[Yeah I think this is more fitting in the research area] I need some information on how you can get psychic abilities. I wanted to know if you could gain psychic abilities by training the brain or something. So I need to know, is it true that we only use roughly 30% of our brain? And if so could it be possible to condition the mind to use just a little more juice to gain psychic abilities? Can the brain be condition by just doing everyday things such as watching television or typing on a computer? [Thankies for all the help...and sorry even I don't know where some of my threads should go. So sorry if this is in the wrong place.]
well, it is true that we use a tiny amount of our brains' true capacity, and we can train our minds to use more of our capacity and so notice more like body language tone and everything and you can sort of tell what people may be about to do...but scientifically as far as I know it is impossible for a human to have true 'psychic' abilities. Well, if you want to know how to get a sort of psychic abilities then watch Derran Brown's shows, they are all about mind tricks and stuff...one I can remember to do with the mind is that with a couple of hours training you can absorb facts from a book without reading it - just by dragging your hand over a book from top to bottom and the guy came second in a very intellectual pub quiz and he was on his own and not very intelligent...
Well I am inspired to write a cyberpunk novel. So I really wanted powers like thoughtform and pryokeneisis
If you create your story with the appropriate physics and create a culture that already understands the deeper recesses of the brain, then yes, psychic abilities can be learned. However, without a society that already taps into the infinite power of the brain - more than our real society does now - your character will need to have some sort event happen that causes him to be able to access the unknown neurological portions of his mind, thus making him an extraordinary character compared to the rest of the world. Also, if you set the plot in the real world, you'll need to be bound by real world physics to make it believable. Consider - to be psychic (I am defining this as the ability to see future events and actions, not to actually travel bodily to the future) one must be able to send some sort of mental power (not the actual brain) into the future, which means traveling faster than the speed of light. So you've got intangible mentals powers trying to mesh with the tangible - physical travel. So psychic ability goes from a mental capability to the physical ability to project your mind or brainwaves faster than the speed of light. Now, this is of course assuming that the speed of light theory applies to the future as well as the past, which it doesn't in the real world. In an alternative world, it certainly could.
Thank you JWilder. Though my MC won't have the abilities. It's a futuristic science experiment. Scientist have noticed individuals who were born with more usage of the brain and somehow they were able to condition their mind to accept this extra usage, through watching television and what not. Though I don't know how to make that sound any scientific. And I think I should research more on that. My MC is one of the security people making sure no intruders get in and no psychics get out.
Oh, I was just thinking...couldn't a character become psychich by falling into a vat of brain fluid? Like whatshisname and like cannibals (you eat brain to get their intelligence...) mixed together into one awesome ripoff!! Lol...
How are psychic powers cyberpunk? You could go with some form of technological enhancement in leu of a sort of mental training. Genetic enhancement using alien or heigh technology? Oh.: maybe Rosewell aliens had psychic powers and the US government uses gene-splicing to get the ability into humans! Cybernetic enhancement? Achieving enlightenment maybe? The possibilities are everywhere. Just pick one you like best or that best fits what your trying to do.
Well I was inspired by Akira. And I thought we always write a story about someone coming in on a private secret, you know a government experiment and what not. Why don't we have a story about someone who is in one of these private secret experiments, who wants out. It's set in a dystopian near future, and I have always this awesomeness.
If you are going to go the more sciencie route and go through the trouble of explaining how the person manages to train themselves into these powers, then the astute reader is going to ask of you, the author, that you also explain the manner in which these powers work. The brain is an awesome thing, but does it have the hardware needed to receive and send signals extra-corporeally? If telekinesis is the power in question, what is the force that the mind will produce to actually move the object?
Depends what you mean by psychic abilities... telekinesis? Clairvoyance? Visions? For, dare i say it, "magical" things like that, i dont think you could really scientifically justify them at all with anything we know today. If it even is possible that simply having more brainpower could allow such things (and personally i believe it definitely is not), the understanding of how that could happen isnt around today, so anything you write would basically just have to be accepted by the reader in the same way we accept Harry Potter is a wizard, etc. If you mean hypnosis and mind tricks like Derren Brown does, then you could maybe realistically say that in the future (if it is the real world) a lot of people have been trained to use tricks like that at a much more advanced level... though i dont think realistically they could be taken to the same levels in power and usefulness as the "psychic abilities" most people are familiar with in fiction. I do suggest looking into things like Derren Brown if you are trying to portray extraordinary yet realistic things that people might be able to do with their minds, though i am sure he is only the tip of the iceberg on that subject. As for the brain thing... i dont claim to be an expert, but from the little i do know, i think that the whole "Do you know you only use X % (seriously the number is different every time) of your brain? Imagine what we could do if we used 100%!" is merely a motivational speech based on misrepresented or misunderstood facts. In fact i remember reading very recentlythat most normal people use near enough all of their brain throughout their lives, and that the common idea that we dont comes from the fact that only a small amount of the brain can be doing its thing at a given time because if every neuron was activated at the same time, the brain would basically overload and stop functioning. Obviously that is a very simplistic explanation, as i am not an expert as i said. But it does seem like the "We only use X% of our brain" is one of these legends that has leaked into popular culture and been heavily distorted and misquoted.
It sounds very cyberpunk, especially considering the cirumstances (gov't conditioning / experimentation). Any plot centered around enhancing the human body (and/or mind) through science can fall under cyberpunk. Akira is a perfect example of that. I don't think there's a scientific explanation for telekinesis, pyrokinesis, or any other mental power that actually effects the tangible world. If you try to explain in detail, it's all going to fall apart. Fortunately, these are widely-accepted phenomena, so you don't need to explain much. It's like magic in fantasy novels; as long as you give an explanation of how it came to be and what limits it has, readers won't bat an eye. EDIT: guy above me pretty much said everything I did, lol. I've always heard it was 8% BTW. Kinda pathetic if it is true.
I was going to use the powers contact telepathy[touch a person and you see their dark side that no one else sees, thoughtform[expressing your emotions unto other people making them like a thought puppet master], psycokeneisis[moving objects with the mind], precognitive abilities[see the future bend time and space], pryokeneisis[using the mind to create fire], emotional energy[your emotions become something like a conductor and you can blow things up..kinda psycokeneisis in a way], and teleportation[go anywhere you want] Yeah I know. That's a lot.
not 'gain' them, since if you have them, they're there already... but you can learn to use them, by training... no... actually, we use only about 10%... with geniuses like einstein perhaps getting up to 15%... ...probably... but i still don't know if that would be 'gaining' such abilities or just 'activating' what's already there... however, in fiction, anything is possible... ...of course it can... which is why excessive tv-watching and/or the influence of what a person watches is often seen by many as the cause of behavioral changes... but i'm not sure what you mean by 'condition'...
I have heard we only use 10% of our brains as well. Also, like Maia said, you need to have an inherent ability first in order to train your brain to use it. I think it is an interesting concept.
And yeah I keep on using gain, when they are technically born with it. By condition I was meaning is it possible for them to use the television and the computer as some sort of to gain control of what they already have. Like with someone with precognitive abilities you would make them do a bunch of math and philosophy....possibly. Someone with Psycokeneisis you would have them watch television and have them...I don't know gain the knowledge that they need to fight in a street fight. But also have them turn it on and off without a remote. Turn up the volume all that kind of stuff. Someone with contact telepathy you would purposely have them touch criminals and bad people so that way they could get use to the negative presence of people. That is what I mean by condition. Could that be possible? @lordofhats: Yep Akira. I liked the manga and the movie, but I wanted to do something like with the spin of Leaka.
There is no credible evidence for the exisatence of psychic abilities. It's a popular myth with a good dose of wishful thinking. If you want to use it for fiction, that's great. But any "research" will be based on mythology and pseudo-science. Despite huge monetary bounties for verifiable evidence, no one has ever been able to collect.
Well I have a suggestion for you. Perhaps you should visit one sometime. I was planning to before, but I don't know how much money they charge and I'm on a limited budget, so I'll think I will wait on that. Also try to make sure that the one you see is a legitimate clairvoyant, not a fraud. I hoped my advice helped.
Actually, I think I saw something on how that "We Only Use Ten Percent Of Our Brain" thing is a myth. Just a sec... http://www.csicop.org/si/9903/ten-percent-myth.html Just thought I'd contribute my ten cents (Get it? Ten cents/ten percent? HA HA HA!)
Committee for Skeptical Inquiry? No offense to them but it doesn't sound like a reliable source. Furthermore that article is littered with logical Ad Hominen fallacies and some pseudoscience. PET scans may scan the brain and its activity but not in a way that proves how much of it is actually active. It scans signal travel, which means areas of the brain can be inactive and merely have a signal pass around or by them or even through them but it doesn't prove actual activity in that part of the brain. It's where the signal goes that's active not how it gets there. The bullet thing under point 2 is also pseudo science. Bullets when hitting the brain might not hit the whole thing but can damage the entire brian severely with the mere act of penetrating the skull, running through it, and then exiting the other side. Its called brain trauma and it effects things that weren't even touched by the projectile. Not to say the 10% thing isn't a myth of course. I've heard 10% a lot from lots of places but I've never bothered looking it up (ballistics are so much more interesting...). Just saying this doesn't seem like a very reliable source to me. EDIT: This article says the same thing: Do People Only Use 10% of their Brain? from Scientific America (which is a reliable source thankfully).
NP. I'm actually surprised I never bothered looking this up before, especially considering how much time I waste reading magazine and wiki articles online XD.
Me too. I read lots of wiki articles as well. Though I could never find credible sources about using such and such percent of brain usage.
