Research News
Who's on the end of the telephone line?
Many of us have had the experience of thinking of someone only for them to telephone us seconds later. Is this just a matter of chance coincidence, or is it sometimes telepathic?
This question is being investigated by Goldsmiths' Professor Chris French, from the Department of Psychology, and Dr Rupert Sheldrake, Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, which is administered by Trinity College, Cambridge.
Their research expands on an original experiment by Dr Sheldrake, in which a participant gives the names of four friends or family members with whom they thought they might be telepathic. One of the four people is then picked at random by the throw of a dice, and asked that person to call their friend. When the telephone rang, the participant had to guess which one of the four people was calling prior to picking up the receiver.
If people have just been guessing at random, they would have been right about 1 time in 4, or 25% of the time. In Dr Sheldrake's experiments encompassing over 1000 of these trials the participants were right over 40% of the time, a statistically significant result. Under these very artificial conditions of testing, no one was right all the time, but the effect was strong enough to show that something more than coincidence was at work.
Professor French - who describes himself as "an open-minded sceptic" - explains that the current experiment has been devised to see whether these results can be replicated. This time the tests will be more meticulous in their scientific methodology with participants being filmed on videotape to record the process, and the 'callers' being located in a separate building. A video example of the research upon which this study is based, can be seen here or through www.sheldrake.org, YouTube.