Proposal for telepathy experiment for people with young children

Greetings everyone,

I had a very interesting experience when I was a teenager, but I've never really had an opportunity to try it again and figured it might be beneficial to try an informal experiment here. Here's what originally happened:

When I was about 16, my 5 year old cousin came to visit. Having read several authors who believed that children all start out with telepathic abilities but lose them later in life, I decided to try a little experiment. He was playing Turok (a game about hunting dinosaurs) for Nintendo 64 in my room, and I asked him if he could still see what people are thinking, to which he responded, "Yeah" without even looking away from the screen. I then visualized a horse and asked him to tell me what I was thinking. I still remember his exact response. Without a moments hesitation, he said, "You're thinking about horsies. I like horsies." Needless to say, I was rather taken aback by both the accuracy of his response and by how casually he answered. It was like I'd asked him what he'd eaten for breakfast.

I tried to continue, but he seemed uncomfortable and didn't want to. Whether or not he was actually sensing my thoughts and emotional state, it was pretty obvious that his answer took me by surprise, so I understood why he might not have wanted to continue.

Although I obviously can't say that this experience was confirmation of telepathy, I think it's fairly safe to say based on the accuracy and natural, confident demeanor of his response that it was not simple coincidence. I am certain, though, that there was nothing in the room or our recent experience that would have prompted the idea of horses, and I have no particular affinity for horses; I chose that particular image because it seemed like something relatively neutral yet specific enough for this type of experiment, and I'm fairly certain that there wasn't anything external that would have prompted that particular image. I suppose it's possible that genetic similarities could have caused us both to pull up the same image when thinking of something "random", but like I said, due to the nature of the response (as well as experiences I myself have had spontaneously perceiving very specific information that I could not see any other way of having known), I'm inclined to think that there was some form of "unconventional" communication taking place.

Anyway, I'd like to propose a similar experiment here for people with young children, let's say around 4, 5, 6ish, but please just use your own discretion. Ask your child if they can see what people are thinking or some similar question, then visualize something and ask them to tell you what it is.

Here are some basic guidelines I think we should follow:

1) Let's limit whatever it is you think of to actual physical things or people that can be clearly visualized, as opposed to abstract concepts.

2) Make sure that whatever you think of is something you know your child will be familiar with, but avoid things (at least at first) that you think might be an obvious "guess", such as things or people in the room or that you have recently interacted with.

3) Make sure you form the thought clearly before asking the question.

4) Try this multiple times if your child is willing.

5) Remain aware of your own emotional state and try to keep a supportive attitude when you ask the questions and wait for the response. It's conceivable that if your child is actually perceiving your thoughts and emotional state, the expectation that they will not be able to do it may inhibit their response in some way. Although I obviously cannot say for certain whether or not this would influence the results, I think it's worth keeping in mind as something that could potentially cause a false negative result.

Well, that's about it for now. If anyone would like to participate, I think this could be very interesting. If you decide to post back here, please include the age of the child, the original thoughts, your child's responses, and also take note of the manner in which they respond. It would also be helpful to include your own mental state throughout the process, especially if you notice the quality or accuracy of the responses start to change.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope we can get some interesting results! If anyone has any suggestions or observations, please feel free to post those here as well.

Having read several authors who believed that children all start out with telepathic abilities but lose them later in life,

Actually this is only half true. We dont loose this telepathic abilities at any time of life.
As the telepaty is the property of the mind, and the brain is functioning at different frequencies
at the young stages of life, so are the childer the ones who can communicate easier with what you call telepathy.
We are forced to function at higher frequencied of the brain from the beginning of the kindergarten/school
so the brain learned to use the vocal communication method more than the telepathical.
Whats left over is what they now call intuition. Which female are a bit more into it than male.

But you can reactivate telepatical communication easily, just start functioning at the lower frequencies of the
brain more often (through meditation or daydreaming) and you will be soon able to do it again.

I have a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old. I'll try this with them later and let you all know what they say.

When my 2-year-old was just turning one, I remember we were playing a game and I was asking her to point at things in the room. We aren't especially religious, and the kids had never been to church at that point nor had we ever talked to them about the concept of God. (We go now, but that's another story.) Out of curiosity, I asked my baby "where is God?" and she reached both hands up and pointed upwards - very insistently. I thought it was strange, but maybe just a fluke. I tried hard to not really respond to it because I didn't want to ruin my little "experiment." But she responded the same, every single time she was asked. And she didn't respond that way for anything else. She was sure that God was "up." I checked with relatives to make sure none had taught her this and none had (not surprising, my parents aren't church types either). I'd ask her sporadically for a while (maybe every few months) and she always responded the same. To which, I'd hold back any real enthuasiam and just say "Oh." or "OK." Soon after she turned two, she stopped doing this. In fact, I asked her yesterday "where is God?" She just looked at me and said "I don't know. Where is God?" She has no idea any more. Not a clue.

I don't want to read too much into it or put too much weight on this. But it is interesting. It seemed as if she had some memory or innate knowledge that was slowly lost.

I have a video of her somewhere, pointing to "God" as a baby. It's very cute. A sweet memory, if nothing else. I would have written it off totally as just randomness if she wasn't so insistent, certain, and consistent without any previous prompting. Again, I'm not hanging my faith on this by any means. It's just a cute story that I thought was relevant to this discussion.

OK. More later. I'll let you all know how my "tests" go this weekend.

OK, I don't think I did it really properly... but I gave it a go. Since you said "horse" in your post, that's the only thing my non-creative mind could think of as an object for them to guess.

I approached my two-year old first. (Four-year-old wasn't around at this time.) Here's a rough transcript:

Me: Let's play a game and see if you can guess what I'm thinking.
2yo: What you're thinking? Why? (she asks "why" about everything)
Me: Just for fun. I want to see if you can guess. What do you think I'm thinking of?
2yo: A pig!
Me: Good guess! It is an animal. That's not it, though. Guess again.
2yo: A horse!

So, I did tell her that it was an animal after her first guess, so I don't know if that sort of ruined the experiment, but she was right on her second guess. I was a little surprised. Could've been luck, though.

Later, I did a similar approach with my 4-year old.

Me: Let's play a little game and see if you can guess what I'm thinking.
4yo: An armadillo.
Me: No, try again.
4yo: Four.
Me: No. Nice try, but no banana.
4yo: (hysterical laughter because his mother is a comic genius and 'no banana' is a hilarious thing to say)


So, it was interesting that my 4 yo also guessed an animal first. I didn't tell him it was an animal, though, and so his second guess was just a number.


So... there you go. My very non-scientific experiment. I should add, if it wasn't obvious already, that I did this pretty quick and on the fly. I didn't concentrate on the horse too much, and I'm honestly pretty bad about being able to visualize something in my mind. I get too distracted. But I did try to picture a horse and think the word "horse" over and over. As most of you know, 2 and 4 year olds don't stay in one place for too long so these conversations happened while we were doing other things. (Getting ready to go outside with the four year old and while making lunch with the two-year-old "helping".)



ETA: I just re-read your original post and realized what a totally crappy job I did of following your instructions. Sorry! I should get an "F" for this assignment.

reply to post by Nanocyte


My daughter will be turning two in May...I will try and work on exercises like this with her throughout her whole childhood, because I am firmly of the belief that we all possess ESP-like abilities, but through societal conditioning of our parents, which seeps down to us, we are made to forsake the gift and honor the servant, as Albert Einstein put it.

I am quite positive that by training her in exercises like my 52-card precognition test, that on a habitual basis that she will be quite special by the time she is to enroll in school.

reply to post by Nanocyte


The reason your 5 yr old cousin didn't want to do anymore is that you became impossible to read after your emotions became heightened, after you got shocked.
I know this, as this is what happens to my family members.
(BTW you can use to stop people listening to you; get excited or emotional.)

I have actually heard my two teenagers in the last few years telepathically.
One was so funny. My eldest is very prim and never swears. But one day she was having problems finding her orthotics. So you can imagine my suprise when my youngest nad I heard her say, "Where is that bl**dy f****** orthotic."
We still have a laugh over that.
It served as a lesson though, keep your thoughts clean as you don't know who is listening.

Another time was my eldest thinking to herself, 'I wonder if I should tell Mum she has a birthday cake?'
Another time was 'Do you want a cup of tea mum? I said yes and she said I haven't asked you yet.

Interesting thing is, no one has heard me but I can hear them. My hubby has come closest but I sound far away to him.

We tried those shapes cards and although we often get more than 50% right, so it is a significant figure. As soon as we get excited it stops, and if we become tired or distracted it stops. I found I am good at projecting and recieving pictures but not projecting words, weird eh?

Good luck and persevere.

I have a little five-year-old neighbor I might try this on, made all the better by the fact that he's autistic. They say kids with autism are better at things like this.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the responses so far! I look forward to seeing what else comes up.

VegHead - I have a couple of ideas about what you wrote, but I don't want to bring them up as I don't want to unintentionally influence the results. After all, if your kids actually are seeing your thoughts, then anything going through your mind may be going through theirs. I do have a couple questions and ideas I'd like to put out now, though.

1) This may seem like a stupid question, but are you sure that your two-year old is familiar enough with a horse that she can differentiate it from a pig? If she is reading your thoughts, it think it might be reasonable to assume for now that that she must be able to map whatever she perceives in your mind to a definition of something she has defined in her mind. Is it possible that either your or her concept of a horse would have allowed for sufficient ambiguity for her to "guess" a pig? I'm not necessarily suggesting that that's the case, but it's one thing that occurs to me.

2) Another thing is the wording you used. I wonder if by using the word guess, which is an attempt to come to a correct answer with limited or no information, she might have "turned off" instead of just directly taking a look? Like closing her eyes to go along with the game? Also, if we are currently operating under the assumption that she is actually directly perceiving your thoughts and intentions, is it possible that choosing such wording might also indicate a certain mental expectation of uncertainty when you're asking the question. In the end, you know of course know your child better than I do, but I'm just pointing out a couple things that we may want to keep in mind given that even without a direct link to your mind, children naturally use their parents as a model of how to communicate with others and how to think.

3) Are there any television or other similar characters that she is fond of that you are also familiar enough with that you could conceptualize the character clearly enough for her to easily and specifically identify them? Perhaps that might be a good test, along with things that you and she are very familiar with, such as your car, etcetera if you choose to try this again.

Your four year old sounds like a very funny kid! Thanks for trying this out, and I'll post my other observations and thoughts after we have some more feedback on this thread. I don't want to inadvertently contaminate the results.

AriesJedi and Hombre - Thanks for the feedback. I did notice that whenever I would have "telepathic" experiences when I was younger, it was always spontaneous and in situations in which I was relaxed, passively engaged and generally unconcerned with getting a correct answer. It happened a lot in high school classes for subjects I was interested in, but not so much in college (perhaps because I was always stressed out and sleep-deprived). So it would make sense that a more relaxed mind and lower frequency brain waves would be conducive to communication.

I have also found, though, that in situations where I was able to remain unconcerned and make "guesses", for example while playing a game or something that involved a choice between only two answers, I would often be able to have hits until the point where I became concerned with my correctness, at which point I would get on a streak of misses. This in itself is kind of interesting, because if these experiences were actually pointing towards a real perception of something external, the consistency of wrong guesses would seem to indicate that I was still perceiving the correct answer in a state of heightened anxiety but just choosing the wrong one, maybe to confirm my fear of getting it wrong.

There was always a specific feeling to these experiences when I had correct information, subtle, yet quite distinct from the feeling of guessing. Of course, it's really difficult for me to draw any definite conclusions, since, as most people know, the human brain processes so many of our experiences into blocks retroactively. So it's very difficult for me to rule out confirmation bias and say that that particular subtle feeling was something that was there at the moment of perception distinguishing it from a random guess, rather than a feeling that was applied retroactively at the moment that perception was verified as being correct.

Anyway, thanks for your participation so far, everyone, and I look forward to further feedback!

reply to post by AriesJedi


I had another quick question. When you "hear" your teenagers, is it actually like hearing the sound out loud, or is it more like a spontaneous idea that translates into sound? The only time I've actually heard sounds that weren't there was after meditating and having let myself fall into a hypnogogic state while still conscious. The voices I heard were indistinguishable from actual real voices (and just a hallucination as far as I could tell). But usually any kind of "extrasensory" perception for me has taken the form of spontaneous knowledge alone.

Originally posted by Hombre

Having read several authors who believed that children all start out with telepathic abilities but lose them later in life,

Actually this is only half true. We dont loose this telepathic abilities at any time of life.
As the telepaty is the property of the mind, and the brain is functioning at different frequencies
at the young stages of life, so are the childer the ones who can communicate easier with what you call telepathy.
We are forced to function at higher frequencied of the brain from the beginning of the kindergarten/school
so the brain learned to use the vocal communication method more than the telepathical.
Whats left over is what they now call intuition. Which female are a bit more into it than male.

But you can reactivate telepatical communication easily, just start functioning at the lower frequencies of the
brain more often (through meditation or daydreaming) and you will be soon able to do it again.

edit on 12/1/2013 by Hombre because: removing spelling errors

Yes, this is quite true. The powers of the mind cannot be taken away without damage to the brain. However, as we go on in life, we tend to forget that we know how to do these things, and so forget they even exist. This is the reason that children see ghosts more than adults do. But just as Hombre said, you can train yourself to "remember" how to do these things. It is the same with psionics, but that is in another thread.

Telepathy is something that all people know, but most just don't know they know.

Do I make any sense?

reply to post by VeritasAequitas


Oh, btw, VeritasAequitas, do you know the site Veritas? It's interesting, to say the least. A person like you would find it to be pretty good, considering the work you do.

I know I like it.

I have a 19 year old son, and for his first 6 years of life, he and I were inseparable, as there were no siblings yet. I was married, but we split a few times, so it was mostly me and my son alone. He and I, to this day, have some sort of telepathic connection. There have been many, many, many times where one of us thinks of something and the other reacts. Say I was going to ask him a question, he many times answers before I say it out loud, and vice versa. I don't know if this has to do with our close bonding when he was younger or what. He and I also share the ability to hear and see 'others'. He has recently been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and in regards to the symptoms, I too would 'qualify' for that diagnosis. It has often made me wonder if it is simply a diagnosis to appease society.

However, there are many times where I think something and others around me ask "What did you say?" when I had not spoken aloud. So I don't know if the bond with my son has influenced my 'awareness' or what...

reply to post by VegHead


Try it again, this time don't explain to them that its a game. Saying game to children is like saying ball to you dog. They become distracted. Its fine if your kid is doing something else, just make sure you spring it on them as if its not a game, just a quick question. Also ask them in a way that they think you can believe they can read your mind.

Its kinda like The Matrix movies where if your mind is free and unbound you can do anything. Same principal i believe applies to children or 'virgin' minds.

reply to post by AbandonedKid


vsociety.net...

This one?

reply to post by VeritasAequitas


YES!!! Thats it!

So you DO know of it!

Originally posted by Nanocyte
...
VegHead - I have a couple of ideas about what you wrote, but I don't want to bring them up as I don't want to unintentionally influence the results. After all, if your kids actually are seeing your thoughts, then anything going through your mind may be going through theirs. I do have a couple questions and ideas I'd like to put out now, though.

1) This may seem like a stupid question, but are you sure that your two-year old is familiar enough with a horse that she can differentiate it from a pig? If she is reading your thoughts, it think it might be reasonable to assume for now that that she must be able to map whatever she perceives in your mind to a definition of something she has defined in her mind. Is it possible that either your or her concept of a horse would have allowed for sufficient ambiguity for her to "guess" a pig? I'm not necessarily suggesting that that's the case, but it's one thing that occurs to me.

2) Another thing is the wording you used. I wonder if by using the word guess, which is an attempt to come to a correct answer with limited or no information, she might have "turned off" instead of just directly taking a look? Like closing her eyes to go along with the game? Also, if we are currently operating under the assumption that she is actually directly perceiving your thoughts and intentions, is it possible that choosing such wording might also indicate a certain mental expectation of uncertainty when you're asking the question. In the end, you know of course know your child better than I do, but I'm just pointing out a couple things that we may want to keep in mind given that even without a direct link to your mind, children naturally use their parents as a model of how to communicate with others and how to think.

3) Are there any television or other similar characters that she is fond of that you are also familiar enough with that you could conceptualize the character clearly enough for her to easily and specifically identify them? Perhaps that might be a good test, along with things that you and she are very familiar with, such as your car, etcetera if you choose to try this again.

Your four year old sounds like a very funny kid! Thanks for trying this out, and I'll post my other observations and thoughts after we have some more feedback on this thread. I don't want to inadvertently contaminate the results.

...

Thanks for your feedback. I'll try to respond to your questions here.

(1) That's not a stupid question at all. Two year olds vary quite a bit in what they know and can identify. I feel confident that she knows the difference between a pig and a horse. That doesn't mean that my abilities to visualize a horse are very strong, though. She might have been picking up on the farmyard concept. She might have been seeing the two big nostrils I associate with a horse that are also associated with a pig. Who knows. I do find it interesting that both my kids guessed an animal first, though.

(2) You make such an excellent point. I'll not use the word "guess" next time. I'll also try to pick a quieter time, when maybe she can close her eyes and be a bit more open. Maybe when she is about to take a nap? My four year old doesn't nap, but maybe before bedtime for him would be a good time to try. Just when we have some relaxed quiet time together.

(3) The kids don't watch much TV, but you gave me a good idea for my next test: Santa. He's pretty easy to visualize and the kids definitely know who he is. I'll use Santa for my next round of tests and let you guys know how it goes.



I hope there are some other parents of young kids here that can try this. I'm very curious to hear the results of others.

OK.... more soon.

I have a five year old and we tried it twice.

I was thinking of a yellow smiley face - she got purple balloon

I thought of a broom - she got phone.

She is a bright girl but no mind reader

Just thought I'd bump this to see if anyone who had previously posted had tried this again. Any results -- even if they were just misses -- could potentially provide useful information. And anyone else who is interested, please feel free to give it a try and post! If you don't want to provide a lengthy description, then a short bare-bones version will work.

Sorry to drop the ball! This thread has actually been on my mind, but my son got sick and as soon as he was better my daughter got sick. So I've been busy dealing with one of the more glamorous sides of motherhood this past week. I did ask them both what I was thinking and I was thinking of Santa - neither got it right. I didn't push it, though, because they were both tired and in sick-mode. I thought maybe being sick would have made them more "open" but maybe not. Haha!

Everyone is on the mend now and I'll let you all know when and if I try again. I hope some other share their results too!

I know my mom and I share a lot of "psychic" moments of the mundane variety - one thinking of the other and then the phone rings, that kind of thing. So I do think that there is a parent-child connection that extends beyond childhood. We are often on the same "wavelength".

reply to post by Nanocyte


Hi, this telepathy happens all the time to me with my 6 year old daughter and also my husband . I will try to make it happen and also try to note it down. They could be reading me like a book and i could be leaving my mind open. I have experienced real and intentional telepathy,but this person is not here anymore, they had a very strong mind. On the other hand some telepathy could be mistaken for habit, routine. I rekon this happens as much as the real deal . I will try and note down habit ones and unexplained ones . cheers1% Oh and when it happens its like you hear them but of course there is no sound.