Question: With the brain senses.. Is it possible for, say triplets, to be split into three different rooms and then be tested. As in one gets a small electric shock, will the other siblings feel the shock.. and not exactly but in their brain wave or concious?

Tom Hartley answered on 18 Jun 2010:

I don’t think this is possible. It would require some form of communication between them that is beyond anything we know about now. If someone said it was true, there are lots of tests I would want to do before I would accept it because it would be such an important finding.

There are one or two scientists who believe in such things, but they are often regarded as outsiders. However, I would try not to think too much about what other people say or think and just look at the evidence.

One reason I think it is (very) unlikely is that to communicate an idea or sensation from one person to another would require a very detailed signal – the brain activity required to feel a shock in a particular part of the body is a very specific microscopic pattern. So the mechanisms we know about really aren’t geared up to receive remote signals, except via our sense organs, of course.

It’s always possible we’ll discover something new in the future (e.g. a special new sense), but this is really very, very unlikely in my view.