Scientists have sent a mental message from one person to another 4,000 miles away in the world’s first successful telepathy experiment.

They connected one person in India to a sensitive headset linked to the internet and another to a similar device in Paris.

When the first person thought of a simple greeting like “Hello”, the recipient in France was aware of the thought.

The subject receiving the message could not see the word itself but could correctly report flashes of light in peripheral vision that corresponded to the exact moment the word “Hello” was thought.
The ground-breaking experiment, after 10 years’ work on the subject, was carried out by a team lead by scientists from America’s Harvard University.


Physicist Giulio Ruffini, co-author of the research, said: “It’s a kind of technological realisation of the dream of telepathy but it is definitely not magical.

“We are using technology to interact electromagnetically with the brain.”

Co-author Alvaro Pascual-Leone added: “We wanted to find if we could communicate directly between two people by reading brain activity from one and injecting it into the second, across great distances, by using existing pathways.

“One such pathway is, of course, the Internet, so our question became, ‘Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of Internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France?’”
Dr Ruffini added: “We hope in the longer term this could radically change the way we communicate with each other.”