Lachat.com

"I need a pencil!"

I could hear it clearly from him and acted on it immediately. Handing him the pencil, I received a quizzical look and the response, "How did you know?" But with a dismissive shake of the head, he took the pencil and continued on with his work.

I found it harder to resume my studies. How did I know he needed a pencil? I was sure I'd heard him say he needed that pencil. At that point, everything about him seemed to exude that need.

Perhaps it was the confluence of both the strength of his need and the receptivity of my mind. At the time my mind had relaxed to a point near meditation. For most people this is where daydreams of scantily clad classmates might enter the scene. For me, with a long day and the warm room, I'd entered more of a thoughtless stupor, a trance. Staring into space, actually somewhere in thevicinity of the drinking fountain, my thoughts melded with the white noise of the universe.

As the synapses of our brains fire, weak electrical signals jump across the brain in fitful leaps and bounds. The signals may relay information about body temperature, autonomic functions of the heart, or trigger a memory recall through whatever the mysterious process is that allows us to store and retrieve thoughts.

These pulses of energy, like all flowing energy, generate magnetic fields that permeate space. If you ever want to have a really stimulating conversation with a physicist, ask him how magnets work. He can tell you about how to make and use magnets, the history of magnets, their application to science. However, the cause of magnetism remains a mystery with but a few confounding theories to leave us guessing.

 Magnets and their fields affect the brain too. The unit of measure for magnetism is the Tesla. Named after Nicola Tesla, a pioneer in electricity and true inventor of the radio, the tesla is a very large unit of magnetism. It is so large that physics classes only deal in microtesla, one-millionth of a tesla. That's on the order of winning the lottery small. However, we have the technology to create far more than micro-tesla. Strange things happen when the brain is exposed to different frequencies of magnetic waves. Certain levels can cause a meditative state, sickness, or agitation. A mega tesla is lethal to all organic life.

Magnetism obeys few boundaries. It permeates most substances as if they didn't exist. There is an underlying beauty to it that many early science students get to experience firsthand. Sprinkle iron dust upon a sheet of paper above a magnet and you'll see visible arcs of iron snap into formation, connecting the north and south poles of the magnet.

Amid this science lesson, clues to the brain's design lay waiting to be discovered.

I wondered, sitting there in the cafeteries, could the magnetic fields of Tye's brain have been received and decoded by my brain? Was it merely a coincidence, rogue magnetic fields, or something else? Frankly, I was at a loss for answers. The mind remained both a repository for secrets and the great secret itself. And yet... just maybe I could use my wiley ways as a scientist to test this new theory. A device could amplify these signals from the brain and direct them to another--electronic telepathy.