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.
Comments
is in your plans to try a replication of Sheldrake's work?
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).
If I sat there, I'd probably doubt my hunches up to the point where it's nothing but a guessinggame.
How to distinguish?
Practice.
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 ...).
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.
Go here for the full article:
http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/telepathy/Nolan_abs.html
A bit off topic (apologies) but have you had a look at the data from the online suite of tests? Do you intend to publish, and what results have been found in terms of overall effect size and psychological / geo-physical correlates.
Thanks,
Michael.
No and yes. I've been busy with other projects and haven't looked at the online data for years. Some day I will.
Just recently I looked at your article
"Compassionate intention as a therapeutic intervention by partners of cancer patients: effects of distant intention on the patients´ autonomic nervous system"
In the beginning of the discussion section it is written "It might be noted that the absolute magnitudes of the observed effects were still rather small, for example, for the receiver’s SCL, the peak changes over baseline amounted to fractions of a microSiemen.."
Could you enlighten me about what is a typical response above the baseline (in microSiemen) for senders?
-Tor
2 to 10 microSiemens is not uncommon for a response to a stimulus.
So the smaller DMILS effect, is it at all visible/detectable above noise in single trials? Or is it just as you group them the together that the signal to noise ratio gets high enough?
Of course, any one single trial might be a fluke, but if someone consistently get a signal in the hypnotized direction, then that would be interesting.
In recent years I've occasionally been looking at so called bio-energy research. Especially the subcategory that has emerged from China examining external qi. Some of the reported effects here are much larger than what is usually reported from DMILS and MMI studies in the west.
Especially the study of Xin Yan and his abilities are fascinating. The review article “Certain Physical manifestation and Effects of External
Qi of Yan Xin Life Science Technology
(Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 381–411, 2002) shows some huge effects on radioactive decay time. Normally REG studies show a change from baseline of only a small fraction of a percent, but these studies range from 1-12% changes. Some of these experiments were done remotely, e.g qi was projected from the US to China. In another study he completely kills off all cancerous grown cells within 24 hours, compared to none in control groups (External Qi of Yan Xin Qigong induces G2/M arrest and apoptosis of androgen-independent prostate cancer cells by inhibiting Akt and NF-jB pathways
, Mol Cell Biochem (2008) 310:227–234
DOI 10.1007/s11010-007-9684-2). Reading these reports I can not see any obvious signs of incompetence in research design. And there have been extensive collaboration with western well known institutions during recent years.
If you ever get the chance Dean, I think testing Xin Yan could be very interesting.
-Tor
This may be a bit off topic but I was reading an earlier post on spoon bending which got me very interested in the subject. In doing further research on the topic I found that many people report that this actually happens. This blew my mind a bit because I had long ago written spoon bending off as slight of hand trickery.
The point of this is that I am curious as to what you felt during the experience and how you were told to focus on the spoon. I am also curious about meditation and how to go about doing it. I was just wondering if you could give me a few pointers on where to start.
I think it will be hard to replicate a relaxed environment in a test. From personal experience as psychic when I'm tested unkowingly by a client it's difficult to be accurate. The information doesn't flow. Full disclosure - its fair to say I'm a better healer than a psychic, but from experience there's something about being tested that interfers.
So on the healing table a client might keep something from me intentionally and I may not pick it up. If they tell me a little about why they're there but forget something I'll find it.
I tend to get emotional personal things when I'm reading, and if I hit a nerve, the reaction from the client can shut down the information.
It works the other way too. Extreme ends of the scale seem to have an affect. Yes everybody wants it to work expectation is high - a mediocre result. This is rot and I don't want to be here - a mediocre result.
Surprise, humour, gratitude, middle range emotions intentions seem to get the best results. How you test this I don't know.
I'm just sharing my personal experience and observations.
I'm not sure how to word this, but it was interesting how some of the sisters were unable to pick up on the more skeptical sister: it's like there was a "mental block" there that kept the other sisters from picking up on her.