Could Telekinesis be possible? It depends on how you define telekinesis. Moving things with just brain power could not be possible, but using technology to accomplish it certainly could be possible.

“Telekinesis” comes from the Greek “tele” meaning “far off” and “kinesis” meaning “movement”. It is the idea that distant objects can be moved merely by using the power of the mind. There are many people who claim that telekinesis is real, but there is nobody that has ever been able to prove it.

There are several problems that would make telekinesis impossible. The first of those is that to move an object requires applying a force to it. You have to use Energy to apply that force. Take picking up a chair, for example. To lift the chair off the ground, you have to counter the force of gravity by providing another force and the type of force you are using is muscular force. Your body burns the energy stores it has to make enough energy for your arms to overcome the force of gravity. If telekinesis were real and people could move things just by thinking about them, they would need to provide a force to overcome gravity.

Now, the brain does have energy. It consumes about 20% of the body’s energy, giving it roughly 0.3 kilowatt hours per day. That sounds like a lot of energy, but you need 3 kilowatt hours to boil a kettle, which would take ten brains one day or one brain ten days. In order to lift that chair off the floor, your brain would need far more energy than it has. The brain has come up with a way around this, though. Instead of trying to use pure energy to pick up the chair, it commands the muscles in your arms to make energy and they pick up the chair.

The second problem with telekinesis is that the energy in the brain would need to be greatly amplified for it to be enough to do anything and this energy would have to come from somewhere because we cannot just create energy. If our brain uses 20% of our body’s energy for day-to-day life and we focused it to pick up a chair, the extra energy needed would burn up all of our body’s energy stores in seconds. That cannot happen.

The third problem is that there has to be a way for the energy to go from the brain to the chair being picked up. Sound waves travel by passing energy from atom to atom. Electromagnetic waves send energy through the vibration of magnetic fields and through photons. All sources of energy have to travel from point A to point B through some kind of medium. If telekinesis were real, the force from the brain would have to travel through the air to the object being acted upon and remain connected for long enough for the action to be carried out.

Telekinesis can’t be real because it violates too many laws of physics. Some proponents of telekinesis claim that there is a new force that science hasn’t discovered yet. This new force would allow for telekinesis. It is a given that there are many things scientists haven’t discovered yet and more and more things are discovered as the years go by. However, if telekinesis were real, it would be very easy to test and it would happen often.

There is another way of looking at this topic, though. Telekinesis by the traditional definition is impossible, but we have the ability for technological telekinesis. I can switch the light on in my room by asking Alexa to do it. I have used brainwaves to make myself speak and that has switched the light on. Is that telekinesis? Perhaps not, but we are heading in that direction. Elon Musk is currently looking for volunteers to have implants in their brains. These implants will be activated by thoughts in the brain, and they will be able to transmit signals to objects. You could think, “turn on light” and the light would come on. This is a form of telekinesis, and it overcomes all of the problems. The force is amplified by the implant and the force can pass through the air by using radio waves, or whatever it will use. It would only work with compatible devices and there would still be no way to pick up a chair by thinking about it. And this is what I learned today.

Image By Édouard Isidore Buguet – https://www.metmuseum.org/special/Perfect_Medium/view_1.asp?item=0&view=lhttp://www.metmuseum.org/special/Perfect_Medium/images/Buguet.L.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3421178

Sources

https://psych.uw.edu/news/2965

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/telekinesis-and-quantum-field-theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telekinesis

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/telekinesis-is-it-possible.10139/

https://bond.edu.au/news/how-much-energy-do-we-expend-using-our-brains

https://study.com/learn/lesson/electromagnetic-waves-energy-transportation.html

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/22/242999/with-neuralink-elon-musk-promises-human-to-human-telepathy-dont-believe-it/

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