
A Forgotten Adventure with a Telepathic Tribe - atollstat
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/amazon-encounter-explorer-photographer/
======
proksoup
A lot of information can be conveyed with body language, context and emotion,
to the point where it's difficult to distinguish from telepathy. Most
especially with folks who've spent a great deal of time together.

I'm maybe not the only one who's experienced bits of 'beaming' with a long
time friend or partner?

Perhaps "I have a pretty good idea of what X is thinking" is softer language
than "I'm reading X's mind", but I can see how the experience of telepathy is
not greatly distant from something that's normal for many people.

~~~
cowpewter
When I was in high school, my AP Chem class only had a handful of people in
it. The chemistry teacher was a pretty awesome laid-back guy, and so in the
month of school left after the AP test but before the end of the school year,
we pretty much used all our class time to play pinochle.

After a few weeks of playing with the same partner, you can pretty much know
what they have in their hand just by the way they play.

------
SCHiM
Let's not forget that speaking/talking is telepathy, right people? Speech
crosses all the boxes:

    
    
      -- It's invisible, travels via 'waves'
      -- The 'waves' I use to speak can cause your brain to show you images
      -- It can convey emotions, thoughts, images.
      -- It can be used to persuade others, change the way they think about a   subject.
      -- **tree**. Did it work? Did you see a tree?
    
     Of course recognising that speech really does check all the boxes is kind of a let down when you're expecting sci fi voices-in-your-head (wait, that sounds familiar...) telepathy

~~~
p1esk
Yes, but the "real" telepathy is when you can picture, in your head, the exact
tree I'm picturing in my head, without me doing anything to help you.

Sounds pretty sci-fi, until you read about recent brain to brain communication
experiments.

~~~
Terr_
I don't think that's possible because the first person never really has a
complete tree picture to begin with. Instead you have a while bunch of sub-
impressions which your brain dynamically invents from old experiences as your
attention wanders.

Even if you transfer all the input-requirements, the other person's procedural
generator will give a different set of outputs to satisfy them.

~~~
p1esk
You're right, but those experiments are still pretty impressive.

------
neom
As a note, I've seen the encounter twice now here in Manhattan - it's
absolutely fantastic and I can't rave about it enough. They used a lot of cool
sound trickery, mostly with a Sennheiser Neumann KU 100 and some well placed
parabolics. Unfortunately it's no longer on broadway.
[http://theencounterbroadway.com/index.php#home-
content](http://theencounterbroadway.com/index.php#home-content)

------
fallingfrog
I can't believe the claim, since telepathy has never been demonstrated-
however! I think I have to admit that there isn't any law of physics that says
telepathy is impossible, theoretically. It would certainly be possible over
short distances if humans had specialized organs for transmitting and
receiving electrical signals, like an electric eel does. Since we don't have
that organ, the signals a human brain can produce are very weak, which is why
they put electrodes right on your scalp and not a few inches away. If
telepathy could occur, it would have to be in a very electrically quiet place
like the Amazon. It could be that telepathy is real but just never tested in
an electrically quiet enough environment. The modern world is shockingly
noisy- cell phones, radio towers, the power grid, and wifi hubs all produce
constant electrical noise. Even in the Amazon I'd say the probability that
this is real is very very low, but hey, who knows.

~~~
Thrillington
If that was true there would be some record from the thousands and thousands
of years of written history from before humans harnessed the electron.

~~~
fallingfrog
That's a good point!

------
mmjaa
I would love for the species to develop Telepathy. Since I was a child I've
dreamed of the day (sci-fi drove me there), and I feel that we inch closer and
closer as the Internet grows by day ..

~~~
wthigo
careful what you wish for, everyone has their dark side

~~~
oelmekki
And an exceptional front light side. I'm always amazed how most people give
the best of themselves during casual social encounters. The big effort we do
in social interactions is kind of an art, we're not so good in daily life with
our close ones, simply because we can't maintain that effort for so long.
Telepathy would ruin this, I guess.

~~~
mmjaa
It depends if there were some sort of control mechanism for just how much
telepathy was 'allowed' \- like, its not - imho - full mind-reading, but
rather "selective understanding" from the target sides' point of view .. I
wouldn't want to know everything, just a few things during actual real
incidents. Therefore, there still has to be a line between individual choice
and social sharing.

------
ivanhoe
Our thoughts, as we experience them, are usually in a form of an inner
monologue, and very much like talking it's always in some particular language.
Based on that I'd suspect, if telepathy was possible, that it would still be
very closely bound to the language that you use to verbalize your thoughts.

~~~
gliese1337
Not for everyone.

People who "think in language" tend to be more common, but there are "people
who think in language" and people who just _don 't_. And people in either camp
tend to assume that that's just how _everyone_ is, until they are shown
different. But since the "think in language" camp is larger, it is a lot
easier to go through life not ever realizing that there are people who are
different, to the point that many people even refuse to belief that non-
linguistic thinkers exist even when presented with examples, which leads to a
great deal of misinformation being spread in discussions of psycholinguistics.

------
samlittlewood
Saw/heard this in London - very well told story.

