HOW TO MAKE PEOPLE BELIEVE YOU HAVE ESP

https://slate.com/technology/2016/03/schizophrenia-and-subvocal-speech-why-people-with-schizophrenia-hear-the-voices-of-god-spies-and-supernatural-entities.html


The relevant passage is this: "Imagine you are standing in the lobby of an unfamiliar building, various unmarked corridors and elevator banks swimming all around you, and you scratch your head as you attempt to understand the directions in your hand that are supposed to lead you to the main conference room: “Proceed down the second hallway to the left, go through the double doors, and take Elevator C to the fifth floor, Suite 511.”

As you ponder which hallway is “second to the left,” and even begin to question the integrity of your navigational skills, you feel a tap on your shoulder. “Elevator C is down that way.” A friendly passer-by points you in the right direction. Apparently you were thinking so intently about the directions that you began mumbling them out loud. You intended for this mental dialogue to remain only in your mind, and yet you ended up broadcasting your thoughts to a complete stranger.

This phenomenon is called subvocal speech, and it happens all the time. Our brains process all language, even the private language in our minds, using its distinct linguistic regions and vast neural pathways that transmit instructions to the muscles of speech. Our thoughts turn into subvocal speech when that mechanism goes as far as to rouse those muscles to contract, even though that stimulation is usually too weak to generate a voice that anyone could actually hear."

Another interesting fact: Oliver Sacks wrote a book called The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat about weird neuro cases. One was a medical student who overdid it on the amphetamines a bit. For two weeks he could determine which of his patients was waiting in which clinic room from down the hall...by smell. (Bear in mind that the medical student actually could do this. Sacks wasn't questioning that. The phenomenon went away after a while.)

Stimulants amplify the perceptions, inducing effective hypersenses. Take enough of them and you also get auditory hallucinations, which are directly relevant to this discussion.

Another circumstance that amplifies perceptions that isn't speed is stress. One’s muscles contract, and one’s eyes dilate. One’s senses sharpen to the point of having hypersenses when fight-or-flight mode is triggered in the human animal. Also a medical fact. PTSD is an example of a constant stressor known to induce auditory hallucinations, as are various drugs.

Autists lack a sensory filter. Temple Grandin describes autists as having “privileged access to raw sensory data” in Animals in Translation.

Science fiction novels and short stories of the 1950s and 1960s, which were very often written by autistic men, posited various scientific, rational explanations for ESP experiences.

A trick common to pickup artists of the early 2000s (a demographic disproportionately composed of autistic men) was called “Locking On.” It was performed by mirroring other people subtly and closely, which required a few weeks of practice, and generally applied by moving subtly in the opposite directions from the movements of the person being mirrored. This application would reliably induce anxiety, due to the feeling of being stalked by a predator, something the human animal is wired to notice on a subliminal level. Once the fight-or-flight reflex was triggered in a man chatting with a woman the PUA was interested in, the PUA would hold the Lock until the man was noticably rattled, then approach the woman and commiseratingly say words to the effect of “You must make him super nervous, huh.”

Humans go into multiple trance states in an average day.  Trance states make people susceptible to suggestion. When recognition of a trance state in another person is coupled with a solid grasp of locking and subvocal speech as described above, it is simple to induce subliminal suggestion. If you are not subtle, the person locked will perceive an audible voice in their head. If you are sufficiently practiced at reading people and have a sufficiently autistic grasp of human social dynamics, it is simple to make others believe you are literally telepathic.

QED: This is how ESP works in practice. We all have the hardware, but it’s rare to configure the software. I’m not sticking around to argue whether it’s “real ESP” or a simulation, because to my mind, it doesn’t matter what the cause is if the effect is real.

And if you don’t believe me, feel free to give it a try.  :-)