An Automated Test for Telepathy in Connection with Emails
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Plain English Summary
Ever get a weird feeling you know exactly who just emailed you before you even look? This study put that hunch to the test with a fully automated online system. Participants signed up through Rupert Sheldrake's website, each providing three contacts. The system randomly picked one contact, asked them to send an email, and then asked the participant to guess who sent it -- all before delivering the message. Across 419 trials with participants aged 12 to 66, people guessed right 41.8% of the time, meaningfully above the 33.3% chance rate. Interestingly, people who didn't finish all their assigned trials actually scored higher (48.3%) than those who completed them (38.4%). The timing of responses revealed a curious pattern: quick guesses (under 3 minutes) hit well above chance, medium delays dropped to chance levels, and very long delays bounced back up again. The 20-29 age group were the star performers, nailing it 52.9% of the time. But here's the big takeaway and why this study really matters as a comparison point: the effect size was notably smaller than previous supervised experiments where sender and guesser were focused at the same time. The researchers believe this is because the automated system introduced unavoidable delays -- the sender and guesser weren't mentally connected in the same moment. That simultaneous focus between people appears to be a key ingredient. So while the study showed automated email telepathy testing is doable, it also revealed that something important may get lost when you remove the real-time human connection from the equation.
Abstract
Can people sense telepathically who is sending them an email before they receive it? Subjects, aged from 12 to 66 years, registered online with the names and email addresses of 3 senders. A computer selected a sender at random, and asked him to send an email message to the subject via the computer. The computer then asked the subject to guess the sender's name, and delivered the message after receiving the guess. A test consisted of 6 or 9 trials. In a total of 419 trials, including data from incomplete tests, there were 175 hits (41.8%), signiο¬ cantly above the 33.3% chance level (p = .0001). Hit rates in incomplete tests were higher than in complete tests. There was no signiο¬ cant difference between hit rates with male and female subjects. The highest hit rates were with subjects in the 20β29-year age group. The effect size in these tests was lower than in previous telephone and email telepathy tests, in spite of the fact that they were unsupervised. One reason may be that subjects were being asked to guess who had sent them a message several minutes earlier, rather than thinking about them simultaneously.
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π Cite this paper
Sheldrake, Rupert, Avraamides, Leonidas (2009). An Automated Test for Telepathy in Connection with Emails. Journal of Scientific Exploration.
@article{sheldrake_2009_automated_email,
title = {An Automated Test for Telepathy in Connection with Emails},
author = {Sheldrake, Rupert and Avraamides, Leonidas},
year = {2009},
journal = {Journal of Scientific Exploration},
}