Videotaped experiments on telephone telepathy

ABSTRACT

The authors tested whether participants (N = 4) could tell who was calling before answering the telephone. In each trial, participants had 4 potential callers, one of whom was selected at random by the experimenter. Participants were filmed on time-coded videotape throughout the experimental period. When the telephone began ringing, the participants said to the camera whom they thought the caller was and, in many cases, also how confident they felt in their guesses. The callers were usually several miles away, and in some cases thousands of miles away. By guessing at random, there was a 25% chance of success. In a total of 271 trials, there were 122 (45%) correct guesses (p = 1 x [10.sup.12]). The 95% confidence limits of this success rate were from 39% to 51%. In most trials, some of the callers were familiar to the participants and others were unfamiliar. With familiar callers there was a success rate of 61% (n= 100;p = 1 x [10.sup.45]). With unfamiliar callers the success rate of 20% was not sign ificantly different from chance. When they said they were confident about their guesses, participants were indeed more successful than when they were not confident.

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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, in press). The average success rate was 40%, hugely significant statistically (by the binomial test, p 4 x [10.sup.6]). 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 16 guesses were correct with familiar callers (p = 1 x [10.sup.-16]), whereas with unfamiliar callers the results were exactly at the chance level of 25% (Sheldrake & Smart, in press). The difference between responses with familiar and unfamiliar callers was highly significant (p = 3 x [10.sup.-7] by Fisher's exact test).

In view of the supposedly elusive nature of psi and the difficulty of obtaining repeatable results, these data may seem too good to be true. Although they cannot. be explained in terms of normal sensory clues, could they be explained by cheating?

We think cheating is unlikely to explain this effect. In general terms, it seems improbable that so many apparently honest people would cheat. It is also possible to make a quantitative estimate of cheating from empirical data. In our earliest series of experiments, we inadvertently provided an opportunity for cheating. The experimental data make it possible to find out whether this opportunity was taken up or not.

In these early experiments, we carried out two trials per session. Both callers were notified in advance. In some cases (about 1 in 4), the same person was picked for both calls. When a caller knew he or she would be calling again in the second trial, in the first trial the caller could have conveyed information, consciously or unconsciously, when he or she was speaking to the participant.

If such a leakage of information had happened, the chances of guessing correctly in the second trial would have increased. It was in fact slightly higher, 43% as opposed to 35%, but this difference was not statistically significant. Only in the case of 1 participant was there a striking and statistically significant difference between the success rate with first and second calls (Sheldrake & Smart, in press). The results from the first trials alone, in which there was no such possibility of information leakage, were still very significant statistically.