(Ebook) Rupert Sheldrake - Telephone Telepathy(1).doc

Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 67, 184-199 (July 2003)

EXPERIMENTAL TESTS FOR TELEPHONE TELEPATHY

by RUPERT SHELDRAKE AND PAMELA SMART

ABSTRACT: Many people claim to have known who was calling before they picked up the telephone, or to have thought about someone for no apparent reason, who then called. We carried out a series of experiments to test whether or not people really could tell who was telephoning. Each participant had four potential callers, and when the telephone rang had to guess who was calling before the other person spoke. By chance the success rate would have been 25%. In a total of 571 trials, involving 63 participants, the overall success rate was 40%, with 95% confidence limits from 36 to 45%. This effect was hugely significant statistically (p = 4 x 10-16). We obtained similar positive effects when the calls were made at randomly chosen times, and when the calls were made at fixed times known to the subject in advance. With 37 participants, we compared the success rates with familiar and unfamiliar callers and found a striking difference. With familiar callers, 53% of the guesses were correct (n = 190; p = 1 x 10-16). With unfamiliar callers, only 25% of the guesses were correct, exactly at the chance level. This difference between the responses with familiar and unfamiliar callers was highly significant (p = 3 x 10-7). We also investigated the effects of distance between the callers and participants. With overseas callers at least 1,000 miles away, the success rate was 65% (n = 43; p = 3 x 10-8). With callers in Britain, the success rate was lower (35%). In most cases, the overseas callers were people to whom the participants were closely bonded. For the successful identification of callers, emotional closeness seemed to be more important than physical proximity.

INTRODUCTION

Seemingly telepathic experiences with telephones are common. Many people have found that for no apparent reason they start thinking about a particular person, then the phone rings and that person is on the line. Or else when the telephone starts ringing they have an intuition about who is calling, and turn out to be correct. Usually such calls are from people whom the person knows well.

Such experiences are the commonest kind of apparent telepathy in the modern world (Sheldrake, 2001, 2003; Brown & Sheldrake, 2002). Surprisingly, psychic researchers and parapsychologists seem to have ignored this phenomenon.

Could apparent telephone telepathy merely be a matter of coincidence? Perhaps people often have thoughts about others for no particular reason. By chance, these thoughts may sometimes be followed by a telephone call from that person. If people only remember the times they are right and forget the times they are wrong, an illusion of telepathy may be created by a combination of coincidence and selective memory.

Alternatively, a person may be expecting a call around a particular time from a particular person, but may be unconscious of this expectation. So when the call comes there is no need to invoke telepathy because an unconscious expectation could explain it instead. The trouble is that unconscious expectations are elusive. Indeed, this may be an untestable hypothesis, because if the expectations of telephone calls are unconscious, how can anyone prove that they are really there? And if they are really there, then might they be a result of telepathy, rather than an alternative to it?

The best way to resolve these questions is by means of experimental tests that can be evaluated statistically. We have developed a simple procedure in which participants receive a call from one of four different callers. They know who the potential callers are, but do not know which one will be calling in any given test, because the caller was picked at random by the experimenter. They have to guess who the caller is before the caller says anything. By chance they would be right about one time in four, or 25 per cent of the time. Are they right significantly more often than would be expected on the basis of random guessing? In this paper we describe the results of 571 such tests. The scores were very significantly above chance levels.

We also compared the participants’ responses to calls from strangers and from people they knew well. We also explored the effects of distance, with callers up to 11,000 miles away.

METHODS

Recruiting participants
In a preliminary experiment, one of us (P.S.) served as participant and the other (R.S.) as experimenter. For subsequent experiments, we recruited participants through advertisements in the Part-time Work section of newspapers or through a recruitment website called www.hotrecruit.co.uk. Our advertisements read: “Do you know who is ringing before you pick up the phone? Good pay for fun and simple experiments as part of psychic research project.”

We initially offered a payment of £10 per two-trial session, and later £10 for a 1-trial session. We sent details of the test procedure to the people who replied to these advertisements, and ask them to nominate people to whose calls they thought they might respond. We asked them to check that these people would be willing to take part, and asked them to supply us with their contact details and telephone numbers. We also asked participants to tell us when they would be able to take part in tests, and to check that their callers would be free to call them at those times. Because it was the responsibility of the participants to ensure that their callers would available, and they did not get paid for a trial if the callers were not, in most cases the callers were indeed available. If the randomly-selected caller was not available, the trial was cancelled.

Some participants were unable to complete the ten-trial series for a variety of reasons, including changes in their personal circumstances, such as starting a full-time job, or because one or more of their callers was unable to continue taking part. Ideally, all participants would have completed all 10 trials, as they had agreed, to avoid the possibility of optional stopping, whereby participants who were not scoring above chance levels might have declined to do more tests. But if this happened at all, it was rare. Most participants who did not complete all 10 trials did not do so because one or more of their callers was unable or unwilling to continue taking part.

Participants in the first series of experiments were mainly recruited through local newspapers in the north of England. For the second series, most were recruited through www.hotrecruit.co.uk. When we wanted to find participants with callers overseas, we advertised in free newspapers aimed at young Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans living in England (TNT and Southern Cross).

Callers
In our first series of experiments, we asked participants to nominate all four callers. This restricted the number of applicants who were able to participate, because most were unable to find four people to whom they thought they might respond telepathically and who were also able and willing to take part.

In our second series, we asked participants to nominate a minimum of two callers, and we supplied the others, who were strangers to the participants. This procedure had the advantage of enabling us to recruit more participants, and it also enabled us to compare their responses to familiar and unfamiliar callers. Most people nominated only two callers, but some nominated three, and hence the total number of trials with familiar callers was larger than with unfamiliar callers.

Test procedures
For each trial, there were four potential callers. The participants knew who they were 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. Each of the potential callers was assigned a number from 1 to 4, and was selected by the thrown die showing one of these numbers. If the die showed 5 or 6, it was thrown again until a number between 1 and 4 came up.

We used three different procedures, involving progressive simplifications. In all cases, when a trial was taking place, when the participant picked up the telephone he or she immediately indicated the person guessed by saying that person’s name. The caller then revealed his or her identity, so the participants received immediate feedback.

1.       In Method 1, participants took part in two trials per session. The two callers were selected at random by two throws of the die (ignoring 5 and 6). If the die showed the same number twice, then the same person was the caller in both trials.

The times of the trials were also selected at random because we wanted to test the idea that people can tell who is calling even if the calls are at random times. Participants were not told at what time the calls would be made, although of course they knew that they would occur within the test session.

Test sessions were usually an hour long, beginning and ending at times agreed in advance with participants and their callers. To pick the call times at random, the session was divided into 6, and the beginning of one of these periods was selected by the throw of a die. For example, if the test session was from 10-11 am, the six periods began at 10 minute intervals, starting at 10.10. Thus if the die showed 4, then the test would be at 10.40. The die was then thrown again to select the time for test with the other caller. If 1 came up , this was 10.10 am.

The experimenter (either R.S. or P.S.) telephoned the randomly selected callers in advance, usually an hour or two beforehand, and asked them to call at the time selected. We asked callers to think about the participant for about a minute before calling. We also rang the callers who had not been selected to tell them that they were not involved in this test session.

A few minutes after the tests, the experimenter rang the participant to ask what his or her guess had been, and in some cases also asked the callers. In no cases did callers and participants disagree. The experimenter recorded the result, noting down the date and times of each trial, the caller and the guess.

This method was used in our preliminary experiment and in our first series with 17 participants, for a total of 198 trials.

2.       In Method 2, we simplified this procedure by using fixed times for the two trials in a session, for example at 10.15 and 10.30 am. The first caller to be selected was asked to call at 10.15, and the second (with a 1 in 4 chance that it would be the same person again) to call at 10.30. These people were called in advance of the test session and told they had been selected and when to call. Those who had not been selected were called and told they had not been selected. The experimenter found out and recorded what the guesses had been as in Method 1. We used this method for the last 5 participants in our first series of experiments and the first 3 in the second series, who took part in a total of 87 trials.

3.       In Method 3, there was only one trial per session. The experimenter (P.S.) selected the caller at random less than 15 minutes before the prearranged test time. Say, for example, the test time was 2.30 p.m., then the caller was selected at random at 2.15, and notified before 2.20. We used this method with 37 participants in our second series or experiments.

To start with (Method 3A) the experimenter (P.S.) also called the three people not selected to tell them so. Starting on 15.11.01, this step was eliminated (Method 3B) by telling the callers that if they had not been notified at least 5 minutes before the test time, then they had not been selected. This simplification made it possible to carry out a series of separate, one-session trials in rapid succession, typically at 15 minute intervals. The experimenter found out and recorded what the guess had been as in Method 1.

In the second series of experiments, we tested 34 participants using this method, in a total of 268 trials.

Statistics
For the testing of the hypothesis that the proportion of correct guesses would be above the chance level of 0.25, or 25%, we used the exact binomial test (Siegel & Castellan, 1988). The null hypothesis was that the probability of a correct guess is 0.25 or 25%.

For combining the results of different experiments we used the Stouffer method (Rosenthal, 1991).

For the comparison of results with familiar or unfamiliar callers, or the results in first and second trials, we used the Fisher exact test (Siegel & Castellan, 1988).

We calculated exact 95% confidence limits for the true probability of a correct response as described by Hahn & Meeker, (1991).

RESULTS

A preliminary experiment
In a preliminary experiment, started in April 1999, P.S. was the participant and R.S. the experimenter. P.S. did not claim to have any special psychic powers, but she had noticed that she sometimes seemed to know who was ringing before she answered the telephone.

There were 5 potential callers, of whom only 4 took part in any given trial, depending on their availability. P.S. was informed before each trial which 4 callers would be taking part. The potential callers were Angie and Cathie (her sisters), Muriel (her mother), her close friend Polly, and R.S. Apart from R.S., who was in London, 250 miles away, the others lived within a 10-mile radius of P.S.’s home in Ramsbottom, Greater Manchester.

We conducted 30 trials according to method 1. In each trial there was a 1 in 4 chance of P.S. naming the caller correctly by chance. In other words, if P.S. were just guessing without the help of telepathy, she would have been right about 25% of the time, an average of 7.5 correct guesses in 30 trials. In fact 13 out of 30 of her guesses were correct (43%), significantly above chance (p = 0.02).

The results with individual callers are shown in Table 1. The highest proportion of P.S.’s correct guesses (67%) was with R.S. as caller, who was furthest away.

Table 1
Pam Smart’s responses to calls from 5 different callers: her sisters Angie and Cathie, her mother Muriel, her friend Polly and R.S., Rupert. Only 4 potential callers took part in a given trial, and was told in advance which 4 callers were involved. (Method 1).

The first experimental series
To find out if these results were replicable, we carried out a series of experiments with 21 participants recruited through local newspapers in the north of England (in Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Yorkshire). We ask all of them to take part in 10 trials, and we then asked some who completed 10 trials to do a further 10 or 20 trials. All the experiments in this series involved two trials per session. Most followed method 1, as in the experiment described above. With 5 of the participants we used Method 2, which involved fixed times for the calls, known to the participants in advance, rather than randomly selected times not known to the participants in advance, as in Method 1.

Nine participants completed the prearranged number of trials, and some agreed to do a second series of 10 trials. Two did a third series as well. As shown in Table 2, these participants took part in a total of 146 trials. In 59 (40%), their guesses were correct. This result was highly significant statistically (p = 0.00003).

Out of these 9 participants, all but one made more than 25% correct guesses. The p values for each participant’s results are shown in Table 2. As an alternative way of calculating the significance of the overall result, the individual results were combined by the Stouffer method. By this more conservative procedure, the result was still very significant (p = 0.001).

Table 2
Scores of 9 participants who completed at least 10 telephone telepathy trials each, following Method 1. One participant was male (M) and the others female (F).