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Plain English Summary
Can people guess who's about to message them? This pioneering study brought telepathy testing online, having nearly 200 people identify which of four friends was sending them a message. Across 2,000 trials, participants guessed correctly 29.3% of the time — above the 25% expected by chance. Family members boosted the signal noticeably. "Virtual" senders (no real person) served as a comparison; real senders initially looked far better, but that gap shrank after correcting for response bias. The caveat: unsupervised online testing meant cheating couldn't be ruled out. The study fed into Sheldrake's broader telecommunication telepathy program and his 2025 meta-analysis.
Actual Paper Abstract
This paper describes an automated online telepathy test in which each receiver had four senders. In a series of 10 trials the computer picked one of the senders at random and asked her to write a short message to the receiver. At the end of the one-minute trial period, the receiver was asked to guess which sender had written a message, and she received the message only after this guess had been recorded by the computer. The receivers chose their own senders when they registered for the test. If they chose only two or three, the computer supplied virtual senders so that there were four senders altogether. In a total of 1,980 trials there were 581 hits (29.3%), significantly above the chance expectation of 25% (p = 0.000006). In tests with two real and two virtual senders, there were significantly more hits with real than virtual senders. Receivers had significantly higher hit rates with family members than with non-family members. Cheating seems unlikely, but it could not be ruled out, and for evidential purposes the hit rates can be regarded as suggestive only. Telepathy could provide one possible explanation for the above-chance results, but other forms of ESP could not be eliminated.
Research Notes
Pioneering automated online telepathy test enabling large-scale internet data collection. Part of Sheldrake's telecommunication telepathy research program, extending the paradigm from telephone and email to web-based messaging. The virtual sender control provides an internal baseline, though response bias complicates its interpretation. Included in Sheldrake's 2025 meta-analysis.
An automated, internet-based telepathy experiment tested whether receivers could identify which of four senders had been randomly selected to write them a short message in a one-minute trial. Across 198 completed 10-trial sessions by 195 receivers (1,980 total trials), the hit rate was 29.3% against a 25% chance baseline (p = 0.000006, 95% CI: 27-31%). In conditions with two real and two virtual senders, raw hit rates were markedly higher for real senders (41.9% vs 23.7%), but after correcting for response bias, this difference was not statistically significant (34.2% vs 30.1%). Family members yielded higher hit rates than non-family (31.4% vs 27.5%, p = 0.02). The unsupervised online format could not rule out cheating, limiting evidential weight.
Related Papers
Cites
- Experimental Tests for Telephone Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert (2003)
- Videotaped Experiments on Telephone Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert (2003)
- A Filmed Experiment on Telephone Telepathy with the Nolan Sisters — Sheldrake, Rupert (2004)
- Testing for Telepathy in Connection with E-mails — Sheldrake, Rupert (2005)
Same Research Program
Also by these authors
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Taking the Mindfield Literally: Discovering Minds by Assuming Competence Among Nonspeakers
Who's Calling? Evaluating the Accuracy of Guessing Who Is on the Phone
A Comparison of Four New Automated Telephone Telepathy Tests
Detecting Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis for Extrasensory Perception Experiments in Last 20 Years
📋 Cite this paper
Sheldrake, Rupert, Lambert, Michael (2007). An Automated Online Telepathy Test. Journal of Scientific Exploration.
@article{sheldrake_lambert_2007_online_telepathy,
title = {An Automated Online Telepathy Test},
author = {Sheldrake, Rupert and Lambert, Michael},
year = {2007},
journal = {Journal of Scientific Exploration},
}