Rupert Sheldrake Study into Phone Telepathy

In 2006 Rupert Sheldrake conducted experiments which he claimed supported the existence of "phone telepathy", the phenomena of knowing who is calling you before you pick up the phone. His results were presented to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

In his experiments, each subject provided researchers with the names of four friends or relatives. These people were told to ring the subject at random. The subject was asked to identify the caller before answering the phone. Similar tests were run using email instead of telephones.

Sheldrake reported a 45% success rate which is well above the 25% expected by the law of averages. Sheldrake calculates the odds of this happening by chance at 1,000 billion to one against.

On the face of it, this presents an interesting result worthy of further investigation.

Critics have responded by identifying the following flaws in the experiments:

• The sample size was very small — 63 subjects for the telephone experiment and 50 for the email experiment.
• Only nine subjects in total were filmed during the study (four for the phone and five for the email), providing inadequate verification.

Sheldrake, who has been funded by the highly respectable Trinity College of Cambridge, intends to expand his experiments to include text messages on mobile phones.

While showing some promise, this experiment requires independent verification and replication before too much can be inferred from it.

References:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/09/05/telepathy.reut/index.html