isolation chamber blocks all paths between Alice and Bob

Note that I’m going to treat the world as 2D to simplify the illustrations, but everything I’m saying can be generalized to 3D. What Alice and Bob are doing seems impossible because all possible paths between them are blocked by the walls of the isolation chamber, like the dashed red line in the diagram. To get past this, I’m going to challenge our assumptions about what space actually is. Since Euclid’s formulation of geometry and Descartes’s invention of the coordinate system, we’ve been taught to think about space as an abstract area in which matter can exist and move around. The location of an object is defined by its position in this abstract area:

Alice and Bob can be located using a coordinate system

Alice and Bob’s positions in space can be defined by measuring how far they are from axes on a coordinate system.¹ In a sense, we think of space as something that exists outside the physical world, independent of matter, energy, and so on, it isn’t made of anything, it just is. But there’s a new way to think about space that comes from the Wolfram Physics Project. In Wolfram’s model, space (and everything in it) is made of interconnected nodes called a hypergraph. Here’s an extremely simplified view:

Alice and Bob can only be located by their connections to nearby points in space

Don’t be misled by this diagram. For one thing the real web of connections would be much more complex and constantly changing. But more importantly, these nodes which I’ve laid out in an even grid don’t have a definite location like they do on the page here. Instead, their location can only be defined by their connections to other nodes. We don’t know where a node is in the usual sense, we only know which other nodes it’s next to. In this model, space is not positional, it’s relational. In the diagram we can see that the length of the shortest path between Alice and Bob is 6 connections, and measurements like this are the only thing we can examine about the structure of relational space, because there’s no way of “stepping outside of it” to see an overview.

But it’s a happy surprise that all of geometry as we understand it can emerge from measuring paths between nodes in networks like these. It’s important to understand that these distances between connected nodes would be extremely small (on the order of 10^-93m), so that to us, space feels smooth and continuous and roughly three dimensional. I say “roughly” because this type of space can have a much more complex and intricate structure than the 1D, 2D, and 3D positional spaces we’re familiar with. Here dimensionality isn’t some property of space but emerges from how the network is interconnected: it’s always approximate, it can vary from place to place, and it doesn’t even need to have a whole number of dimensions.

I want to emphasize again how incredibly small these connections between nodes would be, they’re so small we can never hope to observe them, even indirectly. To give you an idea, imagine you’re the size of the entire known universe and you’re trying to observe a single quark. But that’s still not small enough, so now expand that quark to the size of the whole universe, and the distance between two nodes would now be the size of a quark.² I know this is really hard to imagine, and that shows just how far away we are from this fundamental scale. The main point is that there’s a lot that we can’t know about the fine details of our universe because they’re so much smaller than us, and even the tools we can make to measure them aren’t nearly small enough or sensitive enough to detect anything at this scale.

It seems like we’re quite a ways away from telepathy here, but what’s important for our purposes is that there’s nothing preventing some nodes from being connected to others a long distance away, and if this happened some small percentage of the time, it would be very hard for us to know about it, because we can’t hope to examine what’s going on at this scale. To us, the world would appear to be three dimensional in the ordinary way, even though its structure was in fact more intricate. Think about the air you’re breathing into your lungs right now; it’s made of trillions of molecules moving in incredibly complex ways, but all you can really say about it is that it’s warm or cool, dry or moist. We have to reduce those trillions of complex motions to just a few numbers like temperature and humidity, because we’re unable to observe so many molecules directly.³

a long-distance connection between Alice and Bob

The diagram above shows the nodes representing Alice and Bob being directly connected even though they’re far apart. But again, don’t be misled by the limitations of the diagram, because these connections are all the same length, so the one highlighted in red is actually the exact same length as all the others. And if that’s true, can we really still say that Alice and Bob are far apart? In one sense, Alice’s neighbors are completely distinct from Bob’s neighbors, so they exist in two different localities of space, but also the shortest path between them is no longer 6 connections but 1 connection, so in another sense they’re also very close together.⁴ If we zoomed out to the scale where Alice and Bob are human beings composed of countless nodes, and some fraction of Alice’s nodes are connected to some fraction of Bob’s, we can see that the notion of distance between Alice and Bob would be much more complex than a single number.

Lace of space

left: Irish lace, right: particle tracks in a bubble chamber (source, source)

If the nodes that make up space were all connected in a simple way like the diagrams above, space would be featureless and uniform, because each node is exactly like all the others, its only defining features are who its neighbors are. In Wolfram’s model, the vacuum of outer space isn’t empty, it’s a seething mass of nodes that are constantly being created, connected, and reconnected.⁵ Some nodes are connected in more complex patterns that can maintain a stable form amidst the chaos, and these appear to us as particles. Presumably only certain patterns will be stable, which would explain why we only observe a limited set of fundamental particles with limited states like charge and spin. We can imagine these particles as knots in the structure of space, and matter as a sort of dynamic lacework made of space itself. Here’s a simplified view:

Alice and Bob are now “knots” in space, acting like particles

So how do these kinds of particles move around? In the positional model of space used by conventional physics, they would simply change their coordinates, but in the relational model of space, the only way something can move is to form connections with new neighbors and break connections with old neighbors.⁶ When an object shifts from one neighborhood to another, we perceive it as having moved from one part of space to another. But does it need to break all its old connections? We know it must break almost all of them, or we would see strange things happening, for example an object moved from sunlight into a shadow might continue to glow because a significant part of it is still in the sun. But it’s possible that some connections could remain when an object moved, and if the number were small enough, we wouldn’t be able to tell from ordinary observation.

particles moving apart while maintaining some connections

Sometimes, when two particles are created from the same source, they do something unexpected. Even if they’re moved ten kilometers apart, they behave identically, as if they’re somehow still connected. In quantum physics this is called entanglement, and we don’t know exactly how it works yet. One theory is that the two particles share some hidden information, as if they’re reading from two copies of the same book which they were given at birth, but experiments have ruled out that possibility. It looks as if the particles are somehow communicating with each other instantaneously, faster than the speed of light. In the positional model of space, this looks like “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein called it, but in the relational model of space, we can see how two particles could start out connected to each other and keep some of those connections as they move apart.⁷

If two particles could move apart but also remain nearby in another sense, it wouldn’t be surprising to see them do the exact same thing at the same time. Nothing is moving faster than light, there’s no extra layer of reality they’re communicating on, it’s just two particles that are still effectively next to each other. In fact the only weird thing going on here is that space isn’t shaped the way we thought it was. We already know this type of entanglement can happen in very expensive and elaborate experimental setups, but what if it’s happening all the time?

Current quantum theory tells us that entangled particles like this are a bit special, and that even when two particles happen to get entangled, interactions with local particles will rapidly break their connection. To give an analogy, imagine someone tells you their phone number in a bar, and then you try to remember it as you push your way through the noisy crowd, get jostled, become involved in a few brawls, and slip on the icy sidewalk on the way to your car. Many of the quantum effects we’re able to observe seem to disappear quickly, because the real world at room temperatures is like a crowded bar full of rowdy customers, and that’s why quantum computers need to operate at very cold cryogenic temperatures. But what if there are long-lasting entanglements, but we haven’t observed them in the lab yet because they’re too small and weak for us to detect with our current scientific instruments?

In a world interconnected like this, telepathy wouldn’t be such a mystery. Alice and Bob could share bonds that don’t go through or around the walls of the isolation chamber, but on an even more direct shortcut between the two of them. But this raises another question: how would Alice and Bob use these connections to communicate? If they’re too small to detect with our most sensitive scientific instruments, how come ordinary people can send a crystal clear message over them? To try and answer that question, I’m going to move from physics into biology.

Cells can do things we can’t

Let’s zoom out to the level of cells. Cells existed long before physicists, so they don’t know anything about what physics theories say can and can’t be done. But that’s okay, because all they care about is thriving and producing lots of descendants. They will try to exploit any features of reality that are to their advantage, and over evolutionary time they’ve tried out an unimaginable number of approaches. Despite hundreds of years of studying them, we still don’t understand how cells do all the things they do. They’re challenging to study because they’re very small, very complex, and very dynamic.

left: cartoon of a cell from Wikipedia, right: more detailed cartoon of a cell from The Machinery of Life by David S. Goodsell

When I was studying cell biology in school, the pictures in the textbooks looked like the one on the left. But the reality is much more like the picture on the right. Cells are not loose sacks of fluid, they’re packed with intricate molecular mechanisms in constant motion. They’re able to find nutrients, break them down, reassemble them, repair themselves on the fly, escape predators, fend off invaders, and, most amazingly, split and duplicate every bit of their intricate mechanisms into two perfectly functioning copies.

And yet we keep learning about new things that cells can do. Just last year we learned that individual kidney cells can count to four, recognize patterns, and form memories. This was previously something we thought only neurons could do, and it now seems likely that many types of cells have similar abilities. Also last year, we learned that single-celled photosynthetic cyanobacteria in the ocean can connect to each other by extending microtubules, potentially forming vast cooperative networks to exchange information and nutrients. Some cells use mechanical computation and bioelectricity to execute incredibly complex movements. Whether you call this “intelligence” or “thinking” is up to you, but clearly it’s possible to do very complex open-ended tasks without a nervous system.

And in the fairly new field of quantum biology, researchers are figuring out how cells might exploit quantum effects to get ahead. Photosynthesis appears to gain efficiency from quantum effects, but the debate on exactly how it does this shows how challenging it is for us to observe cellular mechanisms in living beings. Since direct observation is impossible, a lot depends on theories, models, and interpretations. But there is at least one example with solid support, and that’s the way birds use a pigment called cryptochrome to navigate by sensing the earth’s magnetic field. This shows that some quantum effects can work in the noisy environment of a cell. Given how hard it is to study quantum effects in biology and how recently we started studying them, it wouldn’t be surprising to find many more such mechanisms in the living world.

A cell experiences the world very differently from you and I. Scale makes a huge difference: water is viscous and sticky, proteins are thrashing cords with thick tangles and bunches, light begins to diffract and blur, everything is pummeled this way and that by fast-moving water molecules.⁸ Being small has unique challenges, but it also offers an opportunity for unique abilities. Cells don’t need to build instruments to observe and manipulate the microscopic world, because they experience it directly. They can sense their environment without a microscope and rebuild molecules without a chemistry lab full of equipment. We know they can sense and react to light, touch, vibration, chemical signals, electrical charges, and electromagnetic fields, but what other subtle forces might they be harnessing?

Let’s imagine that cells have a structure or organelle that somehow preserves entangled particles. For example, it could be an organelle that we don’t know the purpose of yet, like a vault, but it could also be something that we think we know the purpose of but in fact has multiple functions. I’ll give it a name so I can refer to it concisely; let’s call it a nexusome.⁹ When cells divide, imagine that they can divide their nexusomes in such a way that entanglements are preserved.

a growing family of cells stays connected using nexusomes

As a family of cells grows by division, their nexusomes maintain connections to their sisters and cousins. There might be a limit to this though: the entangled particles in an ancestor cell need to be divided between all its descendants. In the diagram I’ve colored these original connections in magenta so you can see that after each generation, there will be fewer and fewer to go around, like an inheritance being divided and divided. It’s also possible that old connections would break over time from natural wear and tear. In either case, connections to close kin would be strongest, weakening as two cells became more distantly related. If these connections could be maintained and be used to transmit information, even bacteria could communicate telepathically! But why would they evolve to do this?

We know that cooperation is often very beneficial, even for free-living single-celled organisms. Bacteria exchange genetic material in a process call conjugation¹⁰, cyanobacteria exchange nutrients using microtubules, and many bacteria can gather into complex colonies called biofilms. But a telepathic connection wouldn’t be very useful for this kind of local cooperation, because shortcuts in relational space can’t tell a cell whether its kin are nearby or far away. So these behaviors all seem to be organized by local communication channels, using chemicals diffusing through the environment and structures that touch.

left: bacterial conjugation, right: cyanobacteria forming a network of microtubules (source, source)

But I can imagine ways it would be helpful to cooperate across longer distances than diffusion and touch can bridge. For example, a bacterium needs to decide between a number of energetic tradeoffs, like whether to put energy into reproducing or defending against possible threats, and whether to explore to look for better environments or to stay put and exploit the one it’s in. If it could know a fairly simple fact like how many surviving cousins it has, it could decide what kinds of risks are worth taking: if most of its kin are still alive, it’s okay take risky bets without endangering the family line, but if most of its kin have died, it’s better to play it safe. In a sense, a family of bacteria could act like a multicellular organism dispersed through space, analogous to how an ant colony can act as a superorganism.

This is all very speculative, of course, and it would be challenging to prove or disprove it experimentally. But I think it’s worth speculating, because this is the kind of thing we’d be extremely unlikely to observe if we didn’t even consider it as a possibility. Most of the biological mechanisms we know about are so ingenious that I doubt any human could have designed them from scratch, and this is probably no different. I expect that if cellular telepathy exists, understanding of the details will have to wait until we invent more sensitive instruments.¹¹

a brief history of measurement technologies, note that we still have a long ways to go, because to get down to the scale of the fundamental units of relational space, I’d need to almost quadruple the height of this graph

Telepathic people

Okay let’s zoom out to the human scale and get back to Alice and Bob. I believe humans can communicate in all kinds of subtle ways other than speaking and writing, for example through feeling touch, hearing vocal tone, seeing posture changes, and smelling pheromones. But these new telepathy experiments seem to be showing us something else, because the telepathy works even when blocking all these senses. At first I thought it might be based on sensing the electromagnetic fields created by the nervous system, and this may in fact be yet another way humans can communicate, but if it still works from inside a Faraday cage, we’ll know there must be something more as well. Maybe telepathy is just something that all cells can do,¹² and it’s a matter of becoming sensitive to it, like learning a language.

But if human cells are communicating with each other, we still need to explain the fact that telepathy can sometimes work between humans who aren’t closely related. Here are some possibilities I’ve thought of:

1. Our theoretical nexusome connections can be maintained over a very large number of generations, so many that in effect all humans are closely related.

2. Telepathic connections make use of bacteria in the human microbiome, which can spread by skin contact, etc, between anyone in close proximity.

3. There are ways of “harvesting” entangled particles from the environment, e.g. from shared sunlight, air, water, or even viruses.

4. Entanglement is even less special than I’ve been proposing: maybe all matter is entangled to some degree with everything it’s ever touched, and living beings are not creating or managing this entanglement but simply tapping into it.

This last possibility would open up an even grander view of our reality. If all matter is connected by a rich mixture of short-range and long-range connections, and these connections can carry information, it starts to look a lot like the kinds of networks that seem to be capable of something like “thinking” or “intelligence.”

left: animal neurons (source), center: fungal mycelium (source), right: visualization of an artificial neural network (source)

What I’m getting at is that all matter could be interconnected and conscious in some sense. In fact, it may turn out that telepathic connections aren’t a special case, but instead are ubiquitous, and the reason why most of us don’t experience them strongly is that we’re actively blocking them or tuning them out. Of course, this is not a new idea, mystics have been telling us that everything is interconnected for thousands of years. For example Indra’s net is usually seen as a metaphor, but it could also be read as a description of deeply entangled relational space. Many indigenous cultures have pointed out the interconnectedness of all beings, which is usually interpreted through a lens of scientific ecology, but was probably meant in a deeper, more animistic sense. Maybe interconnectedness is not something for mystics but an inescapable aspect of the reality we’re living in, a physical fact inside our flesh.

The more I think about this, the more it both excites and terrifies me. The possibility of deeper connection to those around me inspires me, but I also have to grapple with the fact that the barriers I put between myself and the rest of the world may be illusory. There may be no such thing as being alone, no such thing as privacy even in my unspoken thoughts, no such thing as getting away, no such thing as a separate self. Anything I do or think might affect the world, and anything someone else does or thinks might affect me. What are the implications, and how can I navigate this situation gracefully? I’ll explore these questions next time in Part 2.

1. Since the development of non-Euclidean geometry and relativity, scientists no longer believe this space is perfectly “flat” (it can be curved by gravitation), and there’s no absolute coordinate system, but if we select a frame of reference, and we only consider a local area, the current paradigm tells us that space behaves in a more-or-less Euclidean way, in technical terms it’s a “smooth manifold”.

2. Taking the size of the universe to be roughly 10^27m and the size of a quark to be roughly 10^-18m, that’s a scale difference of 10^45, so we need to do that twice to get to the scale difference between a human at 1m scale and Wolfram’s fundamental distance at 10^-93m.

3. An interesting side note is that the second law of thermodynamics, which tells us that total entropy (disorder) in a closed system must always increase, might simply be a consequence of our limitations as observers of the universe. Molecules are too small to keep track of, our minds are too limited to see any hidden order they might have, and so most states appear disordered to us.

4. Conventional physics has a similar concept called an Einstein-Rosen bridge, or wormhole, but to exist within the theory of relativity it needs to be larger and more continuous, so it’s seen as an exotic structure that may be hard or even impossible to create. In Wolfram’s model, space is made up of discrete connections which have no inherent coordinates, and these “long-range” connections could be commonplace. They could be in us and all around us without causing any disturbance to our everyday experience of reality.

5. This corresponds to vacuum energy in the quantum model of physics. In Wolfram’s model, it seems that most of the universe’s computational capacity would be used to maintain the structure of space itself, as opposed to creating the dynamics of stars, planets, being, and so on.

6. On a cultural or poetic note, I find it interesting that positional space has a somewhat masculine character (matter penetrating emptiness, detached and free) while relational space has a more feminine character (matter arising from a living void, inescapably connected). Some see science as being made up of observations, but I would say science is made up of interpretations of what we observe, and these can be strongly influenced by our habits of thought. Shifts in scientific paradigms and shifts in culture are not distinct but deeply interconnected.

7. I haven’t found a specific discussion of how entanglement might work in the Wolfram Physics Project materials, but they do explain how quantum phenomena would emerge naturally from the structure of the model, without needing any special rules.

8. For a beautiful (and soothing) picture of what the cellular world looks like, I highly recommend the YouTube channel Journey to the Microcosmos.

9. From Latin nexus, the act of binding or tying together and -some, a conventional suffix for organelles.

10. Bacterial conjugation can be considered a type of cooperation between bacteria, because the genetic information exchanged tends to be helpful. But it can also be seen as a competition among the DNA rings called plasmids that organize their own duplication and transfer (they behave a bit like viruses). However, since the plasmids can only win in the long run by helping their bacterial hosts, the net effect tends to be cooperative and helpful.

11. A major barrier to measuring very small things is noise. Like in analogy of the crowded bar, the microscopic world is full of seemingly random fluctuations, which can drown out the weak signals from a sensitive measuring device. Since cells are generally not interested in repeatable and exact measurements, they take a different approach to their noisy environment, often exploiting its fluctuations instead of trying to fight them. To learn more about this and other recent advances in our biological understanding, I recommend How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology by Philip Ball.

12. I think the type of communication through relational space that I’ve been talking about might only be possible at the molecular scale, and so it would require some kind of cellular process to manage it. But these cellular links could then be aggregated by a larger structure like the nervous system, allowing for more nuanced communication.