Telepathy

Reported telepathic experiences range from the everyday (thinking of someone moments before they call, feeling a close family member's distress at a distance) to the more dramatic (receiving specific images, sentences, or numbers from another person without sensory channels). The scientific assessment of telepathy is contested but the literature is well-defined. The principal laboratory test is the Ganzfeld experiment, in which a "receiver" sits in mild sensory deprivation while a "sender" tries to transmit a randomly selected image; the receiver then chooses the target from four options (chance = 25%). Bem and Honorton's 1994 meta-analysis (*Psychological Bulletin*) of autoganzfeld studies reported hit rates around 32% across thousands of trials. A later meta-analysis by Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Risio (*Psychological Bulletin*, 2010) reported similar results. The contrary position (Milton & Wiseman, *Psychological Bulletin* 1999; Hyman, ongoing in *Skeptical Inquirer*) attributes the residual effect to methodological artefacts and publication bias rather than telepathy. Rupert Sheldrake's separate "sense of being stared at" and telephone-telepathy work has been published but remains contested in mainstream psychology.

The English word *telepathy* (Greek *tēle* + *pathos*, "distant feeling") was coined by Frederic W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, in 1882; the SPR's *Phantasms of the Living* (Gurney, Myers, Podmore, 1886) compiled hundreds of spontaneous-case reports and remains the founding case-collection. Controlled experimental study began with J. B. Rhine's Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory in the 1930s, using the Zener cards designed by perceptual psychologist Karl Zener; Rhine's *Extra-Sensory Perception* (1934) is the foundational text. The Ganzfeld procedure was developed by Charles Honorton in the 1970s and refined into the autoganzfeld protocol (Honorton, *Journal of Parapsychology*, 1985). The 1995 CIA Stargate Project external review by Jessica Utts (statistician, UC Davis) found the laboratory results statistically significant; Ray Hyman's accompanying review accepted the statistical anomaly but disputed the psi interpretation. The contemporary scholarly debate runs through Dean Radin's *Entangled Minds* (2006) on the proponent side and Susan Blackmore's *In Search of the Light* (1996) on the skeptical side.

If you want to test the claim honestly, use a structured protocol. The simplest is a Zener-card-style test: a partner randomly draws cards from a 25-card deck (5 each of 5 distinct symbols) and concentrates on each; you record your guesses. With pre-registered sample size and clear blinding (no leakage of feedback during the run), chance is 20% per card. The IONS at noetic.org publishes an online psi-test you can use. For depth, read both the proponent (Dean Radin's *Entangled Minds*, 2006) and skeptical (Susan Blackmore's *In Search of the Light*, 1996) sides. The documented effect sizes if real are small, so trials must run in the hundreds before you can distinguish signal from chance — single dramatic anecdotes are not informative either way.