Friday, November 13, 2009
Rupert Sheldrake: Telephone Telepathy
Rupert's genius is developing simple, scientifically sound ways of demonstrating psi phenomena. Telephone telepathy is one of my favorites, and this video is a great way of showing how the test works, and a glimpse at the results.
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18 comments:
hah that was great AND its made me like the Nolan Sisters . They've got good sense of humour ;)
For a while I've had the idea that small groups of musicians who play intensively together for a long time might be among the best candidates for tests of interpersonal psi. (Alongside obvious candidate groups like siblings of course!) Not only do these groups spend long periods together concentrating on a shared mental task, the task involves emotional and aesthetic as well as mechanical performance. And it's a task involving precise and subtle co-ordination of timing, so Libet's experiments might suggest that a rhythmically tight band, especially one that plays rhythmically subtle or flexible music, should be expected to have some entanglement going on. And there are anecdotes suggesting that some tight bands do indeed demonstrate unusual mental closeness or sympathy. An all-too-obvious example is The Beatles: in his Revolution in the Head Ian MacDonald remarks on "the group's often reported sense of psychic collectivity" (p. 125, and note the anecdote on that page). Though of course we've also seen every imaginable form of conflict, bad blood and treachery inside bands...
Hi, Dean
is in your plans to try a replication of Sheldrake's work?
After speaking with Rupert about this and similar experiments, I've been inspired to come up with a replication of his automated telephone telepathy experiment (that will work in the US, which is not a trivial issue).
One of my favourite heretics.
I love the everyday nature of the experiments that Dr. Sheldrake devises. In my opinion a large part of the appeal of his work is due to the fact that most people can identify with the concepts and results (eg. I can identify with the experience of knowing who's calling before I pick up the phone, but I struggle to identify with the experience of the ganzfeld procedure).
It's true that many lab experiments can seem abstract and divorced from reality. But they also provide simple ways of controlling and interpreting what's going on. I try to design studies that match what people actually report, but also match what scientists are comfortable seeing and evaluating. Sometimes that strategy works, sometimes not so much.
I also think the more traditional lab-based experiments are vital in providing an environment with strict controls that stand up under close scrutiny. The everyday- and lab- approaches compliment eachother and are both vital in spreading knowledge.
How is it possible for the receiver to draw a line between "genuine" psi hunches or just "random" thoughts?
If I sat there, I'd probably doubt my hunches up to the point where it's nothing but a guessinggame.
How to distinguish?
> How is it possible ...?
Practice.
I can't think of any obvious serious flaws in the experimental method. Maybe, however, there is the possibility that the die is slightly (accidentally) loaded in some way so a particular number comes up more often. Then if the receiver happens to like that particular sister more than the others, her score would be higher than chance. The way to get around this would be a series of control tosses to demonstrate the true randomness of tosses of that particular die. How are skeptics challenging these results, other than simply claiming fraud?
I think it is interesting that other telepathy type experiments have results that are better than would be expected by change, but only better by a small margin. Why do you think this is the case?
> loaded in some way so a particular number comes up more often. Then if the receiver happens to like that particular sister more than the others, her score would be higher than chance.
This is known as the "stacking effect," when one bias happens to match another bias. But this same effect has a downside. If the two biases happen to mismatch each other, you can end up with a result that is wildly below chance.
Tossed dice may not be as random as one might like, but in short sequences, as they are used in these experiments, the random sequence is usually perfectly adequate. In any case, it's only in many repeated sessions, with many participants, that a solid statistical case can be made.
> How are skeptics challenging these results, other than simply claiming fraud?
There are no legitimate challenges that I'm aware of. Other than fraud, only highly selective reporting could explain these results in a conventional way. Psi researchers are acutely aware of the biasing effects of selective reporting, and there are very few people actually conducting these experiments in the first place. So when meta-analytical "filedrawer" estimates are made to see how big the supposedly unreported database would have to be, you can quickly calculate that selective reporting is an exceedingly unlikely explanation.
Of course, "these results" are not just the video sessions shown here, but many other well controlled, filmed sessions, along with less tightly controlled unobserved sessions (and ganzfeld studies, and the EEG studies, and ...).
> other telepathy type experiments have results that are better than would be expected by [chance], but only better by a small margin.
Because human performance is variable, and very few people have systematically practiced telepathy for the roughly 10,000 hours it takes to become an expert (in anything). The same variability can be found in many tests of ordinary human performance, and in expert performance as well.
Nice experiment by Rupert. But video did not indicate how many trials the sisters did, a small but very important fact which for me seriously marred the presentation.
"We conducted 12 trials in which the participant and her callers were 1 km apart. Six out of 12 guesses (50%) were correct. The results were significant at the p=0.05 level. "
Go here for the full article:
http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/telepathy/Nolan_abs.html
I am very impressed by Rupert Sheldrake. He has a knack of devising experiments that demonstrate psi in a normal emotional context - such as human-pet relations, or responding to a telephone call - and he is rewarded with much larger effect sizes. Someone mentioned a biased dice - but the dice would have to be grossly distorted to explain 40% rather than 25%. Big effect sizes rule out a lot of subtle possible explanations of that sort.
It seems like this experiment is cheap as relatively easy to do. Why on earth aren't more people doing this? People with close connections would volunteer to do it just for fun. The statistical result appears staggering. With such a result it would seem relatively easy to convert this experiment into a repeatable psi demonstration that would persuade skeptics. Am I naive? Why isn't it being done?
The automated version of this experiment, which is the best way to do it, is technically nontrivial. That's one reason it isn't being done more. Another is that there are very few scientists who have the skills, interest, and the resources to properly do this sort of experiment, and even fewer who might do it and if they get a significant result, risk publishing those results. The strength of the taboo against investigating these phenomena cannot be overestimated.
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