Nov 4, 2025 06:22 AM
Pretty solid evidence for telepathy I'd say...
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."
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."