Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Full Version: The telephone caller ESP experiments...
You're currently viewing a stripped down version of our content. View the full version with proper formatting.
Pretty solid evidence for telepathy I'd say...And it shows that telepathy is stronger between people who know each other.

Journal of Parapsychology (2003) 67, 147-166
by Rupert Sheldrake and Pamela Smart
PDF Download

"Most people have had experiences with telephone calls that appear to be telepathic. Either they think of someone for no apparent reason, then that person calls; or they know who is calling when the phone is ringing, before picking it up; or they call someone who says, "I was just thinking about you!" (Brown & Sheldrake, 2001; Sheldrake, 2000, 2003).

We have developed a simple experimental procedure for testing whether people really can tell who is calling. A participant receives a call at a prearranged time from one of four potential callers. The participants know who the potential callers are but do not know which one will be calling in a given trial. The caller is picked at random by the experimenter.

When the telephone rings, the participant guesses who is calling. The guess is either right or wrong. By chance, participants would be right about 1 time in 4, or, in other words, have a 25% success rate.

We have described elsewhere the results of more than 570 such trials, involving 63 participants (Sheldrake & Smart, 2003). The average success rate was 40%, hugely significant statistically (by the binomial test, p = 4 x 10-16). In these trials the callers and participants were miles apart, and in some cases thousands of miles. The results implied that the participants' above-chance success rate was a result of telepathy from the callers.

An explanation in terms of telepathy was also favoured by the fact that the success rates depended on who was calling. In real life, apparent telephone telepathy generally occurs between people who are emotionally bonded (Sheldrake, 2003). We carried out tests in which some of the potential callers were familiar people, family members, or friends, nominated by the participants themselves. Others were unfamiliar people whose names the participants knew but whom they had never met.

In these tests, involving 37 participants and 322 trials, 53% of the guesses were correct with familiar callers (p = 1 x 10-16), whereas with unfamiliar callers the results were exactly at the chance level of 25% (Sheldrake & Smart, 2003). The difference between responses with familiar and unfamiliar callers was highly significant ( p = 3 x 10-7 by Fisher's exact test."

https://www.sheldrake.org/research/telep...-telepathy
More goofy stuff. I would argue that since computers were making the caller selections then all the people at the receiving end (test subjects)were actually trying to do was guess who the computer selected to call. Nothing to do with who is calling. What is it, telepathy between man and machine?  This is interesting…

Google AI

Quote:Yes, computers were used to automate the process of making phone calls for "telephone telepathy" tests in parapsychology research, most notably in studies led by Rupert Sheldrake and his colleagues.
In these experiments, subjects would register online with the names and phone numbers of a small group of potential callers (usually friends or family members). A computer system would then:

Randomly select one of the registered callers.

Contact that person and instruct them to call the subject's phone via the computer system.

Simultaneously, the computer would call the subject. The subject's caller ID might display a generic message like "Telephone telepathy test".

Before connecting the calls, the computer would prompt the subject to guess, by pressing a number on the keypad, which of their contacts was attempting to call.***

The subject's guess was automatically recorded, and only then were the two parties connected, providing immediate feedback.

This automated system allowed for a large number of trials to be conducted across different locations, and it helped control against potential cheating by ensuring the caller was randomly selected and the subject's guess was recorded before any normal sensory information was available. The researchers reported results significantly above chance expectation in these automated tests.
 

*** I look at that and ask when did experimenters have the contact caller ‘attempt’ to call subject? The contact could only call via the computer system. So the caller does not make the call to the subject but the computer does, afaik.  Because of the ambiguity, the experiment is flawed and should be thrown into the growing heap of parapsychology research compost. Must admit the experiment was good enough to dupe many people, so maybe a success in that regard.
The trouble with AI search results is that they are limited to just one simple answer. As in this case, it confirmed that Sheldrake used computers at some point while neglecting all the other trials where a computer was not used:

"For each trial, there were four potential callers. The participants knew which callers would be involved and also knew that one of them would be selected at random by the throw of a die. For the throw of the die, we used high-quality casino dice and a ribbed casino-style dice cup, purchased in Las Vegas, Nevada. Each of the potential callers was assigned a number from 1 to 4 and was selected by the die showing one of these numbers after being thrown. If the die showed 5 or 6, then it was thrown again until a number between 1 and 4 came up. The randomizations were tested statistically as described below.

In all tests, the participants used landline telephones rather than cell phones, and in all cases only telephones without a caller identification system were used. The video camera was set up in a fixed position so that the telephone was in full view. The participants themselves switched on the video camera at the beginning of the session and switched it off after the trial had been completed. When a cassette was full, they mailed it to PS. In all cases the trials were filmed on time-coded videotape, with the date and time burnt into the film.

In the first series of trials with Sue Hawksley, the camera focussed on the telephone, and thus recorded exactly when it rang and what Sue Hawksley said about her guess before answering it, and also what she said when she did answer it. But she herself was not on camera all the time. In all subsequent trials with Sue Hawksley, and in all trials with the other participants, the participant sat in a chair in full view of the camera so that all actions and activities during the session could be recorded.

In all cases, when a trial was taking place and the phone started ringing, the participant said his or her guess to the camera before picking up the phone. In addition, in most trials, the participants were also asked to rate the confidence they felt in their guess, either "confident", "not very confident", or "just guessing." Immediately upon picking up the phone, the participants again stated their guess by saying that person's name before the caller said anything. The caller then revealed his or her identity, so the participants received immediate feedback.

In most cases the participants were alone in the house or apartment while the trials were taking place. However, during some trials with Sue Hawksley, her daughter (then age 8) was present in the house, and in a few of the trials with Thomas Marcovici, his father was in the house but in a different room. In all trials, Scott Reeves and Claire Morsman were alone.

We used four different procedures, involving progressive simplifications and also progressive increases in rigor. The four methods are described below."
Typically when any scientist or researcher investigates anomalous phenomena like Psi or telepathy and obtains apparently validating results they are automatically shunned and condemned by the mainstream scientists. It is an emotive and largely groupthink-motivated reaction that bears a striking resemblance to the kneejerk outrage religious zealots display when they encounter "heretical" and "blasphemous" ideas. This particular researcher has had her license suspended just for studying the telepathic abilities of nonverbal autistic kids. It is viewed as cruel and exploitive of autistic kids and their parents. Yet still she soldiers on. A possible explanation for why telepathy shows up in non-verbal autistic kids is that they lack the stimuli-filtering ability of a normal brain.This flood of information overwhelms them but also gifts them with non-local information/images that would normally be filtered out or ignored.

“Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

Excerpt from "The Telepathy Tapes"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKbA2NBZGqo

Full documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qlppHc3-gg
Telepathy experiences of a mother of an autistic child:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHrxCrCD90A