Telepathy in Connection with Telephone Calls, Text Messages and Emails
📄 Original study📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Ever get a feeling you know who's calling before you pick up the phone? Rupert Sheldrake spent over 15 years putting that hunch to the scientific test, and the numbers are genuinely striking. In experiments where participants had to guess which of four random people was calling them, they got it right 40% of the time — well above the 25% you'd expect from pure luck. When cameras were rolling to keep everyone honest, accuracy actually went up to 45%. The same pattern held for emails (43% accuracy) and text messages (about 38%), all with odds against chance that are astronomically small. Even fully automated phone tests, removing any possibility of subtle cues, came in at 56% versus the expected 50%. Here's a fun twist: when people felt confident about their guess, they were right a whopping 85% of the time. And the effect was stronger between people who were emotionally close — friends, family, romantic partners — while physical distance didn't seem to matter at all. To rule out the possibility that people were simply predicting the future rather than reading minds, Sheldrake ran control tests where callers were chosen after the guess was made. Those came in at plain chance levels, suggesting something genuinely telepathic rather than precognitive was going on. This paper pulls together the whole arc of that research program, tracing how it evolved from simple surveys to rigorous automated experiments.
Actual Paper Abstract
Telepathy in connection with telephone calls is the commonest kind of apparent telepathy in the modern world. It usually occurs between people who have strong bonds or emotional connections with each other, such as parents and children, husbands and wives, and good friends. In experimental tests in which subjects had to identify who, out of four callers, was calling, the average scores were very significantly above the 25% hit rate expected by chance. The callers were selected at random, and the subjects made their guesses before answering the call. These positive results were replicated independently at the universities of Amsterdam, Holland, and Freiburg, Germany. Similar telepathic phenomena seem occur in connection with emails and SMS messages. Experimental tests using all these methods gave significantly above-chance results. Versions of telephone and SMS tests designed to detect precognition, as opposed to telepathy, gave results at the chance level, suggesting that the positive results in the telepathy tests were indeed a result of telepathy rather than precognition. Automated telepathy tests using mobile telephones now enable anyone to participate in this research. These forms of telepathy have evolved in connection with modern communication technologies and probably occur because people's intention to call or send a message can be detected telepathically before the call has been made or the message sent.
Research Notes
Key overview paper synthesizing 15+ years of Sheldrake's telecommunication telepathy research. Essential for understanding the experimental paradigm evolution from surveys to automated testing. Directly addresses telepathy vs precognition alternative with control tests. Cites foundational telephone telepathy work and connects to meta-analysis (sheldrake_2025).
Comprehensive overview of experimental research on telepathy involving telephone calls, emails, and SMS messages. In telephone tests with 4 random callers, participants achieved 40% hit rate (N=63, 570 trials, p < 10⁻¹⁰) and 45% under videotaped conditions (271 trials). Email telepathy showed 43% accuracy (552 trials, p < 10⁻¹⁸); SMS telepathy 37.9% (800+ trials, p=0.001). Automated mobile phone tests yielded 56% vs 50% chance (600+ trials, p=0.001). Confidence strongly predicted accuracy (85% when 'confident'). Precognition control tests showed chance-level performance, supporting telepathy rather than precognition as the mechanism. Effects stronger with emotionally bonded pairs and unaffected by distance.
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📋 Cite this paper
Sheldrake, Rupert (2014). Telepathy in Connection with Telephone Calls, Text Messages and Emails. Journal of International Society of Life Information Science.
@article{sheldrake_2014_telepathy_phone_text,
title = {Telepathy in Connection with Telephone Calls, Text Messages and Emails},
author = {Sheldrake, Rupert},
year = {2014},
journal = {Journal of International Society of Life Information Science},
}