Telephone Telepathy?

You know the phenomena where you think about someone just before the phone rings and it’s the person you just thought about? That’s what, according to Reuters, a scientist named Rupert Sheldrake at Trinity College in Cambridge is calling “Telephone Telepathy” and for what he claims to have experimental evidence that it really does exists. Not only does this precognition work with telephones, supposedly it also works with e-mails!

Yeah right. The article explains that Sheldrake performed small scale tests asking people to predict, out of four family or friend choices, who was going to call and got a success rate of 45%. Granted that’s a lot higher than the 25% one would expect by pure chance but the article doesn’t give a lot of detail about the protocol used or even if it was a double-blind study. Experience has shown repeatedly that only double-blind studies can be relied upon. It’s amazing what non-verbal clues are sent out and can be picked up, especially when the examiner has a vested interest in the outcome of the experiment.

Sheldrake’s basic hypothesis is that there is an interconnectedness of minds within a social group. My reaction is that’s all very interesting but I think I’ll wait until other folks duplicate Sheldrake’s results before I get too excited.

My problem with all this is that if it works for I’m going to call you or send you an e-mail, then it should work for just about everything and despite lots and lots of trying, no one has ever, to my knowledge, come up with any credible evidence of telepathic capabilities even between the closest of family members.

As for the “Hey, I was just thinking about you” phenomena when the phone rings, it called “confirmation bias.” You remember weird stuff when it happens, because it is weird, but forget about all the times you thought about your wife or girlfriend and she didn’t call.