Telephone telepathy experiment
Rupert Sheldrake's telephone telepathy experiment is now available in the US at this website.
I haven't tried it yet but I will be signing up shortly.
Rupert Sheldrake's telephone telepathy experiment is now available in the US at this website.
I haven't tried it yet but I will be signing up shortly.
Comments
Thanks for the mention - I developed the website and telephony backend for the experiment.
Hopefully we'll get a few of your regular blog readers to sign up and generate some results.
Regards,
Gareth.
We haven't tested it in Canada - perhaps it already works. Sign up and give it a try!
The long term plan is to make the test available globally.
Gareth.
Have you noticed that skeptics generally ignore Sheldrake's telephone telepathy experiments? I've seen skeptics mention Ganzfeld many times, but IME they rarely address Sheldrake's telephone work.
Why do you think that is?
On a completely different note, do you ever accept research assistants or interns at the undergraduate level? It would be a dream to work alongside you at IONS or elsewhere as you're one of the only academic conducting truly groundbreaking psi research in California, and the west coast for that matter. I hope to get a response!
All the best,
Madison
Aside from the many questions I'm laying on you can you answer these few questions?
1. Can you recommend any authors or works with a similar academic rigour and sober analysis as displayed in Entangled Minds? That contains the only statistical analysis and experimental designs that I feel comfortable bringing up to anyone with a scientific background. Thank you for that! I always preface what I say by something I heard you once say which I think is especially apt, "80-90% of psi can be explained by human confounding factors, the rest is left for rigorous study". I'm sure you're familiar with the reactions one gets when bringing up psi so employing such a disclaimer is extremely effective as people think of Sylvia Browne when they think psychic and all credibility goes out the window.
2. What do you think of Penrose-Hameroff Orchestrated Objective Reduction? If you have time I'd love to talk about some theories of mind that allow psi, and their experimental and internal consistencies. I think your entangled minds concept is closely related to Hameroff's ideas.
3. Are you working on any new books? I think the world really needs a sober account of real psi research, along with a thorough exploration of the traditional explanations contrasted with new theories that don't assume a majority of the population is delusional, fantasy-prone, self-deceiving revisionists who think they can make gold appear with their minds. Aside from your somewhat brief foray into theory in EM, all other attempts have been thwarted by authors like Michael Talbot who could easily be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, while giving equal credulity to anecdotes of materialization and Karl Pribram's seminal findings. These and other facts keep me from handing out copies of The Holographic Universe to friends, along with 99.99% of psi books. A case in point is the fact that I had to venture to the "New Age" section to find your book squeezed between a copy of "Vampire Handbook" and "I Was Raped by an Alien" or some such hilarity. Entangled Minds should be in the science section as it has more evidence than some of the books populating the shelves of said section.
Excuse the ramble and any spelling or grammar mistakes I'm currently writing from my phone.
All the best,
Madison
1) See the book "Irreducible Mind" by Kelly et al, for a comprehensive examination of phenomena that challenge prevailing neuroscience assumptions.
2)I like the Penrose-Hameroff model, and a related one by Stapp. My guess is that quantum mind models will continue to be supported by quantum biology, and that such models will eventually replace classical neuroscience models.
3) I have several ideas for books in mind, but I haven't had time to work on them. Also the book publishing business was hit hard by the recession and the rise of the e-book phenomenon, so it's increasingly difficult to get the big publishing houses interested in publishing anything today unless (a) you are a celebrity who did something stupid, (b) already a best selling fiction writer, or (c) intensely famous for other other reason. There are exceptions of course, but it takes lots of quality time to craft a book worth reading, and I am involved in research most of the time.
I will recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the UFO phenomenon. It will be especially interesting to those who are not inclined to automatically accept conspiracy theories as viable explanations for every puzzling event. History reveals that real conspiracies are indeed hatched in shadowy political and military circles, but if they involve more than a few people, and the secrets are too juicy, they don't remain secret forever. Many historical events that were the most tightly held secrets 25 to 50 years ago are ho-hum today. Are there new secrets yet to be unveiled? Certainly. Is this one of them? This book makes me doubtful.
Given the release of UFO files by many governments in recent years, and the increasing efforts by various organizations to disclose who knew what and when, I think it has become increasingly unlikely that any government or private group knows anything more about this phenomenon than anyone else. Conspiracies may be more comforting to believe in because it means that someone is in charge. But the reality is far more unsettling: No one is in charge. That is one of the key messages of this book -- people at the highest levels of the government know nothing about this phenomenon. There have been cover-ups revealed by FOIA requests, but that information just confirms that some UFO reports are genuine mysteries. They do not suggest the existence of secret cabals that know what is going on. This can be a scary thought to contemplate if you believe that someone, somewhere, ought to be in charge.
So for me Alexander's book significantly reduces the likelihood that there are black projects in cahoots with aliens, but at the same time it significantly increases the underlying mystery. That is, UFOs are a genuine and probably an ancient mystery, and something far stranger than human conspiracies or the ET equivalent of those conspiracies may be at play here. That conclusion is at once unsettling and yet, from a perspective of our species as primates just recently down from the trees, not surprising.
I might add that I know some of the people mentioned in this book, including the author, and the story told here is completely consonant with things I've been told by them in private over the years.