Telephone Telepathy.

Posted by Alex in Paranormal, Science & Tech on September 6, 2006 at 2:35 am


From the website:

Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them — now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy.

Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College, Cambridge, said on Tuesday he had conducted experiments that proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails.

Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone.

"The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

"The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."

Link

Previous post
this post? Please Email this               
Next post


FUN PRODUCTS FROM THE NEATORAMA SHOP:


COMMENT

6 comments to "Telephone Telepathy."

  1. Marco McClean
    September 6th, 2006 at 7:33 pm

    "Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends." This biases the results. Who is most likely to call you? A friend or relative. Who are you most likely to think will call you? A friend or relative. It's not unlikely at all for you to guess correctly. In fact, the odds are good that you will, not billions to one against.

    Also, were callers and guessers alike told the purpose of the experiment before participating? If so, they all thought first of their friends who believe in telepathy, both the ones who gave names and phone numbers, and the ones who guessed who was calling.

    This isn't experimental proof of telepathy. It's a magic trick dressed up as science, and, sadly, reported as science. But you knew that.

  2. Alex
    September 6th, 2006 at 11:15 pm

    Not quite, Marco - the experiment was basically this: you're asked to give the name and number of 4 people that you know.

    The researcher will then call one person out of that 4 and tell that guy to call you. You don't know which of the four is called. Then, your phone rings, and you say "ah, it's so-and-so".

    So, you'd expect to "guess" right 25% of the time (1 out of 4). But the experiment's result is 45% of the time, the subjects get it right.

  3. Erik
    September 7th, 2006 at 9:08 am

    There's nothing here about it being double blind, so if the researchers did anything screwy with the data they received (for instance, calling the first of the four names listed a disproportional number of times, or subconsciously picking up on respondents' perceived level of affinity for the four people listed, etc), there's trouble. (And since half these trials were done over email, I'm less than inclined to believe that this was anything but a farce) Even disregarding tha, if you assume that all the variables were in fact controlled, the claim about "a 1 in 1,000,000,000,000 chance!!~1!eleven" is still utterly absurd, given the small number of respondents.

    If he's serious, have him take a shot at the JREF prize; I'm sure randi would have a field day with it.

  4. ted
    September 7th, 2006 at 9:36 pm

    I just lost a little respect for the respected Trinity College.

    This doen't prove telepathy. It just proves that people are good guessers when it comes to who's calling, especially when you narrow it down to one of four people.

    At least they didn't waste their research money on something silly, like a cure for cancer or ways to reduce greenhouse gases.

  5. Akiro
    September 8th, 2006 at 3:31 pm

    In response to Erik,
    A study being double blind has to do with the researcher knowing what condition the participant is going to experience. Although, Sheldrake's experiement seems to have the researcher informed, the random selection of whom is called is most likely not handpicked. Research in remote viewing and telepathy involves random number generators for chooseing levels of a variable, in this case who is called.

    In response to Ted,
    I would agree this experiment clearly does not prove telepathy, but its purpose is to investigate a specific phenomenon with telephones.

    People cannot be proven as "good guessers". Guessing 1 correct answer out of 4 possible should always result in about 25% accuracy. That is probability. Anything statistically significantly higher would mean something is influencing the choice. Is it a telephone telepathy phenomenon? perhaps poor research design? We cannot say for sure without replication.

    At any rate take the results with a grain of salt, but don't discredit it the US Government researched remote viewing extensively and so do many scientists today. I myself have worked on the research at Eastern Illinois University and we found some interesting results. Sadly no telepathy or other fun mind powers proven yet. We shall continue to be skeptics.

  6. Alex
    September 8th, 2006 at 6:03 pm

    Weird experimental results are what make science fun!

    See also: Things That Don't Make Scientific Sense, about an experiment on homeopathy conducted by a scientist bent on debunking it - the only thing was, she actually got the opposite result!


PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT

Neatorama Comment Policy
You don't have to register or login to comment, but it's easier if you do so. Comments aren't censored, but those that are abusive or off-topic may be edited or deleted.


Stay updated on the comments with Comment RSS