Telepathy is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another's without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. The term was first coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Frederic W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), and has remained more popular than the earlier expression thought-transference.

Frederic William Henry Myers was a British poet, classicist, philologist, and a founder of the Society for Psychical Research. Myers' work on psychical research and his ideas about a "subliminal self" were influential in his time, but have not been accepted by the scientific community. However, in 2007 a team of cognitive scientists at University of Virginia School of Medicine, led by Edward F. Kelly published a major empirical-theoretical work, Irreducible Mind, citing various empirical evidence that they think broadly corroborates Myer's conception of human self and its survival of bodily death.