How Psychics Can Read Your Mind, or Transmit Thoughts

Thirty years ago, Uri Gellar appeared on the TV program Beyond Belief and told us he was going to transmit a thought from his brain to the television audience. The screen showed four symbols: square, star, circle, and cross. He stared at the screen, transmitting his selection from among the symbols. Then the audience called in to register the symbol he had transmitted. Of 70,000 calls, 47% percent chose the star. That's almost twice the 25% that would have resulted from random chance. It must have been telepathy!

But that wasn't it at all, because symbols and numbers are neither equal nor random in the human mind. The answer was always going to be the star. Your two-year-old will gravitate to a star among random symbols (or at least mine did). This is a phenomenon called population stereotypes, and professional psychics know what answers will be most prevalent when they ask to you to, say, guess a number between one and ten (it will be seven). Read about this phenomena and how it is used to demonstrate psychic abilities at Big Think.

(Image credit: Francis Wickware)