Telepathy does not require "negative stimulus" to test.
Take for instance, the psychometry experiment I laid out. You just need a few psychic volunteers (20 would be good. try to get a good spread on gender, race, income, etc.), and a few more non-psychic volunteers (20 again would be good), then a few volunteers to help perform the experiment so that you can properly double-blind. (maybe 6 or so.)
The "imprints" could be warm fuzzy things, like bright sunny days surrounded by wildflowers, puppies, kittens, etc. It does not need to be traumatic, though I suppose a properly controlled followup, should you actually get a signal, would test if negative images/imprints are stronger than positive ones.
This is something a typical hobby scientist could do with a university student population as the sample source.
yes, but this fails to take into account basic human greed and satisfaction and selfishness;thus is my point. If we could all pause for a second, what is our first thoughts upon entering this world? It is that of hunger, of abandonment, and of seeking comfort. This is simple elementary psychology-and for a while, let's also consider that it does /not/ need to be traumatic. This goal can be attained, and is a very noble approach which I applaud.
However, let's remember history. For all of mankind's time, no less. What would our first mistake be? To take the first step into a rabbit hole of psychology which is going to be Freudian at first, and after the end of the experiment the psychology of the participants will be irreversibly changed, and so basically you're forcing people to either turn to one side of the other of elementary psychology, good or bad, by the inherent approach we have at this point in time in society itself, not saying humans can't be brought together that are innately good; that's just not true- altruism is a good pursuit, however.
Yeah, I'm honestly curious what you think the risk is here, x2yzh9. The archetypal telepathy/mindreading/remote viewing/ESP/clairvoyance experiment is to pair people off then have one of each pair look at randomly drawn Zener cards while their counterpart tries to determine which one they're seeing. It's like a more boring version of Go Fish, and easy enough that kids can and do run it for elementary school science fair projects. To the best of my knowledge nobody's ever gotten post-traumatic stress disorder from it, and if telepaths were at such a risk of negative side effects wouldn't they show up with noticeable frequency in the general population? If "three blue squiggles" can cause problems, one might expect the Monday at the office to be lethal.
Well, as I explained above I hope this helps. To further explain;artificially engineering this skill or ability(which is part of the thesis I hypothesize) would be immoral, as anyone that naturally develops a affinity for this type of stuff would have problems along the way, I think-imagine it as a form of adolescent puberty, but possible to happen at any point in life. Motor neurons would have to be rewired over time naturally or through engineered means through a society, and not just that, the whole science of the entire brain itself. It would change things at an atomic level-hence my 'playing god' allegation and that engineered telepathy would be like what we did in the 1950's with the manhattan project. And would likely result in similar things, if we had no need to develop a telepathic ability then we would not likely see bad results come from it, is what I posit. If we had developed nuclear science through a natural historical project, trekkin, do you think we would have ever developed the subsequent weapons to harness these nuclear sciences, or at the least, ever used them, as our history says we have done at least twice with devastating(naturally apparent) results even in today's society?