'Avengers Endgame' "I Have Telepathy" Explained: What's Really Happening
The sky-high hysteria of Avengers: Endgame, which is a little over two weeks away, is truly becoming hysterical as fans are starting to hear things. In the officially released clip of Avengers: Endgame showing Carol Danvers meeting the Avengers, Marvel fans are convinced they can hear someone whisper “I have telepathy” when Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) stare each other down.
On the Reddit forum r/MarvelStudiosSpoilers, user TBLvl4 shared the official Avengers: Endgame clip with the explanation: “If you turn up your volume, you can hear someone say ‘I have telepathy’ at the 48 second mark of this video.”
You actually don’t. “I have telepathy” is just the sounds of Thor’s breathing mixed with his footsteps as he approaches Carol, and the resulting sound being something that vaguely resembles a woman’s whisper. As some other Reddit users pointed out, it’s just the human brain succumbing to the power of suggestion, in which your brain tricks you into recognizing a thing happening even though it is objectively, and factually, not happening at all. [Editor’s note: I disagree.]
It’s not an exact, 1:1 comparison, but the 2018 “Yanny or Laurel” viral meme in which a “cognitive dimension” was a factor in whether or not you heard “Laurel” or “Yanny,” is pretty similar. Pop music is full of this stuff.
In this case, you might hear “I have telepathy,” but no one is actually saying that. And why would they? Forgetting the brain stuff for a second, entirely from a storytelling perspective, it makes absolute zero sense for anyone, Carol Danvers included, to say “I have telepathy.”
Think about it. First, telepathy is not one of Carol’s powers, or Thor’s. Second, the tension in the scene has nothing to do with reading minds. It’s about Carol and her place in the Avengers, with Thor “vetting” her in their brief moment of silent intimidation. For what narrative purpose would introducing telepathy serve the scene? The answer is “none.”
A sound engineer even did some investigating on their own and said in that Reddit thread they believe there is no line of dialogue or picked-up sound of someone saying they have telepathy. “I’ll have to experiment further, but this is DEFINITELY human pattern recognition,” they wrote.
My favorite thing about this whole theory is actually the first two comments in that Reddit thread. First, someone said, “It’s just hemsworth’s breath. Jesus fuck we really need this movie ASAP if people are beginning to hear words that don’t exist due to sheer hype.”
To which someone else responded: “It’s definitely not just his breath, you can clearly hear someone saying it.”
Sounds about right.
Avengers: Endgame will be released on April 26, and not a moment too soon.
