Who's there?

How many of you have had the experience of thinking of someone you know and suddenly having them call you out of the blue?

Those conventional explanation is that this is simple coincidence, and that you never remember all the times when you think about somebody and they don't call.

Rupert Sheldrake wanted to test this scientifically and see if there was evidence that people could determine the identity of an unknown caller at better than chance rates. He advertised in various newspapers looking for people who felt that they knew who was calling them before they picked up the phone.

After a series of preliminary trials, Sheldrake picked the most successful participants for a more rigorous set of trials under videotaped supervision. Here is the abstract of his paper:

The authors tested whether participants (N = 4) could tell who was calling before answering the telephone. In each trial, participants had 4 potential callers, one of whom was selected at random by the experimenter. Participants were filmed on time-coded videotape throughout the experimental period. When the telephone began ringing, the participants said to the camera whom they thought the caller was and, in many cases, also how confident they felt in their guesses. The callers were usually several miles away, and in some cases thousands of miles away. By guessing at random, there was a 25% chance of success. In a total of 271 trials, there were 122 (45%) correct guesses (p = 10-12). The 95% confidence limits of this success rate were from 39% to 51%. In most trials, some of the callers were familiar to the participants and others were unfamiliar. With familiar callers there was a success rate of 61% (n = 100; p = 10-13). With unfamiliar callers the success rate of 20% was not significantly different from chance. When they said they were confident about their guesses, participants were indeed more successful than when they were not confident.

Sheldrake has also studied the same phenomena in conjunction with emails. The results here also are astronomically significant, with a large effect size.

And Lobach and Bierman successfully replicated the telephone telepathy study, although their effect size and statistical significance is much less than Sheldrake's. This might be because Sheldrake advertised in large-circulation newspapers for people who felt they often experienced telephone telepathy, while Lobach and Bierman merely circulated an emailed request for volunteers among people they knew, likely reaching far fewer potential subjects with lesser abilities.

Skeptic demonstrates psi (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

In 1995, Rupert Sheldrake began an investigation of a dog named JayTee and his apparent ability to know when his owner, Pamela Smart, was on the way home. Dr. Sheldrake became aware of JayTee when Smart answered an advertisement in the paper looking for dogs who seemed to know when their owner was returning home.

Dr. Sheldrake began to observe JayTee and it quickly became apparent that JayTee was, indeed, going to the window and apparently waiting for her whenever Smart was on her way home. And this behavior occurred despite changes in her return time and using a variety of different modes of transportation. So Sheldrake designed a videotape experiment to provide objective evidence of JayTee's unusual ability, and conducted a large number of trials with Pam and Jaytee.

Sheldrake invited Dr. Richard Wiseman to perform his own videotaped trials with Jaytee. Wiseman conducted four trials total and then proclaimed loudly to the media that JayTee had no special abilities.

However, Sheldrake obtained the videotape data and found that Wiseman's data matched his own experimental data very closely.

It appears that Dr. Wiseman is still claiming JayTee showed no special abilities and "failed the test" despite the fact that his own data matches Sheldrake's. Certainly most of the "skeptic" websites seem to loudly proclaim how Wiseman "disproved" Sheldrake's research with JayTee.

I'm including data published in Sheldrake's account of the controversy with Wiseman below so you can judge for yourself.

The first graph shows Sheldrake's data from 30 videotaped trials. The second shows data from Wiseman's 3 trials taken at the same location. The bottom graph shows control data from 10 trials when Smart arrived home much later than the recorded data or did not return that evening. Note that the last point in all trials shows the first 10 minutes of Smart's return journey which always lasted at least 13 minutes, so no data from Pam's actual arrival in the vicinity.









UPDATE: Richard Wiseman admitted in his recent Skeptiko interview, that his data does correspond with Sheldrake's. Wiseman should be congratulated for his honesty about this.

Taboos in science. . .

Here is Rupert Sheldrake talking about taboos in science:

I hope Lewis would also say something about that because … I think it is a taboo subject. It’s an extraordinary thing that scientists who claim to be rational or rationalists, get extraordinarily irrational when it comes to the subject of telepathy. The belief in evidence just goes out of the window. It often arouses deep emotions, and I often wonder, why is it that people get so upset at the possible existence of telepathy? Why is it something so deeply disturbing?

I think the reasons are historical. They go back at least as far as the ‘enlightenment,’ when the idea of the agenda was to push forward the science and reason and reject religion and superstition, credulity, folklaw and so forth. Somehow, telepathy - at that time, not called telepathy - but somehow, these psychic phenomena got put into the compartment of ‘superstition,’ and ever since then, rational people have been supposed not to believe in them. I think that’s why (as a sociological fact) you won’t find serious articles about this in broadsheet newspapers or on Horizon programmes on BBC, because these are beyond the pale of rational discourse, and educated people - not just scientists, but most university graduates - know that they’re meant to be part of this ‘enlightenment’ project, and at least in public, are supposed to deny telepathy, or at least, not talk about it. The penalty for doing so is to be thought credulous, superstitious or stupid and no one wants to lose intellectual cast.

So, I think that this taboo got established quite early on and it’s somehow been in place ever since then. If you look at the controversies in the late 19th century, they were the same as today, the same kinds of arguments. The people in favour, said, “Here’s all the evidence.” The people against, said, “It’s impossible, the evidence is all not credible, etc.” It’s very strange in science that some new ideas are perfectly acceptable. For example, David Deutsch who is a Physicist in Oxford has written a book on Time Travel. He’s also written a book on Multiple Universes, the idea that every time a physical observation is made, the universe splits, and there’s billions, trillions, quadrillions of parallel universes, completely unobserved. He holds down a respectful position in Physics in Oxford. There’s no evidence at all for this postulate, and yet, this is quite tolerable within Physics. However, when it comes to the subject of telepathy, David Deutsch says very much the same as Lewis Wolpert. “It’s total rubbish, not a shred of evidence.” I know he hasn’t studied the evidence, but somehow the same person can have totally wild theories about parallel universes and yet, this complete taboo against telepathy, co-existing in the same person. . .

Telepathy Debate: Wolpert and Sheldrake

Here are some excerpts of a debate between Lewis Wolpert and Rupert Sheldrake at the London Royal Society for the Arts held in 1994:

Rupert Sheldrake: Thank you. Well, Lewis Wolpert and I agree on one thing, which is that we think the nature of science is based on evidence. He thinks there’s no persuasive evidence for telepathy. Of course, that depends on how easily it is to persuade somebody. There are many creationists who think there’s no persuasive evidence for evolution. If you have a closed mind and if you’re convinced you’re right, then no amount of evidence will make the slightest difference. I think that the question really is, what is the evidence for telepathy and that’s what I’m going to talk about. I, myself, think there’s a lot of persuasive evidence for telepathy, and I think that the experiments that have been done to test it have been far from pathological. . .

Professor Lewis Wolpert: . . .I have in front of me a paper by Richard Wiseman, Matthew Smith, and Julie Milton, actually done with your dog … (sorry, no, Pam Smart as your collaborator), with your dog, Jaytee, which you claimed, knew when (I think it was you) who were coming home, and their analysis of the behaviour of the dog, Jaytee, shows that the dog didn’t have a clue. It would go outside for all sorts of reasons, and, you know, there was somebody passing by, there was a cat in a nearby tree. It didn’t have a clue when you were coming home. So, here is a people, trying to replicate your experiment, and simply falsifying it. . .

Rupert Sheldrake: Well, I noticed that when the parrot film was showing, Lewis wasn’t looking at it! That film was shown on television … and in early stage of our investigations, he did the same then. They asked a sceptic to commentate. Lewis appeared on the screen and he said, “Telepathy is just junk … there is no evidence whatsoever for any personal, animal or thing being telepathic.” The filmmakers were surprised that he hadn’t actually asked to see the evidence before he commented on it, and I think, this is rather like the Cardinal Bellarmine, and people not wanting to look through Galileo’s Telescope. I think we have a level here of just not wanting to know, which is not real science … I’m sorry to have to say it, Lewis.

Let me come to his specific points. He said that in the telephone experiments we didn’t bother to find out the effects of distance. Yes we did. If you read the paper, we deliberately recruited people in England who had relatives living in Australia and New Zealand and South Africa. We tested it at distances right up to the Outer Hebrides, precisely to find out, is it distance-dependant. It’s not … distance had no effect. . .

Now, when we come to the case of the psychic dog, Jaytee, - the dog that belongs to Pam Smart who is here this evening - what we found in our experiments was that the dog - here are some averages from these experiments the dog … these are 10-minute periods after Pam went out … these are the number of seconds at the window, evaluated from the videotape by a third party who knew nothing else about the experiment in an objective measure at the time it went to the window. That is the first 10 minutes of her homeward journey, from at least five miles away. These are medium-length experiments and these are short ones. The dog did sometimes go to the window, when she wasn’t coming home, to bark at passing cats or look at commotions or disturbances outside or people arriving in cars, but it went to the window far more when she was on the way home and it started waiting, in the 10 minutes before she started off home, when she decided to come home or when she got a random signal on a pager to go home. It was highly significant it was at the window most when she was on her way home and it wasn’t just that it waited a certain time and then went there, because in these short experiments, you see it was at the window at long time, whereas at the same time after she went out here, it wasn’t. These results are highly significant, highly repeatable. We’ve done lots of them.

The case of Richard Wiseman and his colleagues is a very interesting one. Wiseman is one of Britain’s leading media sceptics. He is an informed sceptic, in the sense he reads the literature and knows what’s going on and he actually does experiments. However, he is a very committed sceptic who believes these things are basically impossible, and Wiseman went along to do these experiments with Pam Smart. He invented a criterion for the success or failure of the dog, which was, that it should go to the window, for no reason apparent to Wiseman … the first experiment it was 60 seconds. Then he changed the criterion to being two minutes for no apparent reason. If the dog went to the window for no apparent reason when she wasn’t coming home, it failed the test.

He published a paper in the British Journal of Psychology, saying it had failed the test. There’s the paper. He put a Press Release. It was in all the science correspondence that most of our broadsheet newspapers are committed sceptics (most of them). They’re very credulous when it comes to claims of sceptics. The papers were full of it. ‘Psychic dog fails test … Psychic dog fails to give scientists a lead,’ and so on! It was on the radio, it was on the television … the whole phenomenon was totally refuted and everybody bought it (who wants to believe that) and we’ve heard from Lewis, a categorical statement.

However, if you plant Richard Wiseman’s data on a graph, which he didn’t do in his papers, even though I sent him graphs before he submitted it, his data corresponds very precisely with my own!