Try this with a friend: While you sit side-by-side in a theater, auditorium, or church, stare at the head of someone seated in front of you. Just stare and concentrate on the words “turn around.” Make no audible sound (possibly impossible, since breathing and squiggling often go unnoticed by either breather or squiggler, yet are observed by others). What will you observe? Walla! The person seated in front of you will turn his head, not necessarily all the way, but sufficiently noticeably so. Why? Do you think telepathy plays a role? Do eyes exude a force? Or is the turning just a response to the noise of barely perceptible breathing and squiggling?
I wish I knew the answer. As teens, my friends and I used to try such staring on occasion, always with success, sometimes with a complete head turnaround. Was the Force with us? Were we budding Jedi? If so, such Jedi status took no special training other than sitting still and concentrating a bit (that, in itself, is remarkable for normally fidgety teenagers). Was there a power in our eyes, something like Superman’s X-ray vision? (Don’t worry, no head ever burst into flames spontaneously while we stared—in fact, no human was hurt during the course of these experiments, as the disclaimer goes)
Consider this title: “Scientists Demonstrate Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans.”* Were my teenage friends and I way ahead of the neuroscience curve? Should we have published? Alas, it was a game to us though we recognized its experimental nature. Who knew there was fame and fortune awaiting? Shoot! Another missed opportunity. (Another? Is my life the Sum over Missed Opportunities? Pay attention, Donald. Your mind is wandering in wondering about a road not taken, and you are losing your connection to your reader)
Okay. I’m back. Connecting minds just by gazing seems to be nothing unusual in light of flirting with or threatening another person. What’s that typical response of the angry street thug in the movies? “Hey, you lookin’ at me? What are you starin’ at.” Such “lookin” is eye-to-eye communication. Staring at the back of someone’s head is a different matter. It’s done without gesture or voice, scribbles or art, with not even a smoke signal from a distant mountain or the staccato of Morse Code. Yet, communicating without the normally associated physical actions or objects still seems possible to me in light of my own teenage experiences. I think my friends and I somehow linked to another brain. Or, should I say another “mind”? And we did so without eye contact or language. Is language the eye that simultaneously projects mind and serves as connector? Certainly, it exudes influence over others! I say; someone else acts. That’s control, isn’t it? That’s a connection.
Language obviously connects us. You could be thousands of miles from me yet connected through this essay, the product of my mind. You and I are separated not only by space but also by time because you read here a final draft (unless you’ve hacked into my computer as I wrote). Somehow our minds merge in these words, not necessarily in agreement, but nevertheless in a connection centering on a common set of thoughts. Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Vergil, Augustine, Descartes, and authors too numerous to mention entered my mind as I have temporarily entered yours. There’s no hubris here. I’m not saying that I’m the equal of those I’ve mentioned. But I have at least at your present moment and not at mine, entered your mind. You have control of the remote, but as you channel surfed past this essay, you paused briefly enough for some flash of my mind to spark thoughts in yours. You briefly turned your head to look.
Have you ever experienced a simultaneity of thought with a friend or lover? “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” you asked. No need for a verbal response. Both of you understood. Your experience was not unusual. Lots of people have had such experiences, like finishing sentences started by someone else.
Of course, such sentence-finishing might be a simple artifact of known idiom and not an indication of some mind meld. Given the repetitive nature of our sentence structure and word use, we might easily surmise certain types of phrases, clauses, words, and even entire thoughts that someone is about to express. Given our common experiences, we might simply state the obvious. You might not, as Heraclitus wrote, be able to put your foot in the same … twice, but stepping in a … isn’t beyond either common experience or common imagery. There! How’d you know what I wanted to say? Are you telepathic? Or are you just familiar with “river” as a commonly known part of the Heraclitean expression explaining a world of change that has now become cliché? Or what of the expression, “She’s the apple of my ….” Every language has its idiomatic expressions and ways of expressing common thinking. I don’t want you to think I’m hatching a wind egg here, or, as the Germans say, ein Windei ausbrüten, that is, doing something pointless or chasing rainbows with my references to clichés in an essay on the subject of connecting brains and minds. Every culture has its idioms; but all of humanity shares clichés that serve as universal connectors. How many ways can we say we live in an ever-changing world? That Heraclitean metaphor works around the world.
That we share common expressions in any culture begs the question about what we know, how we come to know it, and how we convey our knowledge to others. Is the bulk of our knowledge expressible in clichés? Are the majority of our expressions ultimately clichés? If so, there’s no telepathy involved in finishing someone else’s thought, no surprising connection of minds (or brains). We finish another’s sentence because there are only so many directions the sentence could go, and we’ve heard most of those sentence endings multiple times. We are immersed in clichés and connected by both verbal and nonverbal language. Do you want to know how to get the park? I’ll simply point. And then there’s the matter of context. Given knowledge about a speaker’s personality, interests, present circumstances, and topic at hand, what else could come out of the mouth beyond the words and expressions we mutually share in a specific culture?
So, what about that Superman/Star Wars Force stuff? Do the eyes “have it”? In eye-to-eye or face-to-face contact, we know others’ thoughts by their gaze. “He looked menacing”; “I could tell she was happy by the gleam in her eyes”; “There was a hint of suspicion in that look”; “I thought I could read her, but she could look you straight in the eye and lie convincingly.” Those and other expressions come from a common verbal storehouse whose use depends on the importance we assign to eyes and “looks.” “Gaze is a powerful element of social interaction,” writes Robert Martone, who also notes, “Belief in the power of gaze appears in stories and myths throughout the centuries” and “…researchers found that subjects associate gaze with a physical force.”** Ah! The power of a stare, especially when it asks, “What do you want?” I’m reminded of the ABBA song “Voulez-Vous”:
People everywhere
A sense of expectation hanging in the air;
Giving out a spark
Across the room your eyes are glowing in the dark…
Could ABBA have been onto something with glowing eyes that give out a spark? They do that in the bar scene, but…
But that staring at the back of the head experiment in an auditorium still suggests a mystery. Even if the eyes emit a “spark,” the subject can’t see it. If there’s no physical way for the person to know that two people are staring at the back of his head, why does he turn? Is there really power in the gaze alone? I reiterate, this isn’t a matter of reading the eyes. The center of vision might be seated in the back of the brain, but both the brain and skull block a rear view.
Brain-to-brain communication rightly falls under the purview of science and technology. Brains are obviously physical objects, so they lend themselves to falsifiable investigations. But then there’s the mind, that which we associate with the brain but that we can’t exclusively assign to the brain’s activities without consideration of that which houses the brain, that is, a body in which resides a character with experience, knowledge, and personality. Each of us is more than a brain. Rather than say, “Each of us has a mind,” I prefer to say existentially, “Each of us is a mind.” And because of unknown variables, we really can’t put minds to the same kinds of scientific tests to which we put brains though we can determine associations among mental states and between thinking and emoting and neurons. We’re close to understanding brains, but it is mind that understands or fails to understand. Sure, I can run wires between the heads of two mice or put a WiFi chip in a human brain, but how do I physically connect two minds?
Neuroscientists have done yeoman’s work in linking and then studying networked brains that exhibit some common mental states and thinking. Viewing fMRIs of brains in action, they can link types of thinking to types and areas of brain activities, but mind remains largely elusive though one can find peer-reviewed journal articles on the subject.
Where, we must ask, is the place where staring at the back of a head while thinking, “Turn around” meet and connect to the brain or mind of another? Does the juncture lie somewhere between the gazers and the gazed-upon? Does it lie inside the gazed-upon’s head, the skull having somehow been penetrated by the gazing? Should we even use the word juncture or place? My teen friends and I envisioned that our minds met the mind of our subject “somewhere out there,” that is, somewhere outside our skulls. We assigned a “place” to the mind; our minds met the subject’s mind in the space between his and our brains, and definitely, we thought, outside our bodies. Did we have the kind of “out-of-body-experience” that one hears stories of and ascribes to mere aberrations in brain chemistry? Some product of neurotransmitters gone wrong? But then, what are the chances that such aberrations occur coincidentally in separate brains? Could two teenagers prime their brains by suggesting they run an experiment with the priming itself serving as an open floodgate through which neurotransmitters flow in two brains and the brain of the subject simultaneously? But the gazed-upon is always a necessarily unwilling participant. So, how does that brain chemistry work?
Obviously, there was no science in our experimenting. Our results, seeming to us to be invariably the same and repeatable as all science should be repeatable, might have been coincidence in associated experiments run without proper controls and with neither randomness nor numbers sufficient for statistical significance. And maybe my memory has faded. Were there times when the person in front of us never turned? Probably. Yet, I would suggest that if you and I sat side-by-side today in a room with seats in rows, we could, given that we might remove all the distractions of our lives, cause someone sitting in front of us to turn around, simply as a product of our staring at the back of his head and thinking, “Turn around.”
As we enter an age when some people will choose to have brain implants that connect them to some hackable server or to the brain of another person as in The Matrix or Star Trek’s Borg Collective, we might consider that such connections have long been a product of human interactions. If you sense that you are being watched, you might be right. Where that “sensing” takes place is supposedly the networked brain or mind; yet, without some physical mechanism identifiable through experimentation, the “place” remains a mystery.
We know we are more than brain. But how much more? Enough to connect mysteriously? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
*Martone, Robert. 29 Oct 2019. Online at Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-demonstrate-direct-brain-to-brain-communication-in-humans/ Accessed December 30, 2020. Of course, there are experiments ongoing to link brains via technology, but I’m not addressing electrical connections unless some quantum tunneling occurs between skulls. This little essay isn’t about a physical interface; such interfacing has been accomplished. There’s no physically invasive procedure involved in staring at the back of a head.
**Martone, Robert. 29 Dec. 2020. When Our Gaze Is a Physical Force. Online at Scientific American:https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-our-gaze-is-a-physical-force/ Accessed January 1, 2021.
I wish I knew the answer. As teens, my friends and I used to try such staring on occasion, always with success, sometimes with a complete head turnaround. Was the Force with us? Were we budding Jedi? If so, such Jedi status took no special training other than sitting still and concentrating a bit (that, in itself, is remarkable for normally fidgety teenagers). Was there a power in our eyes, something like Superman’s X-ray vision? (Don’t worry, no head ever burst into flames spontaneously while we stared—in fact, no human was hurt during the course of these experiments, as the disclaimer goes)
Consider this title: “Scientists Demonstrate Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans.”* Were my teenage friends and I way ahead of the neuroscience curve? Should we have published? Alas, it was a game to us though we recognized its experimental nature. Who knew there was fame and fortune awaiting? Shoot! Another missed opportunity. (Another? Is my life the Sum over Missed Opportunities? Pay attention, Donald. Your mind is wandering in wondering about a road not taken, and you are losing your connection to your reader)
Okay. I’m back. Connecting minds just by gazing seems to be nothing unusual in light of flirting with or threatening another person. What’s that typical response of the angry street thug in the movies? “Hey, you lookin’ at me? What are you starin’ at.” Such “lookin” is eye-to-eye communication. Staring at the back of someone’s head is a different matter. It’s done without gesture or voice, scribbles or art, with not even a smoke signal from a distant mountain or the staccato of Morse Code. Yet, communicating without the normally associated physical actions or objects still seems possible to me in light of my own teenage experiences. I think my friends and I somehow linked to another brain. Or, should I say another “mind”? And we did so without eye contact or language. Is language the eye that simultaneously projects mind and serves as connector? Certainly, it exudes influence over others! I say; someone else acts. That’s control, isn’t it? That’s a connection.
Language obviously connects us. You could be thousands of miles from me yet connected through this essay, the product of my mind. You and I are separated not only by space but also by time because you read here a final draft (unless you’ve hacked into my computer as I wrote). Somehow our minds merge in these words, not necessarily in agreement, but nevertheless in a connection centering on a common set of thoughts. Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Vergil, Augustine, Descartes, and authors too numerous to mention entered my mind as I have temporarily entered yours. There’s no hubris here. I’m not saying that I’m the equal of those I’ve mentioned. But I have at least at your present moment and not at mine, entered your mind. You have control of the remote, but as you channel surfed past this essay, you paused briefly enough for some flash of my mind to spark thoughts in yours. You briefly turned your head to look.
Have you ever experienced a simultaneity of thought with a friend or lover? “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” you asked. No need for a verbal response. Both of you understood. Your experience was not unusual. Lots of people have had such experiences, like finishing sentences started by someone else.
Of course, such sentence-finishing might be a simple artifact of known idiom and not an indication of some mind meld. Given the repetitive nature of our sentence structure and word use, we might easily surmise certain types of phrases, clauses, words, and even entire thoughts that someone is about to express. Given our common experiences, we might simply state the obvious. You might not, as Heraclitus wrote, be able to put your foot in the same … twice, but stepping in a … isn’t beyond either common experience or common imagery. There! How’d you know what I wanted to say? Are you telepathic? Or are you just familiar with “river” as a commonly known part of the Heraclitean expression explaining a world of change that has now become cliché? Or what of the expression, “She’s the apple of my ….” Every language has its idiomatic expressions and ways of expressing common thinking. I don’t want you to think I’m hatching a wind egg here, or, as the Germans say, ein Windei ausbrüten, that is, doing something pointless or chasing rainbows with my references to clichés in an essay on the subject of connecting brains and minds. Every culture has its idioms; but all of humanity shares clichés that serve as universal connectors. How many ways can we say we live in an ever-changing world? That Heraclitean metaphor works around the world.
That we share common expressions in any culture begs the question about what we know, how we come to know it, and how we convey our knowledge to others. Is the bulk of our knowledge expressible in clichés? Are the majority of our expressions ultimately clichés? If so, there’s no telepathy involved in finishing someone else’s thought, no surprising connection of minds (or brains). We finish another’s sentence because there are only so many directions the sentence could go, and we’ve heard most of those sentence endings multiple times. We are immersed in clichés and connected by both verbal and nonverbal language. Do you want to know how to get the park? I’ll simply point. And then there’s the matter of context. Given knowledge about a speaker’s personality, interests, present circumstances, and topic at hand, what else could come out of the mouth beyond the words and expressions we mutually share in a specific culture?
So, what about that Superman/Star Wars Force stuff? Do the eyes “have it”? In eye-to-eye or face-to-face contact, we know others’ thoughts by their gaze. “He looked menacing”; “I could tell she was happy by the gleam in her eyes”; “There was a hint of suspicion in that look”; “I thought I could read her, but she could look you straight in the eye and lie convincingly.” Those and other expressions come from a common verbal storehouse whose use depends on the importance we assign to eyes and “looks.” “Gaze is a powerful element of social interaction,” writes Robert Martone, who also notes, “Belief in the power of gaze appears in stories and myths throughout the centuries” and “…researchers found that subjects associate gaze with a physical force.”** Ah! The power of a stare, especially when it asks, “What do you want?” I’m reminded of the ABBA song “Voulez-Vous”:
People everywhere
A sense of expectation hanging in the air;
Giving out a spark
Across the room your eyes are glowing in the dark…
Could ABBA have been onto something with glowing eyes that give out a spark? They do that in the bar scene, but…
But that staring at the back of the head experiment in an auditorium still suggests a mystery. Even if the eyes emit a “spark,” the subject can’t see it. If there’s no physical way for the person to know that two people are staring at the back of his head, why does he turn? Is there really power in the gaze alone? I reiterate, this isn’t a matter of reading the eyes. The center of vision might be seated in the back of the brain, but both the brain and skull block a rear view.
Brain-to-brain communication rightly falls under the purview of science and technology. Brains are obviously physical objects, so they lend themselves to falsifiable investigations. But then there’s the mind, that which we associate with the brain but that we can’t exclusively assign to the brain’s activities without consideration of that which houses the brain, that is, a body in which resides a character with experience, knowledge, and personality. Each of us is more than a brain. Rather than say, “Each of us has a mind,” I prefer to say existentially, “Each of us is a mind.” And because of unknown variables, we really can’t put minds to the same kinds of scientific tests to which we put brains though we can determine associations among mental states and between thinking and emoting and neurons. We’re close to understanding brains, but it is mind that understands or fails to understand. Sure, I can run wires between the heads of two mice or put a WiFi chip in a human brain, but how do I physically connect two minds?
Neuroscientists have done yeoman’s work in linking and then studying networked brains that exhibit some common mental states and thinking. Viewing fMRIs of brains in action, they can link types of thinking to types and areas of brain activities, but mind remains largely elusive though one can find peer-reviewed journal articles on the subject.
Where, we must ask, is the place where staring at the back of a head while thinking, “Turn around” meet and connect to the brain or mind of another? Does the juncture lie somewhere between the gazers and the gazed-upon? Does it lie inside the gazed-upon’s head, the skull having somehow been penetrated by the gazing? Should we even use the word juncture or place? My teen friends and I envisioned that our minds met the mind of our subject “somewhere out there,” that is, somewhere outside our skulls. We assigned a “place” to the mind; our minds met the subject’s mind in the space between his and our brains, and definitely, we thought, outside our bodies. Did we have the kind of “out-of-body-experience” that one hears stories of and ascribes to mere aberrations in brain chemistry? Some product of neurotransmitters gone wrong? But then, what are the chances that such aberrations occur coincidentally in separate brains? Could two teenagers prime their brains by suggesting they run an experiment with the priming itself serving as an open floodgate through which neurotransmitters flow in two brains and the brain of the subject simultaneously? But the gazed-upon is always a necessarily unwilling participant. So, how does that brain chemistry work?
Obviously, there was no science in our experimenting. Our results, seeming to us to be invariably the same and repeatable as all science should be repeatable, might have been coincidence in associated experiments run without proper controls and with neither randomness nor numbers sufficient for statistical significance. And maybe my memory has faded. Were there times when the person in front of us never turned? Probably. Yet, I would suggest that if you and I sat side-by-side today in a room with seats in rows, we could, given that we might remove all the distractions of our lives, cause someone sitting in front of us to turn around, simply as a product of our staring at the back of his head and thinking, “Turn around.”
As we enter an age when some people will choose to have brain implants that connect them to some hackable server or to the brain of another person as in The Matrix or Star Trek’s Borg Collective, we might consider that such connections have long been a product of human interactions. If you sense that you are being watched, you might be right. Where that “sensing” takes place is supposedly the networked brain or mind; yet, without some physical mechanism identifiable through experimentation, the “place” remains a mystery.
We know we are more than brain. But how much more? Enough to connect mysteriously? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
*Martone, Robert. 29 Oct 2019. Online at Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-demonstrate-direct-brain-to-brain-communication-in-humans/ Accessed December 30, 2020. Of course, there are experiments ongoing to link brains via technology, but I’m not addressing electrical connections unless some quantum tunneling occurs between skulls. This little essay isn’t about a physical interface; such interfacing has been accomplished. There’s no physically invasive procedure involved in staring at the back of a head.
**Martone, Robert. 29 Dec. 2020. When Our Gaze Is a Physical Force. Online at Scientific American:https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-our-gaze-is-a-physical-force/ Accessed January 1, 2021.
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