A brief speculative essay on how psychic phenomena may have developed

The possible mechanism for the development of telepathy and psychokinesis in evolutionary terms may be based on the bioselection of neural networks with minimal interaction between neighbouring but unrelated neural systems.

There is still a lot to learn about how the complex structures developed in the brain. For those who have experienced phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis it is obvious to ask how we as biological systems come to produce these interactions. Whatever our current understanding, these systems would have certainly developed on an empirical basis. If there are physical effects present, even those of which we have no knowledge at present, these would have certainly been exploited in evolutionary terms if they affected the efficiency of the individual.
As neural nets were developed in the first organisms it is clear that the signal to noise ratio would be important to maintain.When one considers the nature of the brain it is clear that it is easy for most of us to follow a coherent train of thought without spurious noise being a problem. If we accept that telepathy and psychokinetic effects at a low level are fairly common among humans, perhaps even present as a collective unconscious during sleep, then is it quite likely that telepathy would have first occured within the brain. This would manifest itself as unwanted “noise” produced between adjacent neural systems. There could also be a certain amount of background telepathic input from outside. This may even orriginate from non living systems and could be mediated by the zero point energy or quantum wave function collapse.
How will this noise manifest itself in space and time? If we assume that this noise varies in its effects from point to point, and it’s phase change is gradual in terms of distance, it may be that it could be compensated for by spreading the synapses between neurons over space and possibly to a small extent in time. There are dendritic tree structures found in the brain whose function is unknown. Perhaps these represent a first order noise reduction system?
Going one step further, it may also be possible that more complex noise cancelling systems have evolved, much as we are able to cancel the unwanted sound in a vehicle by adding a signal of the opposite phase; it may be that quantum noise can be similarly reduced.
Few experiments have been done to investigate possible correlations between closely placed systems that are sensitive to random quantum noise, but if these are present and systems have adapted to reduce the noise in the brain it is apparent that a thorough knowledge of the signal which is being cancelled is, by implication, availabe to the brain.
If the source of the fluctuations is in some sense related to abstract concepts or properties of complex systems then this gives a possible way to account for remote viewing. These effects indicate a more significant role to the abstract information associated with physical objects than is currently accepted. There may be a whole hierarchy accessible, the lower levels corresponding to voluntary PK.
If it is possible to observe physical systems in this way then there are also deeper implications. We accept that an observation performed on a quantum mechanical system will alter its quantum state in the sense that the complementary observable will become uncertain. It would thus be easy to speculate that a mental observation is in some sense complementary to the usual physical one for large systems. This would account for why it is that objects are frequently reported, among researchers of the paranormal, to be in a state where they move in straight lines or pass through walls. Here one may suppose that someone is observing them by a mental means and thus preventing the more usual interaction of the object with our world.
This would also account for how psychics can sometimes view the essence of an object in their mind and change it to produce a change in the physical object. An example is Psychic healing.