Testing for Telepathy in Connection with E-mails
📄 Original study ↗📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
If telephone telepathy is a thing, does it work over email too? That's what this study asked, and the results are striking. Participants guessed which of four people was about to email them, submitting their guess one minute before the message arrived — all time-stamped to prove guesses came first. In round one, 50 participants took 552 guesses and got it right 43% of the time, crushing the 25% chance rate with astronomically significant statistics (p = 2 x 10^-19). An impressive 43 out of 50 people scored above chance. Round two upped the anti-fraud game: five top performers did 30 more trials while continuously filmed, with screens covered between trials. Their hit rate actually *rose* to 47% — a powerful argument against cheating, since scores should drop under surveillance if someone's gaming the system, not improve. One wild finding: people were significantly better at identifying emails from people they knew versus strangers. Some participants scored well with senders thousands of miles away, including one whose emailers were in Hong Kong. That familiarity effect matters because it favors telepathy (mind-to-mind connection) over alternatives like clairvoyance (directly perceiving hidden information) or precognition (predicting random events). This study directly inspired a later automated version, making it a stepping stone toward more standardized psi research.
Related Papers
Same Research Program
- Videotaped Experiments on Telephone Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2003)
- A Filmed Experiment on Telephone Telepathy with the Nolan Sisters — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2004)
- An Automated Test for Telepathy in Connection with Emails — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2009)
- Telepathic Telephone Calls: Two Surveys — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2000)
- Testing a Language-Using Parrot for Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2003)
- The Sense of Being Stared At, Part 1: Is It Real or Illusory? — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2005)
Cited By
- Do You Know Who Is Calling? Experiments on Anomalous Cognition in Phone Call Receivers — Schmidt, Stefan. (2009)
- Telecommunication Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2025)
- An Automated Online Telepathy Test — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2007)
- A Rapid Online Telepathy Test — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2009)
- Who's Calling? Evaluating the Accuracy of Guessing Who Is on the Phone — Wahbeh, Helané. (2024)
- A Comparison of Four New Automated Telephone Telepathy Tests — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2024)
Extended By
Companion
- Automated Tests for Telephone Telepathy Using Mobile Phones — Sheldrake, Rupert (2015)
- Videotaped Experiments on Telephone Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2003)
- Do You Know Who Is Calling? Experiments on Anomalous Cognition in Phone Call Receivers — Schmidt, Stefan. (2009)
- A Filmed Experiment on Telephone Telepathy with the Nolan Sisters — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2004)
- An Automated Test for Telepathy in Connection with Emails — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2009)
Also by these authors
More in Telepathy
Rethinking Communication and Consciousness: Lessons from The Telepathy Tapes Podcast
Taking the Mindfield Literally: Discovering Minds by Assuming Competence Among Nonspeakers
Detecting Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis for Extrasensory Perception Experiments in Last 20 Years
Meta-Analysis of Free-Response Studies 2009-2018: Assessing the Noise-Reduction Model Ten Years On
Can Morphic Fields Help Explain Telepathy and the Sense of Being Stared At?
📋 Cite this paper
Sheldrake, Rupert., Smart, Pamela. (2005). Testing for Telepathy in Connection with E-mails. Perceptual and Motor Skills.
@article{sheldrake_2005_email_telepathy,
title = {Testing for Telepathy in Connection with E-mails},
author = {Sheldrake, Rupert. and Smart, Pamela.},
year = {2005},
journal = {Perceptual and Motor Skills},
}