It has happened to me very often that I am talking to somebody, I have never met the person before, and i think "this person will tell me the red car is his" and a second later he does tell me just what i thought! or that i am thinking about a hamburger and then somebody that has nothing to do with me screams "lets go eat a hamburger!". my point is how does this happen? it certainly is not that the person knows me or visa versa (although it may happen). it can be pure coinsidence, but come on, when it happens too much then there is gotta be a reason behind it.

i have read some articles and seen some tv documentaries about that thoughts are transimtted outside the brain. that people around us receive those thoughts in the subconscious. i actually do think there might be something like that going on... what do you guys think about it? any stories on it, or am i a freak...

Ah, telepathy, always an interesting topic.

Unfortunately, I cannot say with confidence that there is such a thing as telepathy and that it is not merely a string of strange coincidences. As far as I am aware, though, there are a few theories behind telepathy.

1. It's a hoax. Or wishful thinking. Or a string of lucky breaks.
If telepathy really did exist, perhaps those gifted with it to an extraordinary degree are few and far in between generations. Much worse, a lot of these telepaths are not completely in control of their "power". Thus, in the absence of 100% proof or a decisively conclusive objective experiment, certain people might be tempted to make the hasty judgment that telepathy is completely rubbish.

Analogously, though, there's something to be said for this theory. We have yet to see a planet's moon made of cheese. So... should we also consider that, somewhere out there, we might stumble upon a large cheddar sphere orbiting a much larger ham sphere? Should we suppose that, since we have not made a complete census of our cosmic neighborhood, we should grant that anything could be out there?

2. Telepathy is an illusion.
On the other hand, there are those who claim that telepathy is just some fancy name, coupled with wishful thinking, for perfectly mundane phenomena. Say, for example, you correctly guessed that your blind date, a person you, supposedly, have never seen before, drives the red car. It is quite possible that, days before, you have seen that person disembark from his/her car. You may not have paid him/her attention at the time because you may be busy chowing down a burger. Nonetheless, when you finally meet, you subconsciously remember the association between your blind date and his/her red car. You don't quite understand how you knew so you just wrote it of *bottom* "chance" or, more audaciously, "telepathy"

3. Telepathy is real.
Well, I'm pretty sure there are some people who believe we can achieve the feats of Charles Xavier, Jean Grey, Emma Frost or Psylocke. I really don't think I need to explain this Note, however, that this theory has so many sub-theories that I can't really list them all. You can ask your local alien specialist, conspiracy theorist, evolutionist, psychologist and medium for more details

alright, i've got a comment on this.

now first off, we are human beings, its possible we might have the capacity for telepathy. however i belive the cause for these common occurances have a far simpler explanation. the keyword here is factors. millions of factors come into play each and everyday of our lives, most go unnoticed. by being observant, very observant one can come to understand and veiw most of the more directly influential factors. to start, take notice of simple things and take note of why you do things the way you do? when it rains and you must go outside, do you rush outside imediately, or do you check the weather, grab a jacket and becareful of slipping as you walk? eventualy you begin to clearly see your habits, and why you have these habits. have you ever been about to do something and heard the voice of a parental figure in the back of your head, telling you how to do something right? this is another factor, one of the bigger influences on human life, upbringing. the method used to raise you, the culture you were initialy exposed to has a vast influence on the choises you make in your life. many people say that when a pregnant woman eats one type of food during her pregnancy her child will come to eat that same food often through out their lives. this is factorial influence.

now, so that you can see and practice this high level of observance of the world around you, im going to outline some of the experiences you had above with factors that once explained will remove some of the mystery about the experiences.

#1)
next time you have this sensation, look at the person that own this or that car or thing, think about what gives you the impulse that you might be correct. is the person possesed of a certain personality that would have him buy a red car? is the car of luxury status? does he seem like a person who can afford that car? some peopl in many cases surround themselves with things that express who they are, and it is no surprise when you are able to catch on to that.

#2


when looking at factors, you will see many reasons behind this sort of phenomenon. this happens with me and my riends all the time, we've known each other for nearly a century and our habits, thoughts and personalities have blended to the point that when we are all together we do no guess work at finding a funny joke to share, making conversation or finding food to eat that we ALL like. people who see this call us the 'unit'. and just like a family unit we have spent so much time together, been through soo much, that we know each other on a very deep level, one at which we could esily predict what we may want to eat. sometimes its a matter of taste, sometimes its convinece, but we often fin ourselves with the same idea, when we talk, we all bring up the same points. its creepy sometimes.

but now i think i should expound apon the final factor involved that makes this sort of phenomenon seem strange...

telepathy, is something that very cool, but in our daily lives we dont need it. if we did we woul develop it naturaly or artificialy. but our minds are amazing things, they are incredibly fast. and i beliv that is why it seems so strange that you you pick up on something that there is no way you could have known. right now, when you are alone, and you go to do something take notice of your internal dialouge. when going to grab cookies out of an oven do you say to yourself "man thats hot, i better grab some oven mittens" in most cases you might think something brief like "oven mit" or you might not think anythin to yourself at all. this same thing can happen with noticing all the factors that make up our world, you brain can operate so fast that your consious mind my remain unaware of it. and realy thats what makes things like those phenomenon seem so out of this world, or like some strange ability.

I'd say most of the time things like that are calculated guesses, based on the person, the enivornment, etc. But get it right enough times, and people think it's less of a coincidence.

Like at one point, I could guess what a friend was wearing (pink bikini) because it was a hot day, she said she'd been sunbathing, and I assumed it was pink 'coz it's generally a popular colour with girls.

Nothing that big

I think whats cool is when you're thinking of a song, and it plays next on your playlist Same thing though, it's just a coincidence. There's like a 1 in how-many-songs-there-are-on-the-playlist chance, so it's bound to happen.

think of it differently. Whan you think of something and it happens - you (and anyone else) say: "Wow! I just thought of that! I must be a crazy psycho and go to some stupid TV show and show them my awesome powers!" When it does not happen you either do not notice it, or do not want to notice it. Thus you fous on the time that this actually happens.

Now, consider another situation. You are a fortune teller. Or a "fortune teller", if you wish. You claim that 90% of your customers come back and say that what you told them was completely, or partially true. Let's see. Any human's fate can go 2 ways: good and bad. You have a 50/50 chance of guessing it right backed up by your intuition and/or knowledge of human psychology. You tell a person that this, this, and this is going to happen to them soon. This, this, and this being three most common good (or bad) things - falling in love, making money, marriage, or a desease, accident, relatives' death. You have a 50/50 chance of being right, since you listed such general things. If you are right - you are guaranteed that all the people you told the 'truth' to will come back and thank you. that is 5/10, since the chance of getting it is only 50%. The other 50% got all wrong. Or partially wrong. If it is partially right - they will come to you and tell it, so you can count it in your statistics. If it is all completely absolutely wrong - surprisingly not many people will come back and tell you that by thus admitting being idiots by wasting money on somebody who lied to them and being scorned by their friends, neighbors, etc. Thus you get about 8 people, whose predictions were right, 1 that is wrong, and 1 that did not show up because it was wrong. 8/9 is about 90%.

See my point? People tend to notice only what they want to notice.

Well we only use a certain percemtage of our brains so I would say mind reading is a possability if one knows how to acess that part of there brain.

Well this topic actually reminds me of something very very interesting known as the hundred monkey phenomenon.

Basically there was a big ol' set of island that were all dotted around somewhere in the sea. On each island there was 100 or so monkeys. This experiment was set up to monitor the behaviour of the monkey etc. They were far too far away to swim to the other islands and too far away for the monkeys cries to be heard from that kind of distance. All the was there was a couple of cameras set up on each island to monitor all of the monkeys.

Now the monkeys had food but not all that much of it. So they picked an island and sent down, via helicopter a big old bunch of dirty potatoes. Of course the monkeys got hold of the potatoes and realised it was filthy after trying to eat it. Then not eating it. One monkey however realised that if you take it down to the water and wash it. It becomes OK to eat. The other monkeys started watching this monkey, for arguments sakes let's call him Bobo. Bobo then kept ofing this as more and more potatoes were dropped onto his island. The other monkeys of course started catching onto this theory. They started taking potatoes down to the water and washing then eating.

Now here is where it gets very weird...

According to the research of these Japanese scientists, published in a book by Lyall Watson...

As soon as a critical number of monkeys knew every other monkey on all the other islands instantly knew about washing the potatoes.

Weird huh? I reckon it's probably a big load of horse defecation but if there is any truth to it... it's probably that the electrical impulses that tell your body to do things can be transmitted across the air. In other words, our thoughts could be sent off in all directions like a radio tower. Thus when a certain percentage of monkeys know about it the signal is strong enough for other monkeys to start picking up on it.

Think of it as if your trying to figure something out. And one of your friends or someone your with just goes "oh yeah I know it!" but doesn't tell you. I often find that I can kinda just twig straight away after. Like I just picked up their thought patterns...

I don't really believe it but it's a thought..

One of the topics we learning about in psychology is called "priming." In the example you cited about the red car, priming would be a factor because you were just thinking about the red car, so you were more likely to make the connection between the car you were just thinking about and the fact that this person may own it. I think that that is where a lot of the "telepathy" we experience stems from.

Also, we do have the ability to be "mind readers" in the sense that we can empathize with other humans. By looking at their facial expressions, posture, etc. and listening to how they are presenting themselves, our minds subconsciously reason about their emotional state and how they may perceive us or their situation. In this way, we get a sense of how they are thinking, even though we may not realize it. BBC's documentary "Brain Story" discusses this in more detail. It's really a fascinating show, if you ever get a chance to watch it.

So I think that we are "mind readers" in this sense. As for the fortune teller sense of the meaning, well, I think some of the previous comments summed it up rather well