Automated Tests for Telephone Telepathy Using Mobile Phones
📄 Original study ↗📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Can you tell who's calling before you pick up? This study tested that with an automated mobile phone system -- the first of its kind. Over 2,000 trials with three possible callers, participants guessed correctly 41.8% of the time versus 33.3% expected by chance. With two callers, they hit 55.2% against 50% chance. Both statistically significant, which sounds exciting! But the effect sizes (how strong the result actually is) were quite small compared to earlier supervised, filmed studies. And here's the really crucial detail: when researchers looked only at trials where callers responded quickly (under 4 minutes, eliminating timing-based clues), hit rates dropped to non-significant levels. The impressive results may have been driven by trials where slow caller responses leaked subtle, non-telepathic information. The study proved you can scale up telepathy testing with phones, but whether it actually caught telepathy remains an open question.
Actual Paper Abstract
Objective: To carry out automated experiments on mobile phones to test for telepathy in connection with telephone calls. Study Method: Subjects, aged from 10 to 83, registered online with the names and mobile telephone numbers of three or two senders. A computer selected a sender at random, and asked him to call the subject via the computer. The computer then asked the subject to guess the caller's name, and connected the caller and the subject after receiving the guess. A test consisted of six trials. Interactions Evaluated: The effects of subjects' sex and age and the effects of time delays on guesses. Main Outcome Measure: The proportion of correct guesses of the caller's name, compared with the 33.3% or 50% mean chance expectations. Main Results: In 2080 trials with three callers there were 869 hits (41.8%), above the 33.3% chance level (P o 1 1015). The hit rate in incomplete tests was 43.8% (P ¼ .00003) showing that optional stopping could not explain the positive results. In 745 trials with two callers, there were 411 hits (55.2%), above the 50% chance level (P ¼ .003). An analysis of the data made it very unlikely that cheating could explain the positive results. These experiments showed that automated tests for telephone telepathy can be carried out using mobile phones. Key words: telepathy, ESP, automated tests, telephones
Research Notes
First automated telephone telepathy study using mobile phones (2015 publication, experiments conducted post-2008). Important for scalability but lower effect sizes than filmed studies, possibly due to convenience sampling and reduced participant motivation. Unsupervised design leaves cheating possible though authors argue pattern makes this unlikely. Critical caveat: when restricting to trials where all callers responded in < 4 minutes (eliminating delay-based cues), the three-caller hit rate drops to 34.8% (NS) and two-caller to 53.2% (NS) — the significant results are driven by trials with longer caller delays (Tables 6-7), raising the possibility that response-time patterns provided non-telepathic information.
Two automated experiments tested telephone telepathy using mobile phones under real-life conditions. In experiment 1 (three callers, 2080 trials), hit rate was 41.8% vs 33.3% chance (p < 10^-15, d = 0.19). In experiment 2 (two callers, 745 trials), hit rate was 55.2% vs 50% chance (p = .003, d = 0.10). Incomplete tests showed 43.8% hit rate, ruling out optional stopping. Hit rates increased with longer caller response delays. No significant effects of sex, age, or practice. First demonstration of automated mobile phone telepathy testing feasibility, though effect sizes smaller than supervised studies (d = 0.35-0.46).
Links
Related Papers
Extends
Companion
- Do You Know Who Is Calling? Experiments on Anomalous Cognition in Phone Call Receivers — Schmidt, Stefan (2009)
- Sensing the Sending of SMS Messages: An Automated Test — Sheldrake, Rupert (2009)
- Testing for Telepathy in Connection with E-mails — Sheldrake, Rupert (2005)
- An Automated Test for Telepathy in Connection with Emails — Sheldrake, Rupert (2009)
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📋 Cite this paper
Sheldrake, Rupert, Smart, Pamela, Avraamides, Leonidas (2015). Automated Tests for Telephone Telepathy Using Mobile Phones. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2015.04.001
@article{sheldrake_smart_avraamides_2015_automated_telephone,
title = {Automated Tests for Telephone Telepathy Using Mobile Phones},
author = {Sheldrake, Rupert and Smart, Pamela and Avraamides, Leonidas},
year = {2015},
journal = {Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing},
doi = {10.1016/j.explore.2015.04.001},
}