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Plain English Summary
Can people guess who's about to message them? This pioneering study brought telepathy testing online, having nearly 200 people identify which of four friends was sending them a message. Across 2,000 trials, participants guessed correctly 29.3% of the time — above the 25% expected by chance. Family members boosted the signal noticeably. "Virtual" senders (no real person) served as a comparison; real senders initially looked far better, but that gap shrank after correcting for response bias. The caveat: unsupervised online testing meant cheating couldn't be ruled out. The study fed into Sheldrake's broader telecommunication telepathy program and his 2025 meta-analysis.
Research Notes
Pioneering automated online telepathy test enabling large-scale internet data collection. Part of Sheldrake's telecommunication telepathy research program, extending the paradigm from telephone and email to web-based messaging. The virtual sender control provides an internal baseline, though response bias complicates its interpretation. Included in Sheldrake's 2025 meta-analysis.
An automated, internet-based telepathy experiment tested whether receivers could identify which of four senders had been randomly selected to write them a short message in a one-minute trial. Across 198 completed 10-trial sessions by 195 receivers (1,980 total trials), the hit rate was 29.3% against a 25% chance baseline (p = 0.000006, 95% CI: 27-31%). In conditions with two real and two virtual senders, raw hit rates were markedly higher for real senders (41.9% vs 23.7%), but after correcting for response bias, this difference was not statistically significant (34.2% vs 30.1%). Family members yielded higher hit rates than non-family (31.4% vs 27.5%, p = 0.02). The unsupervised online format could not rule out cheating, limiting evidential weight.
Related Papers
Cites
- Experimental Tests for Telephone Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert (2003)
- Videotaped Experiments on Telephone Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert (2003)
- A Filmed Experiment on Telephone Telepathy with the Nolan Sisters — Sheldrake, Rupert (2004)
- Testing for Telepathy in Connection with E-mails — Sheldrake, Rupert (2005)
Same Research Program
Also by these authors
More in Telepathy
Rethinking Communication and Consciousness: Lessons from The Telepathy Tapes Podcast
Who's Calling? Evaluating the Accuracy of Guessing Who Is on the Phone
A Comparison of Four New Automated Telephone Telepathy Tests
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
📋 Cite this paper
Sheldrake, Rupert, Lambert, Michael (2007). An Automated Online Telepathy Test. Journal of Scientific Exploration.
@article{sheldrake_lambert_2007_online_telepathy,
title = {An Automated Online Telepathy Test},
author = {Sheldrake, Rupert and Lambert, Michael},
year = {2007},
journal = {Journal of Scientific Exploration},
}