Correlations Between the EEGs of Two Spatially Separated Subjects − A Replication Study

Can one person's brain activity ripple across to someone in a separate room? Earlier studies by Wackermann claimed yes -- they put pairs in shielded rooms eight meters apart, had one watch flashing patterns while the other relaxed, and reported mysterious brainwave correlations. But when Ambach tried replicating with seventeen pairs, he found something more interesting than telepathy: a bug in the math. The original statistical method flagged false positives roughly 20-25% of the time when it should have caught them only 5%. Once he applied a corrected approach, every single test came back non-significant. The kicker? The old flawed method applied to his own data would have produced seemingly impressive results. A cautionary tale about how subtle analytical choices can manufacture evidence for brain-to-brain connections that aren't there.