Hi everybody! Today I wanted to tell y'all about this really cool, highly understudied vestigial cognitive feature that I know by the name of Joint Synchronized Attention. It has another name though: psychedelic telepathy. Some of you may have experienced it without realizing what was happening. However, as everyone I know who has experienced it, including myself, has encountered it purely by chance, it's likely a relatively small portion of you. So, let's stop gabbing and get down to brass tacks.

As the less formal name implies, this is a phenomenon that feels like telepathy. When I experienced it with my ex several years ago, I was trying to explain something to her but couldn't find the words in my LSD laced brain. Disappointed, I looked at her with a sad look in my eyes. She looked back in complete sympathy, and that's when I noticed that I was picking up the microexpressions on her face more clearly. A sudden rush of visual acumen occurred, and I noticed that she seemed to be experiencing it too. Then we started noticing that we were having the same thoughts. This led to us stammering to talk, but every time one of us would start a sentence, we would trail off as we knew immediately what the other person was going to say. Using so little effort, I completed telling her what I wanted to just moments prior, before we paused and opened ourselves up, and we felt exactly what the other one was feeling. It then ended, leaving us like water through your fingertips. It lasted maybe five minutes tops.

For the rest of the trip, we thought we had a real psychic experience. A sequence of highly improbable events would happen in the next few days, and I wound up talking with a fellow psychonaut who dabbled in the cognitive sciences. He would tell me that it wasn't real telepathy; nothing was actually transmitted between the two of us. Instead, he called it Joint Synchronized Attention and explained that he theorized that it had to do with our brain's default attention coordination system being overridden by a more primitive system that we don't use anymore.

Everyone has seen a school of fish or a flock of birds all move as a single unit, right? They're operating under Joint Synchronized Attention. Most animals have a similar method of collectively deciding which signals in their environment are the most important. We do that too, but we do it through our advanced ability to communicate through language. Instead of us all unconsciously deciding what we should pay attention to, we live in reality tunnels that sometimes form disjointed correlation with others in our environment. 

So, why is this? Joint Synchronized Attention is highly useful for communicating in sometimes more effective manners than with language, so why did it go away? I think it has something to do with the agricultural revolution. Up until that point, our ancestors lived in nomadic tribes of roughly two hundred people. Then, in the span of generations, we had permanent settlements that started to balloon in population. I've heard that the human brain is only capable of having roughly three hundred close interpersonal connections. Anymore and we start to lose our ability to empathize with those we don't know well. Given that our ability to coordinate attention relies on simulating the perspectives of other people, it's natural that people living in these now over-populated settlements would no longer benefit from their ability to agree on which signals in their environment were most important, and would have been at a disadvantage to someone who had genes that allowed them to live in their own reality tunnel. Thus, natural selection led to our now default mode of attention coordination. Personally, I like to call this the fall of man.

Now comes the bad news: I have no idea how to induce Joint Synchronized Attention besides taking psychedelics with someone and messing around. My friend says you have to notice them notice you noticed them noticing. I don't know how to do that, and he wasn't able to really explain a method of accomplishing this. Likewise, he says he's experienced this on LSD and mushrooms, but everyone else I know has only experienced it on LSD. It would be cool if this post got popular and allowed someone with the ability to experiment in a rigorous scientific fashion to see and maybe get the ball rolling on that. I haven't talked with my friend in over a year, but last I heard it hasn't really come under any academic scrutiny.