LogicMania

I'm curious. Is it conceivable for organisms to acquire the characteristic of sending and receiving electromagnetic radiation as a kind of communication? Can radiowaves or any form of em radiation induce electric potentials in neurons?

Perhaps neurons could be arranged in a way that they could send pulses of em radiation that could be interpreted by other organisms? I'm not implying that telepathy is a reality right now I'm just wondering about the possibility of it in organic beings. I'd appreciate your comments.

Coragyps

Phrased like that, at least, they do it all the time. Sharks, many (well at least some) other fish, and platypuses all have organs to sense electrical signals, I presume from the plain old day-to-day operation of other organisms' neurons. Electric eels and their kin carry the sending half of such communication to sort of extremes: "Zap! fish, you're dinner!" Now whether there is any real analogy between this sort of communication and a telepathy-like communication of thoughts, I couldn't say. But I'd be pretty agnostic as to the possibility.

NeilUnreal

The fact that we don't see ubiquitous telepathy* is probably a good indication that it can't exist. If it were possible, it should have arisen multiple times and developed to a high degree. Of course it may be available to organisms in such a weak form that there is little selection pressure in its favor (which is probably the case with biological electromagnetic communication -- other than vision, of course).

-Neil

*i.e. Communication that violates what is currently known about electromagnetics, relavity, and QM.

[ June 05, 2002: Message edited by: NeilUnreal ]</p>

JoshuaT

Fireflies produce pulses of EM (light) that are detected by other fireflies. These signals are used to find mates, and thus have an obvious selective advantage.

liquid

Yes, you have to be careful here. We are all mind readers, in the sense that someone can transmit thoughts, perhaps by speaking or making an expression, touching or possibly even making a scent, and they can be received by our senses. And all of these at some level are influenced by electromagnetics.

Of course, we don't see this as telepathy, for a couple of reasons:

1. It's so ordinary

2. The 'message' is passed through areas exterior to our mind (such as nerves, light and so on).

3. People can lie with their signals, and for some reason we seem to assume that wouldn't happen over telepathy.

By looking at number 2, you realise that for something to be actually considered telepathy, it's going to have to go mind to mind with no intermediary. And of course, it doesn't, because our brains cannot transmit or receive without a change to their structure.

And that change would produce something just like an eye, or a nerver, or in the case of radio, an antenna, transmitter and receiver. And that's not mind to mind, it's just the equivalent of another sensory organ. So if we had one we wouldn't consider it telepathy.

As Nealunreal stated, for something to be telepathy as we imagine it, you would have to do something that breaks the laws of nature, and of course that doesn't happen. And any natural distance communication (which is eminently possible) is, perhaps incorrectly, not regarded as telepathy.

Oolon Colluphid

Bugger! Beat me to it!

Light is electromagnetic radiation. And it's used to send (bioluminescence) as well as receive. We have EM detectors that are pretty finely adjusted, called 'eyes'. ;P

IOW, we know a lot about EM radiation, and telepathy isn't involved. Telepathy is also very likely impossible anyway: see Nicholas Humphrey's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387987207/qid=1023378470/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-2848791-7135223" target="_blank">Leaps of Faith</a> (aka Soul Searching in the UK).

Cheers, Oolon

bluefugue

Good post, liquid... you really broke down the semantical problems in the question.

Incidentally, not that this is an evolutionary likelihood, but if you were to "hard wire" a neuron cable from one brain to another, might the result be some sort of telepathy? I wonder how that would feel to the recipients...

liquid

Thanks Iesus...

Actually, surprised you understood it! Currently rushing all my posts because I am in exams at the moment (wanting to get round to building a proper profile too!)

LogicMania

Thank you all for your responses. They were very wortwhile.

Really, what I was just getting at was that if, assuming that, organic matter could give off radiowaves, then perhaps evolution could have taken advantage of this. I suppose it did not have to since organisms already evolved to adapt to the usage of visible light. But if it had to use radiowaves, would it have? I was also thinking that if the brain evolved and specialized at the transmission and reception of radiowaves, then communication that would seem telepathic like would have occured. Of course I don't think that would keep intelligent organisms from lying even if they could broadcast their neuronal signals via radiowaves. Just like we could control what we convey through speech, they could control what they convey through radiotransmission.

I'm not really so much aware of the ability of organic matter to transmit radiowaves nor am I aware of how much power it would require to make a meaingful communication out of such an emr frequency. Radiowaves have such a long wavelength and probably could not affect matter on such a small scale to produce any influence.

KC

Even if this emission was occurring, there is always the problem of sifting through all of the emissions in order to make sense of any of it.

Cheers,

KC