Phone telepathy proved true in experiment

Blackleaf

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Phone telepathy: You knew it was true

September 5, 2006

NORWICH, England (Reuters) -- Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them -- now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy.

Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College, Cambridge, said on Tuesday he had conducted experiments that proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails.

Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone.

"The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

"The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."

He said he found the same result with people being asked to name one of four people sending them an e-mail before it had landed.

However, his sample was small on both trials -- just 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the email -- and only four subjects were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some skepticism.

Undeterred, Sheldrake -- who believes in the interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping -- said that he was extending his experiments to see if the phenomenon also worked for mobile phone text messages.

Copyright 2006 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

www.cnn.com
 

Kreskin

Doctor of Thinkology
Feb 23, 2006
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You new I would post here. You must have internet telepathy.
 

gangstalking

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Sep 10, 2006
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Though I do believe in morphic resonance, I think he really needed to get a wider sample going to have truly believeable results, still it's a nice start and I would love to see some updates.
 

Dexter Sinister

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Re: RE: Phone telepathy proved true in experiment

gangstalking said:
Though I do believe in morphic resonance...
Why would you believe a crackpot idea like that? There's no evidence for it, unless you have some nobody else has seen. Try this http://www.skepdic.com/morphicres.html and also try the link at the bottom of that page to Michael Shermer's article in Scientific American. He points out that believers interpret both positive and negative test results for morphic resonance as supporting their claims, so it would appear the claims are invulnerable to any kind of evidence. That makes them vacuous.


Edited: Had to do some messing around to fix the links. Scientific American apparently won't let you link directly to their site unless you sign some kind of complex legal agreement, which I didn't want to bother with.
 

gc

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May 9, 2006
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Blackleaf said:
"The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

"The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."

He said he found the same result with people being asked to name one of four people sending them an e-mail before it had landed.

However, his sample was small on both trials -- just 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the email -- and only four subjects were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some skepticism.

"the odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one"

A quick calculation using a binomial disribution shows that is false. Taking n=63 (63 trials) and p=0.25 (percentage of getting it right) and 28 hits (45% of 63) shows that the probability of this happening by chance is 1 in 1,653 not 1 in a trillion. Even if the hit rate was 45% for both experiments (n=113) and hits = 51, the probability of it happening by chance is about 1 in 780,000. Or maybe my math is rusty?? But if I am correct, why would he exaggerate the results?? ....and that is assuming the experiment was done honestly.
 

Dexter Sinister

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gc said:
... But if I am correct, why would he exaggerate the results?? ....and that is assuming the experiment was done honestly.
You can reasonably assume the experiment was done honestly but incorrectly. Sheldrake's not deliberately dishonest (at least, I don't *think* he is), but appears to have a very limited understanding of statistics and proper experimental protocols. Odd that, he has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and certainly should understand those things very well. Nobody but true believers similar to himself, with the same flawed understanding of how to do things, has ever been able to replicate any of his tests.
 

gangstalking

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Sep 10, 2006
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Re: RE: Phone telepathy proved true in experiment

Dexter Sinister said:
gangstalking said:
Though I do believe in morphic resonance...
Why would you believe a crackpot idea like that? There's no evidence for it, unless you have some nobody else has seen. Try this http://www.skepdic.com/morphicres.html and also try the link at the bottom of that page to Michael Shermer's article in Scientific American. He points out that believers interpret both positive and negative test results for morphic resonance as supporting their claims, so it would appear the claims are invulnerable to any kind of evidence. That makes them vacuous.


Edited: Had to do some messing around to fix the links. Scientific American apparently won't let you link directly to their site unless you sign some kind of complex legal agreement, which I didn't want to bother with.

Hey Dexter, what's up?

The idea is not a crack pot idea, however belief in the theory is still a work in progress it has never been proven or disproven. Just to make sure that we are on the same page, here is a simplified explaination of what I believe.

"The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels. And how that influence moves across time, the collective squirrel-memory both for form and for instincts, is given by the process I call morphic resonance. It's a theory of collective memory throughout nature. What the memory is expressed through are the morphic fields, the fields within and around each organ ism. The memory processes are due to morphic resonance."

Basically I think that as humans we could well have a collective human memory or ccollective consciousness that we draw from, I don't think the idea is so far out there.

Here is a bit more on Rupert Sheldrake for those not familiar with the man.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake

Here is a really good article for those not familiar with the idea of collective conscienceness.
http://www.wie.org/j25/kenny.asp
 

gangstalking

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Dexter Sinister said:
gc said:
... But if I am correct, why would he exaggerate the results?? ....and that is assuming the experiment was done honestly.
You can reasonably assume the experiment was done honestly but incorrectly. Sheldrake's not deliberately dishonest (at least, I don't *think* he is), but appears to have a very limited understanding of statistics and proper experimental protocols. Odd that, he has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and certainly should understand those things very well. Nobody but true believers similar to himself, with the same flawed understanding of how to do things, has ever been able to replicate any of his tests.

Again trying to prove something like a collective conscience is going to be difficult especially in a lab setting, but the experiments that are being done are more and more promissing, again I think he needs a way larger sample than he has in this experiment to give greater validity to his renderings.
 

Dexter Sinister

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Re: RE: Phone telepathy proved true in experiment

gangstalking said:
Hey Dexter, what's up?

The idea is not a crack pot idea, however belief in the theory is still a work in progress it has never been proven or disproven.
It seems pretty much crackpot to me. The original notion is, as far as I know, due to Carl Jung, who wrote about what he called the collective unconscious, which I understand to be a pool of ideas and what Jung called "truths" that every mind can tap into at need, and it somehow unites all of us at some unconscious level. I'm quite prepared to believe that the collective minds of the 6 billion or so human beings on the planet might have some significance for us all, if somebody could provide good evidence of some effect from it. I'm not completely an empiricist, and I try to be open to stuff like this, but at heart I'm still a hard-nosed old engineer and my instinctive response to stuff like this is usually, "Oh yeah? Prove it." For Jung's notion of a collective unconscious, for instance, my first question would be, "Where is it, where is this stuff stored?" Jung was pretty clear about it being external to us as individuals, and he seemed to think it was just floating out there in some weird space we can't normally detect.

It's a nice idea, I'd like it to be true, but I know of no convincing evidence that points that way. In fact all the evidence I know of points the other way. For instance, Sheldrake's claim that people can tell when they're being stared at has clearly been shown to be false, as you'll see if you follow the links I posted about a week ago. And that's generally true of all independent tests of his ideas. It's too bad, in a way, it'd be nice if he was right, but the best evidence is that he's not.
 

hermanntrude

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Jun 23, 2006
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RE: Phone telepathy prove

I would not be surprised if these theories were true. But I have seen no evidence of that in the above links
 

gangstalking

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Re: RE: Phone telepathy proved true in experiment

Dexter Sinister said:
"Oh yeah? Prove it." For Jung's notion of a collective unconscious, for instance, my first question would be, "Where is it, where is this stuff stored?" Jung was pretty clear about it being external to us as individuals, and he seemed to think it was just floating out there in some weird space we can't normally detect.

It's a nice idea, I'd like it to be true, but I know of no convincing evidence that points that way. In fact all the evidence I know of points the other way. For instance, Sheldrake's claim that people can tell when they're being stared at has clearly been shown to be false, as you'll see if you follow the links I posted about a week ago. And that's generally true of all independent tests of his ideas. It's too bad, in a way, it'd be nice if he was right, but the best evidence is that he's not.

Hey Dexter.

I can completely see where you are coming from on this. I don't know how we will ever prove this, some of the best experiments have involved pets who's owners moved and they were able to locate the family. There has to be something there, how else could these animals find the families?

Eg. a family moves thousands of miles, spuffy the cat has never seen the new house, but 3 weeks later is able to locate the family. There must be something there.

The other thing that I was trying to find which I could not was information about the memory being stored outside of the brain. I had read that there was reseach being done on this theory. Cause if we can prove that memory is stored outside of the brain then this would be closer to proving the original theory of a collective unconscious.

Eg. People born with very small brains or no brains who function very well, some scientist have been lead to the belief then that memory might be stored outside of the brain. I tried to find the article, but this was years ago and I have not kept up.

This article was interesting, but not the article that I was looking for.
http://www.alternativescience.com/no_brainer.htm
 

humanbeing

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Jul 21, 2006
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RE: Phone telepathy prove

Well, we might not have telepathy now, but we probably will have something like it in the near future. And no, I'm not talking about certain humans within the population evolving to the "next step" and attaining these powers, like in some wacko comic book, or something.

I'm talking about technology... perhaps something along the lines of Marshall Brain's Vertebrane. See the wikipedia article on that...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertebrane

Or better yet, read his story...

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

** I highly recommend reading this if you have the time. Very fun, thoughtful stuff. **

By then, we won't be talking about phone telepathy, not because it was proven to be crackpot, but because we will use this technology instead of phones, which will give us a type of telepathy.
 

hermanntrude

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Jun 23, 2006
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Eg. a family moves thousands of miles, spuffy the cat has never seen the new house, but 3 weeks later is able to locate the family. There must be something there.

interesting.

while I agree you may have hit on one of the points at which something unknown may be true, I can see a way these kind of stories may have developed. It's based on a few things:

1) people can be VERY soppy over household pets
2) when people are soppy they can often fool themselves (remember when you were a kid and totally believed that aliens had given you the five pound note u found in teh gutter? or you really had seen a golden eagle on the M1?)
3) glossy magazines pay a lot of money for that kind of story

So the story goes as follows:

The family Jonson moves, accidentally leaving behind diddums their loved and spoilt rotten cat which serruptitiously scratches the fuck out of all visitors, knowing that the family would never believe anyone who claimed their precious pussy was an evil little sod. The cat itself dies horribly on the local highway while looking for a rat to eat and is never seen again, roasted on a fire by some local bums.

Meanwhile the family jonson are distraught and also very embarrassed that hey were dumb enough to forget to bring the cat. The youngest daughter finds a cat which is remarkably similar to diddums and currently has no owner since she passed away in her sleep three doors away. The cat has been wandering around the naighbourhood for a week, and is tired and prepared to give allegiance to any family willing to give it food and a nice soft bed to sleep on. The cat acts pleased to see the daughter, as it has acted pleased to see everyone it has seen for the last week, and half expects the usual kick in the rusty starfish. This time however, diddums (II) is successful, and the daughter, half believing, half not believing that this is in actual fact diddums (I), the original, and picks it up, gives it some love, takes it home, and on the way, totally convinces herself that this must be the real cat and prepares herself for the hissy fit she knows she must throw if anyone shows any sign of disbelief.

Upon arrival at the family home, daughter sees mother, and mother quickly infers most of the above, and realises she must at all costs avoid the aforementioned hissy fit, and is somewhat surprised that diddums(II) looks amazingly similar to the bums' lunch. She quickly finds that she can accept the new cat as much as the first one and finds the best way to accept her daughters story is to appear to believe it herself, and the best way to acheive this is to fool herself into believing it. Father doesnt care cos he's tired home from work, but realises they might make some money after the local neighbours totally believe the story, hook, line and sinker as everyone has heard that cats can do this. The siblings all join in the game, as for all they know this is how cats move house anyway.

Family Jonson sells story to "heat" and "don't you just love it" and a host of other trashy glossy magazines which also include stories on how amazing these new diet pills are and how they helped maggie lose 13 stones in two days. Everyone who reads it believes it as the degrees of separation make it easier to accept, they also believe the diet pill story and end up pissing their own bladders out for a week and putting all the weight (4lbs) back on the next week.

Now I'm not suggesting that cats couldn't do this, because I have a lot of respect for cats and animals as a whole, but i wonder... has this ever happened to a chipped cat?
 

Karlin

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Jun 27, 2004
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I want to believe

Oh ya, for sure!! This is as much news as that water is wet. [someone allready said that I bet].

But I have had it happen to me, esp with my neice, who only calls me about once a year. With people who you talk to regularly, it is expected you could guess it is them, but with the ones who call rarely it is evidence.

My neice calls, and I was thinking about her just as the ring started.
My friend Kirs calls about twice a year, and I am thinking about him for the first time in months just before he calls.
When my blue friends with the big dark eyes, from outer space, Anteres I think, calls me up, I allways know its them too.

Actually, I am making one of those up - I bet you can guess which one.
Karlin
 

Dexter Sinister

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With people who you talk to regularly, it is expected you could guess it is them, but with the ones who call rarely it is evidence.
'Fraid not, not by itself. You have to balance that against every time you thought of your niece and she didn't call. Besides, is there some predictable pattern to her infrequent calls? Like, she calls you on your birthday or some other significant anniversary?

I think you made up the one about the blue friends with big dark eyes. Am I right? Do I win a prize?