Thought Waves

by Peter Shikli
21 April 2004

Sidenote: Many of the predictions in this article have come to pass. Note that it was written in 2004. I have not revised the article because I'm curious to see how far things go from this starting point.

Yet what happened has a word for it in every language in the world. In English, we have several; “felt his eyes on the back of my neck” or “as though someone was watching me.” The very scientists who explain how it is impossible will tell us they experienced the phenomenon themselves.

Yet we know our eyes can't produce a feeling in another person. They can't project anything at all. They're just sensors. Eyes can only react to the light something else has sent their way.

But eyes never work alone. Its wires run to the brain with what it sees, and there happens the mysterious work of recognition. What little we know of that shows some amount of pre-processing even in the back of the eye. The 25 million tiny rods and cones at the back of the eye each sense their individual pixel (dot) of light and transmit it to nearby synapses that somehow pack that into well under a million nerves in the optic nerve bundle. Speculation is that this preprocessing converts a pixel map of the image into information about edges, contours, and perhaps even shapes. At this point, we may have converted light waves into the outline of an ear, for example, and other sketches. We have computers today that can do this work fairly quickly and easily.

The brain matches what the optic nerve brings it to records in its huge knowledge base of patterns and shapes. At this point, we recognize that we are looking at the back of a head in a room of other objects. We have computers today the size of cars that take a long time to do a fraction of this, often with incorrect results. Finger print matching, for example, has been perfected on computers, but facial recognition works only some of the time and with lots of human intervention. To recognize anything from any aspect angle, computers are still in the dark. Of course, breakthroughs are inevitable.

After the brain's thalamus relays such sensory information to the cerebral cortex, we do the threat/opportunity analysis and formulate a course of action. We recognize the back of Mary's head, for example, and wander over to say hello. At this point, we don't have computers that can do much of this, and we couldn't tell them exactly how to do it if we did.

The reason we know about the involvement of the thalamus and cerebral cortex in all this is that the brain has been mapped by, among other devices, the electroencephalogram or EEG. The EEG is based on an observation by Hans Berger around the last quarter of the 19th century that the brain has a continuous electrical current. By then, it was known that all electrical current produced magnetic waves through induction, and that could be measured. In the case of the EEG, they measure the changes in these magnetic waves, less than a few microvolts, brought on by certain isolated stimuli, like seeing the back of someone's head. By the end of the 1980's, EEG brain topography was beginning to measure the magnetic waves emitted by the brain in its various regions to various stimuli.

In simple terms, the brain produces an invisible wave when we see something, and this wave can be picked up by an instrument.

We can of course produce the same fluctuating magnetic waves without using our brains but by spinning a magnet or alternating the current in a wire. The curious thing is that an EEG, or any such device, measures magnetic waves similar to the way that it is produced, only with the circuitry running backwards. One such device produces magnetic waves by alternating the voltage polarity in a wire, for example, and a similar nearby device measures the magnetic waves by the voltage polarity produced (inducted) in its wire.

We have strong evidence that some birds and dolphins navigate by sensing the Earth's magnetic waves, produced in their case by moving through static magnetic fields.

So we know the brain is producing magnetic waves, and with circuitry similar to what could measure similar incoming waves, from let's say another brain. Now we're stepping from facts to theory, but a theory supported by the above facts. And if this theory is valid, our brains act like primitive radios.

Consider the workings of a radio, once again peculiar in that the device that produces a radio wave is similar, though much more powerful, to the device that measures it, our table top radio. And a radio wave is an electromagnetic wave, which has close physical relationships to a magnetic wave, hence the similarity in the names. Without getting into the details, we can say that an electromagnetic wave is like a magnetic wave that can go much farther. If it wasn't for that limitation, we could have built radios using magnetic waves. In fact, radio receivers and EEG receivers both measure waves that produce about the same amount of electricity, a few microvolts.

Curiously, sound waves are similar in that the device that produces one, like a vibrating membrane or drum, may have much in common with the device that picks up the vibration, like an eardrum.

We can take a theory further, first to see if it is supported by other theories that have been proven. If we believe the theory of evolution has been proven, we would have to ask what benefits to survival would there be in such “brain radios”. Of course communication would be a big benefit, but sending thoughts through such brain radios would be a big jump from the facts presented.

First, a thought would have to be modulated or encoded on to the magnetic wave. Just because a creature can make a sound wave doesn't mean it can talk. We humans can talk, write, and encode our thoughts in many ways, but if brain waves were to be part of the mix, it would still be on a primitive level. Otherwise, we would all be having telepathic conversations with one another right now. If brain waves are viable, we would be at the stage where we're trying to form an intelligent grunt.

Another problem brain waves would have to overcome is what communication gurus call the signal-to-noise ratio. A room full of people would be full of brain waves, and many other waves. And each person's brain wave would be encoded with their own thoughts. This would be a lot of noise. How could we pick out an intelligent grunt, the signal, from all this noise?

Consider the signals you make when you talk to your dog, “Blah blah blah Fido, blah blah. Blah Fido blah.” The only signal Fido can pick out from the noise is that it has something to do with him, and he can do that no matter who says “Fido”. Not much communication involved in this intelligent grunt, but a world of evolutionary advantage over the creature who is deprived of it. Combined with other stimuli, Fido can understand there is something to eat or it's time to stop chewing the slipper, all of which may impact his survival.

Fido doesn't know his name as much as he knows his identity, a sign of intelligence, and can associate it to a peculiar signal, in this case, a modulated sound wave. From an evolutionary standpoint, connecting that signal to threats and opportunities could have a big impact on survival.

Assuming something similar for ourselves, how could brain waves transmit our identity? Consider the processing we explored earlier of an image by our eyes and brain, in particular, a look at the back or side of someone's head. The path from eye to cerebral cortex and the brain waves thus formed produce the basic communication medium, and the signal modulated on to that is the image of the back of someone's head. To every human, that is a key part of our identity, what we look like. It remains the same for years, is unique compared to most other humans, and forms an important part of our signature brain wave.

Whether the observer connects that an instant later to knowledge of who we are, or just leaves it as the observation of a stranger, a recognizable signal could have passed from a brain wave transmitter to a nearby brain wave receiver.

And in a crowded room with conversations all around, it would be as if someone had said our name. They don't have to yell it. We are wired to automatically pull it out of the noise. We would turn our head to face the threat or opportunity.

So why can't we analyze these brain waves with sophisticated instruments and pull out of them the information about the identities being transmitted, and whatever else interesting is being sent? The problem is in decoding or demodulating the signal. It is comparatively easy to measure the amplitude and frequency of the sound made by a person speaking Swahili, and another matter to understand what they are saying. In the case of brain waves, we're still deciphering its basic concept of language. Progress in decoding brain waves is inevitable, but we can only guess where that adventure will take us.

Having transitioned earlier from facts to theory, we can now transition from theory to speculation, and wonder where all this may lead.

Measuring brain waves close to our heads is much easier than from across the room. The strength of a magnetic wave drops off dramatically with distance. This may be explained by incredibly sensitive sensors in our brains, but there is another possibility.

By the laws of physics, all changing or alternating magnetic waves produce electromagnetic waves, like radio waves. And all electromagnetic waves striking or passing through matter produce magnetic waves. Lots of variation depending on the matter involved, the energy of the waves, and so on. But our bodies do sense some frequencies of electromagnetic waves; light with our eyes, infrared with our skin, and possibly others. Although the strength of electromagnetic waves also drops off with distance, they can still travel far; 13 billion light years in the case of the remote galaxies.

We are also dimly aware of waves other than magnetic waves and electromagnetic waves. From gravity waves to waves of massless subatomic particles to waves of dark energy. We know only that our brains and its ancestors have had a couple billion years to figure out some evolutionary path to harness whichever wave propagation system would be best to transmit information that supports survival.

Every year we make strides in uncovering the mysteries of waves and information. Today, we may be on the brink of discovering an intelligent grunt in brain waves, perhaps the signal for our identity, the eyes on the back of our heads, so to speak. Tomorrow, we may be able to pull out of a brain wave the thought of a tree, after that, the feeling of liking a tree. Perhaps the telepathy of science fiction will stop being fiction. And on the dark side, perhaps our last personal privacy, our thoughts, will stop being private.

As creatures bent on doing good over evil, I believe we humans will leverage whatever comes of this to add value and meaning to our time in this world, at least on average. We may begin by empowering those whose other communication faculties are defective, perhaps victims of a spinal chord injury who have little left but their thoughts, to help them communicate and rejoin our world with a super-EEG machine.

We may overcome the boundaries of language since an Albanian's thought of a tree is likely to be similar to my thought of a tree. Perhaps this can extend even to reduce the strife between people caused by misunderstandings. I can glare at a black man out of fear and ignorance, but what if I sense his thoughts of family and a longing for peace that we all share somewhere inside us?

We define thoughts and feelings separately, but a feeling that I love someone is impossible without thinking that I love that person. What if we learn a more effective way to transmit love among ourselves? Or better yet, we learn that brain waves are how we have been transmitting love all along. We often speak of feeling the love of another person. What if we discover brain waves are what we feel?

We know that people in love (sexual, parent/child, or whatever) want to be physically close to each other. Of course that is to embrace and involve the other senses. But the urge for lovers to be close holds even when there is a barrier between them. Even busy with their lives, lovers tend to share the same room or sit near one another. And when they do embrace or stay close, lovers tend to keep their heads touching or at least close together. Even with dogs and cats we love, we draw our heads together (mumbling such idiotic things), even at the risk of injury.

We all enjoy the pleasure of love, and we all seem to get more of it that way. Almost as though we gravitate to where the signal is strongest, where the transmitter and receiver are next to each other..

As I said, this has transitioned to speculation, and now for some blue-sky speculation.

If brain waves allow humans to communicate invisibly, perhaps we can use it to communicate with those who are invisible. This may include space aliens, people in other dimensions, the spirits of the dead, and anyone else who can affect or encode brain waves. But it can include one other guy, God, however we define her, and that might make things more interesting.

A few thousand years before anyone could guess at brain waves, we were taught to meditate, pray, or otherwise focus our thoughts. Almost as though training to package and project our thoughts for transmission to a place our ancestors didn't understand, they somehow found time in their busy lives to put lots of effort into this. Of course this can be explained in many different ways. Meditation and prayer cleanses the mind of distractions, increases self awareness, and provides insights unavailable without such work. For the religious types, it is how we talk to the supreme being, and we are told it is better than firing off stray or undirected thoughts with lots of noise around them.

Without exception, all religions believe in communication with God, that prayer is a bidirectional medium that grows more effective with our diligent practice. Like speaking or seeing, we somehow get better at it by tuning our bodily senses. Such things imply, or at least don't contradict, a possible role for something like brain waves.

One may ask why God bothers with brain waves to communicate with us. If he is all powerful, he can just make it happen, like a miracle. But a miracle is an aberration of natural law, almost as though God is admitting that the world needs a tweak he didn't foresee. What if God is so smart that he made a natural world so grand that it can get the whole job done without tweaks? It would be a world of natural laws stretching from the self evident to beyond our comprehension. Brain waves would be somewhere in between. And the reason God would bother with brain waves is that he made a world magnificent enough to have them available.

Would the discovery and analysis of brain waves prove that God is out there, talking to us? No more than the discovery and analysis of sound waves proves or disproves that God may have used that to speak to us. If the big guy wants to keep a secret, we're not about to pry it out of him.

Between what our senses can detect, what our instruments can measure, what our wisdom can understand, and what the natural world still holds, God has lots left to amaze us.

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