Although the exercises in this book are sort of cool, I have to say that there is still no real scientific evidence for telepathy. A lot of people still have basic misconceptions about how the brain works, something we've learned quite a bit about over the last 50 years. So although I'd like to believe in ESP powers myself, I have to say that everything we've learned about the brain so far contradicts that. So I'd like to discuss that a bit. Some of this is going to get a little technical, so I apologize in advance for that.

One reason ESP powers like telepathy seem plausible to many people is the popular misconception that the brain is electrical in nature and generates electricity, and could possibly create something similar to radio-frequency waves that might be able to traverse long distances and could serve as the underlying mechanism for the remote transmission of thoughts, basically similar to radio. It seems plausible at first. If the brain generates electricity, why not electrical waves, too, which could serve telepathic transmission?

Unfortunately, this is not the case. As usual in our universe, the devil is in the scientific details. The brain really doesn't generate electricity in the same way that a generator creates electricity . Neurons don't actually conduct electricity--the voltage difference produced by a nerve cell occurs because of a self-propagating reversal of negativity along the nerve axon mediated by the movement of ions across the semi-permeable nerve membrane. This reversal of negativity propagates down the nerve to the synapse, where it becomes even more chemical in nature--again, not the stuff that telepathy is made of. But again, there is no actual conduction of electricity, and nothing like RF waves is being generated.

There are other reasons why the RF model doesn't work very well here. Even if radio waves were being created, the impedance of a human skull is several megohms--and human nerve cells only generate about 70 millivolts of potential. Even if it were in the form of an electrical wave (which is isn't, as I've said), it wouldn't make it past the impedance barrier of the skull. The only reason EEG's and similar measuring devices work is because they have very costly amplifiers capable of amplifying the signals thousands of times so they can be detected and displayed, not to mention the fact that the pickup electrodes are resting on a shaved patch of skull--not hundreds or thousands of miles away.

But the biggest problem with the RF theory is the bandwidth allocation problem. The human brain has 60 trillion nerve cells and 14,000 major and minor brain centers. Suppose each of them had the ability to send and receive RF type transmissions. If they all used wireless transmission it would require 14,000 separate channels to handle all the communication requirements, again, something the brain doesn't do because nerve cells have insufficient bandwidth to accommodate 1/10,000th of the total bandwidth required. The maximum frequency bandwidth of a neuron is 1000 Hz. Dividing 1000 by 14,000 gives you .07 Hz per channel--which is a physical impossibility, since you can't have fractional RF carrier waves. This is another example where you have to be very careful about applying the usual electrical engineering concepts to the brain.

There are other problems with the mechanism behind telepathy--such as how would your brain direct it or aim it? Broadcasting it would be extremely inefficient, and as I've pointed out, your brain isn't exactly a powerhouse in this regard. Also, how would the signals be filtered and picked up from all the other RF noise on the planet, especially, since, as I've said, they would be infinitesimally faint?

Of course, you could postulate there is some undiscovered energy the brain is using that hasn't been discovered yet, but then, there is no scientific evidence that this is the case and we're back to unsupported speculation, not rational science. If the proponents of telepathy and the like want to believe in it, that's fine, but what is the possible neural mechanism behind it?

There are other reasons why the brain never evolved telepathy, such as the fact that it had enough trouble evolving the neural machinery for language communication, and the possibility that it would have evolved another, even more mysterious form of communication, is extremely unlikely. When the brain has already evolved one solution for something, it doesn't develop another. It's too expensive and costly, and you only have a finite amount of neurons. And I suspect the neural machinery to support something like telepathy would be far more complex and take up far more space than the neural substrates for language.

I hope I didn't bore everyone too much with some of the technical brain details here (well, I probably did). Personally, I too would love to believe in something like telepathy. It would just be too cool if the human brain could do that. But everything we've ever learned about the brain says it just ain't so.

As someone once said, God is a mathematician, and so the universe works along well-defined mathematical and physical laws--rather than as mystics, poets, romantics and so on--would have liked.

I would normally give this book one star, but I give it two stars since the author is at least trying to provide something constructive, and as I said, I still keep an open mind on the subject. But basically, people need to learn a lot more about all this so as not to be so gullible about the great-sounding but still pseudoscientific nonsense that is all too common in this area.

Be Psychic Now has great exercizes for increasing your psychic powers and for running your brain. I originally checked this book out from the library, but I found it so full of good ideas, I had to buy it and add it to my library. The exercizes in this book are definately improving my life!! Good book

This was a good read and the book had me trying the exercises in all of my spare time. You will see results with this book. I would also recommend an older book that was mentioned in this book, The Silva Mind Control Method.