I’ve known Professor Richard Silberstein for decades; he’s one of my closest friends. And when you look at his credentials, you’d probably think he’d be the past person to write a book about telepathy. He’s a physicist by training who spent four decades as a working neuroscientist in Melbourne, chaired a physics department, founded a brain sciences institute, and invented a brain imaging method that labs still use to study memory and attention.
I still remember years ago when he told me about the experiment he later conducted, published, and now includes in his new book Stranger and Stranger, thinking that while I hoped he was right, I expected him to be disappointed.
Basically, he was trying to find out if identical twins were somehow connected to each other via some sort of as-yet-unknown mechanism of consciousness. There have been tons of literature published over the past few centuries about twins experience things that are inexplicable — one gets injured while on the other side of town, and the other feels the pain is one of the most common — and Richard wanted to test it with hard science.
He and his colleague Felicity Bigelow recruited pairs of identical twins and put each twin into a separate, sensorily-isolated room. One twin was designated the “sender” and watched a series of 100 images flashed on a screen at random intervals over 11 minutes. Half were personal pictures both twins had chosen together for the experiment, the other half were emotionally neutral and ordinary landscapes and cityscapes.
The “receiving” twin stared at a single unchanging picture for all of those 11 minutes, and both work a brain-recording setup that also exposed both to a faint 13-hertz flicker on the edge of their vision, which Richard hoped would lock their brains into something approaching synchronization.
What happened next was amazing. The “receiving” twins’ brains showed brief spikes of connectivity between the “seeing” visual cortex of the brain and the parietal and temporal regions, the same type of spike a brain scientist would expect to see when a person had just looked at something meaningful.
The “receivers” brain spikes lined up with the “senders” at a statistically significant level, something that — without some sort of physical communication between the two — should have been impossible. It’s the first time any hardcore scientists have tested this and the results (while needing replication) are already creating a buzz in scientific circles.
Most interesting, when the sessions were over and the “receiving” twins were asked whether they’d experienced anything at all, a twitch or a twinge or a sudden thought or picture or anything, they universally said that they had not. Nothing. No images, feelings, hunches, or anything else.
Their brains were responding to the other twin in a faraway room, in other words, but it was all happening at a level that was way below their own consciousness. Something was arriving, but their thoughtful, conscious mind was blissfully ignorant of it.
A mother of one of the twin pairs in the study told Richard how they played netball on separate courts, out of each other’s hearing or sight, and when one fell and dislocated her kneecap the other twin instantly felt an inexplicably sharp pain and had to limp over to the bench. These kinds of twin stories are legendary, but nobody before ever took an instrument capable of finely measuring brain activity as they were happening. Until now.
More than a century ago, William James suggested that the brain might be more of a receiver with a filter on it than a generator of consciousness. Richard’s experiment — and dozens of others he cites — puts the meat on the bones of that argument.
Every second, receptors on every square millimeter of your skin are sending signals to your spinal cord that you’re unaware of because of a massive inhibitory network you brain runs; it’s whole job is to suppress anything not relevant to staying alive in the moment. Evolution fine-tuned our senses to look out for physical threats, food, and sex but a faint signal from a sibling across town was never going to grab our attention more effectively than a snapping twig.
Richard reports on how 2024 study in the journal Cortex found that briefly quieting part of a person’s left frontal lobe with magnetic stimulation let “ordinary” people affect a random number generator with their minds in ways they otherwise couldn’t. It’s more of the same stuff.
This is an idea found in the teachings and core assumptions of every major religion in the world, particularly in the mystical traditions. The only thing that’s truly new is the science being applied to it.
So here’s a small experiment for this week that any Christian Scientist or Hindu meditator would instantly recognize. Pick a person you’re close to and, at some quiet moment, simply hold them in your mind and heart for a few minutes. Then let us know in the comments whether you learned anything, about them or about yourself.
And if you’ve ever known something before you had any way to know it, I’d love to hear that story too.
"More than a century ago, William James suggested that the brain might be more of a receiver with a filter on it than a generator of consciousness. Richard’s experiment — and dozens of others he cites — puts the meat on the bones of that argument."
A firm believer of the above. That our brains do not generate consciousness. Excellent article. Thank you.